We bought a lot of shovels. Even if we don’t find more gold, we can dig holes for industry elsewhere.
For example, there’s a ton of room for developing all kinds of low latency, highly reliable, embedded classifiers in a number of domains.
It’s not as gee-whiz/sci-fi as an LLM demo, but I think potentially much bigger impact over time.
My favourite example is the astonishing pace with which reverse-rendering technology has progressed. It started with a paper by NVIDIA showing projections of 2D photos being "fitted" into a 3D volume of differentiable hashtables, and then the whole thing exploded when Guassian Splats were invented. I full expect this niche all by itself to generate a huge variety of practical applications. Computer games and movie special effects, obviously, but also AR/VR, industrial uses, mapping, drone navigation, etc...