AI companies will never go to zero because AI is part of the Military Industrial Complex now. All the money is coming from the military and government for surveillance and power and war.
The problem with conspiracy theories is more that they have a ratchet-like quality where counter evidence reaffirms the theory in your view and you can only ever get more confident. We should have been increasingly skeptical of gravitational waves to some degree as we failed to demonstrate them, even though we didn't abandon the hypothesis and it ultimately prevailed. But if you adopt a wrong idea, and people try to demonstrate that to you, and you take that effort they're putting forward as a sign that you are correct and they must be hiding something from you, it will be very difficult for you to realize your mistake.
So, as long as you are less certain than you were before, I don't think rolling your prediction over into the future is necessarily conspiratorial or a mistake.