Some elephants are more difficult to see in some rooms than others.
It can depend on how good the bifocals are ;)
Or if the only thing that can block the view is piles of cash, it might take so much cash to be unattainable by almost anybody, but if it happened bifocals won't be able to help in that room, and the only thing that might be able to get any attention is a bigger elephant.
At least until the cash has dwindled :(
Most computer programs (almost all?) are not supposed to be worth money to begin with. It can require quite a reality-distortion effort to build positive sentiment on a case-by-case basis. As we have seen, after some people get that good at building sentiment, they can choose to do so without anything of value underlying their effort, whether integrity is intentionally being compromised or not.
The odds to be played here are one of the things that makes it more of a crap-shoot and defines an investment landscape where all the duds need to be offset by a single home run out of the park, but which one will be the heavy-hitter is never very well identified in advance of going viral. For that one outfit, it can be like printing money, for everyone else the default is a black hole.
AI of some kind (probably ramen kind) may be possible to leverage without putting a black hole onto steroids, but otherwise I could only imagine that if sustainable research was still required beforehand, the most suitable structure might just be a non-profit organization. Who would think of that unless there really weren't enough organic profits to be leveraged like a financially sound investment should have?
With some of the more challenging or nearly-unattainable projects, almost all approaches are not going to be profitable enough to provide a return for shareholder-style investment, most things like that are just too expensive to be justified except as an indulgence, which is where pride can be taken without anticipating a financial return. So money used to fund the effort is most accurately categorized as donations not investments and another reason that a non-profit structure, and resulting not-profitable outcome should be considered ideal.
Or maybe one particular approach is all wrong only because it is too expensive, overpriced, not-profitable or all of the above.
OTOH could be an approach is too expensive, overpriced, not-profitable or all of the above, because it is all wrong to being with.
But what difference does it make if the final outcome is the same?