The AI crowd has been working for multile decades and only now has made progress that people care about. Also I’m pretty sure the “eye-watering amounts of money” Sam Altman referred to exceed what developers of even the crypto projects had, when they built eg Bitcoin or Ethereum. That’s what it took to make AI turn heads. Until AlphaGo you could also yell that AI has no real applications.

The personal computer crowd had hobbyists like Wozniak coming to meetups for decades and computers were the province of nerds, now everyone is addicted to them. Decades took place

You are like a person yelling at the video game industry: “pong and space invaders are a stupid waste of time with ugly graphics!! Don’t play or make video games!!” Until a few decades later we have Halo, Call of Duty etc.