Do you have any citation on lack of funding for foundational research? From the looks of things, it seems like there is insane amount of money in AI and while maybe majority of it goes to "projects with high probability of success", whatever that means, fringe ideas seem to generate good amount of capital as well. Even (what I would consider to be) academic projects seems to get good funding [0]. On top of that, it seems like you're not saying that Transformers might be a dead end but Neural Networks itself might be one. At this point, NNs already gives a lot of value. If someone's goal is to just get products out that say diffusion models already helps you achieve, how is that even a dead end? Do you mean dead end for AGI? In which case, there seems to be research on alternatives there as well? [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rie-9AEhYdY

[1] https://ai.meta.com/blog/yann-lecun-ai-model-i-jepa