I know in electrical engineering / chip design, it's actually quite hard to do "real" research that's useful for industry simply because of how expensive it is to make chips... I think most research for improving LLMs will go in a similar direction.

I've personal almost stopped reading papers in my area, which is in ML but not related to LLMs or CV. I do look for work related to whatever I'm doing, but it's kind of depressing how uncommon it is for (say) neurips papers to actually have anything useful...

(It's also kind of annoying how basically all funding agencies are only funding research into or using AI, but don't provide enough funding for lots of gpu time lol)