The benefits have just not been that wide ranging to the average person. Maybe I'm wrong but, I don't AI hype as a cornerstone of US jobs, so there's no jobs to suddenly dry up. The big companies are still flush with cash on hand, aren't they?
If/when the fad dies I'd think it would die with a wimper.
Self driving cars and intelligent robotics is the real goldmine. But we still don't seem to have the right architecture or methods.
I say that because self driving cars are entirely stagnant despite the boom AI interest and resources.
Personally i think we need a major breakthrough in reinforcement learning, computer vision (which are still mostly stuck at feed forward CNNs) and few shot learning. The tranformer is a major leap, but its not enough on its own.
In general I do not agree that the economy is overleveraged on AI just like it is not overleveraged on cyrpto currency. If the money dries up, I don't expect economy wide layoffs.
I think we're in a massive AI bubble, but its a bubble that doesn't affect normal consumers much, so it's not too dangerous or concerning.
As for my prediction of what is needed for truly useful AI automation... i suspect the current bubble will pop before we solve it.
I think you might be underestimating how many non-technical people are using LLM’s daily.