I think the reverse is also sometimes the case, I was in a meeting where some academics were talking about ontologies about a specific topic and the semantic web, and the non-IT guy there (correctly) noticed that what they were doing apparently has absolutely no practical use. LLMs strike me as a much more interesting area.

And there are also NLP researchers who don't seem to know about GPT-3, which is very strange considering its very high performance on so many tasks. (But maybe the person I talked to was in some other subarea, he was smart, idk).

(Of course there are also many people doing amazing work in academia.)