Same as with Crypto, the bubble pops, and while the tech doesn't magically vanish it stops the seemingly geometric growth driven by speculative investment. The assumption built into all of these debates is so... uncritical, and can be summed up as, "The issues we see with 'AI', scaling, energy/water demand, hallucinations, running out of data and having to cannibalize itself, etc... can be solved within the existing frameworks." There is no indication of that being true, and frankly a lot of indications that it isn't.
Buuuuut a chunk of the US economy in the form of NVIDIA is tied up in pretending that it's true, a lot of companies are going whole hog into this, and of course a ton of people here are drawing their salaries based on that assumption. For those of us who aren't in that position however, much like Crypto was a real tech with hugely overblown marketing, 'AI' is the same.
Winter is coming.