And the money these companies are blowing on all of this shit is banking on them being ‘the’ dominant player in a completely world-changing commodity industry.
Being "a" player in a multi-billion $ industry is also pretty good. For example, Bing gets some small % of the search engine market, but that's still a ton of market and $. And Foursquare/Swarm is used by like 0.01% of the population, but they can still map the exact floor plan of Macy's and that Chipotle will lose 30% of their share value from people shiitting blood (both were extremely accurate).
And then Bing gets a pretty big upgrade: ChatGPT. And here we are.
Not for the amount of money they are spending to get there. Spending Money you’ll be paying back for decades to be a middling contender, without a significant moat, for something without any clearly-defined, real practical, sustainable business use cases is absolutely terrible.
No matter what happen with the AI bubble text, image and video and other generative neural networks are here to stay.
Whatever you like it or not this tech already changed a lot of industries and there is no going back.