I don't really think big tech have that much control. They are aiming for optimal profit solution, thing likes AI monopoly with huge self-supervised learning just popped up recently when ChatGPT performs really well, a couple years ago, people still believed modular and supervised learning is the key to AI application. So simply current scaling deep learning/llm is most promising and it works while tradional methods don't. If there is something that works as good as current solution and requires less resource, they will go for it very fast, see the implementation of Flash attention as an example.