They didn't. Not LLM people specifically. Google a long time ago figured out that you get far better results on a very wide range of problems just by going bigg

They didn't. Not LLM people specifically. Google a long time ago figured out that you get far better results on a very wide range of problems just by going bigger. (Which then must have become frustrating for some people because most of the effort seems to have gone to scaling? See for example as-opposed-to-symbolic.)