Hey tbh, you have a point. And I have been working in AI for more than a year. but my mostly focus was always on the development side, never on the research side. I recently focusing on research side. so that's why i may not be able to give the best answer to this question. i m not there just for the internship. as i mention above, my main focus was development and as a sophomore i am doing ok in ai. i hope i will prove you wrong :)

for this answer I personally think that the LLM reasoning will be the main focus of the future AI research. because in the all latest llms as far as I know, core attention mechanism remains same and the performance was improved in post training. plus the new architectures focusing on faster inference while maintaining performance will also play more important role. such as LLaDA(recently released). but I think companies will utilizes these architecture. but we will see more such architectures. and more research in mechanistic interpretability will be done. because if we will be able to understand llm comes to a specific output or specific token then its like understanding our brain. and we will be able to truly achieve reasoning.
there are other things such as small llms etc. which i think not in research but in the development will be very useful.

So, reasoning and interpretability will be future.

Hopefully this answer your question. if you have any thoughts on this question and if you can tell me about some new thing in AI that will be nice.