What's the counterfactual? Where would the world be today? Certainly the present is not an optimal allocation of resources, uncertainty and hysteris make it impossible. But where do you think we'd be instead? Are you assuming all of those dollars would be going to research otherwise? They wouldn't; if not for hype "ai" LLMs, research funding would be at 2017+/- 25% levels. Also think of how many researchers are funded and PhDs are trained because of this awful LLM era. Certainly their skills transfer. (Not that brute forcing with shit tons of compute is standard "research funding").

And for the record I really wish more money was being thrown outside of LLM.