The foundational $$ that has gone into the research to make the LLM stuff happen... was inside the existing big corporations (Google, FB, MS, etc.) and only left there once it had been proven.

Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI) for example was employed inside Google doing that kind of work and only left when he ran up against the limits of what he felt he could get done there. But the fundamental R&D had already been done. When I was at Google I saw some of it from a distance before I ever heard of OpenAI.

The VCs have come along at the tail end of the R&D cycle on this stuff in hopes of cashing in. Same as they did with crypto and N number of trends before. They're trailing, not innovating.

They're primarily interested in successful business models capitalizing on existing technology, not the actual development of new technology. Unless one has distorted the meaning of "technology" significantly.