I mean… the origin of that analogy is selling shovels to gold miners in the 1849 gold rush. Most of those miners found absolutely nothing.
Others, not miners, also made a lot of money. Personally I recommend investing in AI but not LLMs. I expect John Deere to make a lot of money implementing more AI in farm equipment.
The problem is that they have to spend so much time and money inventing new types of mines, for which they need to be the shovel salesmen.
They’re also called “snake oil salesmen”. Or “Robber Barons”.