This is AI's Segway era. Perfectly functional device, but the early-2000s notion that it was going to become the primary mode of transportation was just an investor-fueled pipe dream.
I think dialup is the appropriate analogy because the world was building WebVan-type companies before the technology was sufficiently wide spread to support the economics.
In this case, the technology is too concentrated and there aren't enough ways to adapt models to problems. The models are too big, too slow, not granular enough, etc. They aren't build on a per-problem domain basis, but rather a "one-size fits all" model.