The uptake forced the bigger companies to act. With image diffusion models too - no corporate lawyer would let a big company release a product that allowed the customer to create any image...but when stable diffusion et al started to grow like they did...there was a specific price of not acting...and it was high enough to change boardroom decisions
I'm not sure if you're correct. In fact there has been a revolution in some areas of social science in the last two decades due to the availability of online behavioural data.
The question 'what is science actually for' can be sidestepped. Everyone can agree that it has value, albeit we disagree on the actual value...this is why you need a market. As to how things get priced in such a market, this is a subject for further research...To start, it just needs to tie to something measurable. Heck we've created memecoins with far less backing. Also, we've carved up the conceptual space on a very course grained level with patents, we just need a more immediate, and granular system for doing so...
Actually, the problem is pricing. If we could identify and correctly value new concepts, then we can dispense with citations and just use the correct sum of concept valuations. Perhaps a correctly designed futures market would not only solve getting the right PhD students the right jobs, but bring a lot of speculative capital into fundamental research?