Sure, there's a ridiculous amount of hype, fueled by greed and FOMO, often justified by cargo-cultish science, but... progress in AI seems inevitable, because we have the human brain as physical proof that it's possible to build an intelligent machine with 100's of trillions of interconnections between neurons that consumes only about as much energy as an incandescent light bulb.
Today's largest AI models are still tiny in comparison, with only 1-2 trillion interconnections between neurons, each interconnection's weight specified by a parameter value. And these tiny AI models we have today consume many orders of magnitude more energy than a human brain. We have a long way to go, but we have proof that a human-brain equivalent is physically possible.
The timing of progress is of course unpredictable. Maybe we will need new breakthroughs. Maybe not. No one knows for sure. In any case, breakthroughs don't come along on a predictable schedule. It's possible we will go through a period of stagnation that lasts months, or even years. We cannot rule out another "AI winter" just because we don't want one.
Even if progress is punctuated by high peaks and deep valleys, I believe we'll get there, eventually.