It's not as vaporware-y as blockchain, but I still see some potential for the bubble to pop. At some point people will hopefully realize that but everything that can be done with a neural network needs to be done with one (and tons of data).
The neural network stuff is anything but vaporware, it's delivered incredible results, but people keep coming up with silly dismissals along the lines of it not being "real AI".
That is not what I meant at all. For me, it is the nature of the field and has been that way since the days I first learned it (the 1990's). Once an reproducible algorithm or methodology is discovered to solve an AI problem, it generally ceases to be an AI problem.
Imagine if people treated programming languages like that. People would get excited about the idea of communicating with a computer, and then when you finally build Python and show it to them, they say "but that's just parsing, what about a real language?" The bar just keeps rising whenever you get close to it. That's the sort of thing I meant by "silly dismissal".