I don't get the point of comparing apples to make a point about oranges. Flying isn't AI. Nor is "progress" a permanent state. If you want to stay in the flying comparison: in 2000 you can fly from NY to Paris in 3 hours on a Concord, something no longer possible in 2023. Why? Because economics made it unfeasible to maintain. Silicon Valley has made enough promises using "emergent" behavior and other heuristics to justify poor investments. Unfortunately it's taken out too many withdrawals from its bank of credibility and there'a not enough to cloud their exit schemes in hopes and dreams.
And yet every day we still fly faster and farther than the objects designed by evolution. And much like evolution of creatures go extinct.
Promises are always meaningless, progress is in the results, and recently LLMs have been giving us results. You can choose to invest or not invest, but in an environment where there is still a lot of investment money around I don't see work on this stopping any time soon.
