A better analogy might be something like medicine. There are many drugs prescribed that are known to help with certain conditions, but their mechanism of action is not known. While there may be research trying to uncover those mechanisms, that doesn't stop or slow down rolling out of the medicine for use. Research goes at its own pace, and very often cannot be sped up by throwing money at it, while the market dictates adoption. I see the same with LLMs. I'm sure this has attracted the attention of more researchers than anything else in this field, but I would expect any progress to be relatively slow.