There is a ton of money going into x with AI, including things like ads. Or customer support bots. Or shopping assistants… etc etc. The academic side of this whole industry is very small relative to overall funding amounts.
And even if the academic side is a small amount of the funding, it's at least something. Some of the rest is being spent training models I can download and run forever more.
I guess mainly I'd rather focus on the interesting technical and scientific side of AI rather than worry about the investors.