Sure, but it was fairly obvious to the critical eye that neither blockchain nor VR/metaverse were likely to have much impact beyond a few niches. Neither solves problems many people actually have. And a lot of the tech world rightly scoffed at the whole Facebook/Meta "transformation".

But machine learning has been used for years behind the scenes in things like recommendations and clarification. And LLMs specifically, even in their current infancy, have shown immediate value in some cases (e.g. coding assistants) and obvious potential across a vast number of domains.