I'm also an AI researcher and I'm not hopeful that the hype will die down anytime soon. People have been touting insignificant results through shoddy science for a long time now. They've noticed it works well enough because current ML is still pretty much alchemy (Ali Rahimi's 2017 NIPS Test of Time [1] talk still resonates today) so people rarely spend the effort to effectively refute the bogus claims.

As a result, I've opted out of the system and I'm working on trying ambitious ideas I have to try to upend the current paradigm of training on big data, which is truly insane (by age 4 the most erudite of children have probably only been exposed to 45 million words [2] and yet exhibit vastly more understanding and fluency than any language model trained on a similar amount of data).

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi1Yry33TQE

[2]: https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/media/2014/TheEarlyC...