AFAIK, in the case of Microsoft, it's less FOMO and more about execs being able to impress their peers at other companies. So not really a fear of missing out but a desire to have an exclusive access to a technology that has already been socialized and widely understood to be impressive. It's a simple message, 'that impressive thing you've been reading about, we're the ones building that'.
Also: the big company "thought leaders" need something new to talk about every year at conferences like "Microsoft Ignite" or whatever. These people will push funding into things like quantum research just for this. I'm sure they're getting lots of mileage out of LLMs these days...
I'm maybe a little jaded having worked on whole products that had no market success, but were in fact just so that the company had something new to talk about.
