You have to understand how academia functions. It is not about what works, it is all about what is new or different in theory, regardless of what works in practice.
So especially when an already explored (and thus claimed) theory relies on scale and emergence, it becomes near impossible for academia to reach, not because of the scale of investment needed you only have to look at physics to see funding is not a problem, but because the underlying theory is already done.
NN theory is not very different from what we had in the 80s. The scale is many many orders of magitude beyond when I was collecting floppies from all the lab's Macs in the morning to get the results of my overnight run.