Personally, I see the AI hype the same as the blockchain hype, it's a technology with narrow applications which people are trying to apply to everything since the venture capital to be burned on it was nearly infinite. It shows how bad we are at managing resources as a society that so much money is being burned for applications that don't do better than a minimum wage worker in a third world country could(oh yeah, there were a few "AI" applications who were literally that). All that money would have likely made everyone's life's better if it went towards material science, for better batteries, power grids, energy reactors or even carbon capture.