It takes time for technology to show measurable impact in enormous economies. No reason why AI will be any different.
Personally I think AI is unlikely to go the way of NFTs and it shows actual promise. What I'm much less convinced of is that it will prove valuable in a way that's even remotely within the same order of magnitude as the investments being pumped into it. The Internet didn't begin as a massive black hole sucking all the light out of the room for anything else before it really started showing commensurate ROI.
Most idiots like Columbus died in obscurity.
The thing I'm making with the APIs is very helpful to me, maybe it'll be helpful to others, who knows.
Right now the frontier AI companies are explicitly running a kind of chicken race - increasing the burn rates so much that it gets harder and harder. With the hopes that they (and not their competitor) will be the one left standing. Especially OpenAI and Antropic, but non-AI companies like Oracle have also joined. If they keep it going, the likely outcome is that one of them folds - and the other(s) reap the rewards.
Utility (per cost) will go up the tougher the competition. Money captured by single entity possibly down with increased competition.
I think there are two layers of uncertainty here. One is, as you say, if the value is worth the investment. The other and possibly bigger issue is who is going to capture the value and how.
Assuming AI turns out to be wildly valuable, I'm not at all convinced that at the end of this money spending race that the companies pouring many billions of dollars into commercial LLMs are going to end up notably ahead of open models that are running the race on the cheap by drafting behind the "frontier" models.
For now the frontier models can stay ahead by burning heaps of money but if/when progress slows toward a limit whatever lead they have is going to quickly evaporate.
At some point I suspect some ugly legal battles as some attempt to construct some sort of moat that doesn't automatically drain after a few months of slowed progress. Google's recent complaining about people distilling gemini could be an early signal of this.
I have no idea how any of that would shake out legally, but I have a hard time sympathizing with commercial LLM providers (who slurped up most existing human knowledge without permission) if/when they start to get upset about people ripping them off.
The iPhone killer UX + App store release can be directly traced to the growth in tech in the subsequent years its release.
We might have been possibly better of actually, with the Apple walled garden abominations and user device lockdowns not being dragged into the mainstream.
Not clear that this is a helpful interpretation, other than "we're in the primordial ooze stage and the thing that matters will be something none of the current players have", but that's hard to take to the bank :-)