You probably hear it from people that have to sell you AI-powered products. At best it'll turn into a bubble, but more realistically LLMs will not cause any economic boom in and of themselves, especially in these shaky times. Content generation is not really what the world is looking for to return to the highs of early 2010s.
AI boom and austerity on hiring can be happen at the same time.
AI boom is interesting in the sense, if the AI successfully increases programmer productivity, then it also would drive down the demands, unless AI can increase the pie by eating away other industries. So far I haven't seen this, AI seems to have a bigger impact on software industry itself than any other industry out there.
Not very optimistic that AI alone can change the tide, but considering how fast things can change (GPT-5 might be the AGI, or GPT-4 level model gets open sourced and runs much cheaper everywhere), 6 months in the future the outlook might change drastically.
Well I work at a FAANG and at the beginning of the year (after our round of layoffs) we were more or less told "no growth, flat headcount, no spending money, lean times, austerity etc" and now I'm hearing "ok we need to hire some (albeit slowly) and we need to spend some money for this AI thing".
So maybe "boom" is the wrong word, but it sure seems to have put a stop to the outright austerity mindset.