I was at a conference recently and at one of the panels, someone asked "when do you think the [AI] bubble will pop?". The panelist said "hopefully never, given that our pensions are tied up in it".

That made a bunch of things click for me in terms of understanding why this ridiculous hype machine keeps chugging onwards despite being patently bullshit. Obviously companies like OpenAI are invested in continuing the hype, but there's a heckton of other companies and investors who have put enough money into this that they also stand to lose should the bubble pop. Even people who haven't directly invested in AI stand to lose out — even people who don't directly invest in AI stand to be affected due to how many index funds etc. work.

Furthermore, I don't think it's possible to bet against AI hype without betting against actually useful technologies, because the entire tech sector has become such a bloated, overvalued blob that extricating the useful stuff from the bullshit would be difficult, if not impossible.