Out of curiosity, I did a search through HN from a few years ago, and, just as I expected, people were bringing out that quote to argue against the cryptocurrency skeptics. Of course, the cryptocurrency skeptics were right all along.

Anyway, the original article is probably correct, but it's missing the whole story. Very likely, the future AI panic will be followed by a gradual recovery to a sustainable level of investment, as we as an industry learn what generative AI is actually good at and what it's bad at. In other words, the article is consistent with the upcoming "trough of disillusionment" part of the Gartner hype cycle around generative AI. But the trough of disillusionment won't last forever, and I certainly think that generative AI has its uses (for example, automatically moderating the most vile content so that human moderators aren't at risk for PTSD).