It almost feels like AI is a hype and is used by the NFT/blockchain/crypto/web3 grifters as yet another vehicle to grift people right into their graves. Fun times.
Always? Maybe for the past 15-20 years but for the 50 years before that there wasn't much investment or interest from executives. AI was mostly about research and niche applications.
AI has always been a marketing term. As soon as it has a useful application it is named around its utility. Search, recognition, generation, classification, etc. AI is the term you use when you can't easily describe what you're doing.
It's true that in the early years, much of the investment was public money—but the above still stands.
This is true and is the reason I personally have always hated the term. This time around things are different. This time we also hate the technology.
Personally I used to love Markov Chains, Kalman filters, Supervised learning, etc. and resent the fact that people called it AI. But LLM has nothing but hate from my heart. Ironically, I love that people call it AI, and do so enthusiastically my self. A bad and hyped up technology deserves a bad and hyped up name.