I don't think that's fair. It's R&D for a potential infinite money/effort hack. Unless you're in the camp that thinks only meat can be intelligent, depending on your perspective, it can be considered somewhere between useful research and critical research, including for the pursuit of things like "housing".
Maybe all the learnings of the specific architectures/implementations will be thrown out in the end, but that's not some rare occurrence with R&D/progression.
If you think their goal is to make chatbots, then maybe this won't make sense to you.
Do you think you're a god? You're are a general intelligence, that has the capacity to learn and create. This is the stated goal of most of these companies: make a general intelligence that allows autonomous agents (possibly controlling robots) to do general, human like, work with sufficient, and ideally superior, competency. No silly claims of gods required.
It's interesting how these conversations usually turn irrational, immediately.
You have to have these people that can speak these horrible languages, study for years unimpeded for likely no goal, can finance expeditions to the bottom of the ocean and fail again and again, sacrifice the right victims at the right times, etc. These people that will awaken Cthulhu have to be some of the most brilliant in human history (so says the lovecraftian mythos), and then they have to throw away all their brains and money and time to awaken the 'do not awaken under any circumstances' dark god of terror and soul consuming ambivalence.
Like, there isn't anyone out there that is that stupid. Totally breaks the immersion of the worldbuilding, right?
