That's been the very normal way of the human world.

When the foundation layer at a given moment doesn't yield an ROI on intellectual exploration - say because you can overcompensate with VC funded raw compute and make more progess elsewhere -, few(er) will go there.

But inevitably, as other domains reach diminishing returns, bright minds will take a look around where significant gains for their effort can be found.

And so will the next generation of PyTorch or foundational technologies evolve.