[unshavedyak]

Lets reverse this - why wouldn't they do that? I agree with you, but LLMs tend to be massively expensive and thus innately tied to ROI. A lot of companies fret about advertising even near some types of content. The idea of spending millions to put a racist bot on your home page is, no surprise, not very appetizing.

So of course if this is where the money and interest flows then the research follows.

Besides, it's a generally useful area anyway. The ability to tweak behavior even if not done for "safety" still seems pretty useful.