> But if there was an obvious path forward

Even obvious can be risky. First it's nice to share the risk, second more investments come with more connections.

As for LLMs boom. I think finally we'll realize that LLM with algorithms can do much more than just LLM. 'algorithms' is probably a bad word here, I mean assisting tools like databases, algorithms, other models. Then only access API can be trained into LLM instead of the whole dataset for example.