I'm kind of puzzled. I've been interested in AI for ~45 years and read quite a lot of the stuff on HN and similar. I'm not aware of any of that being pushed on me by a corporate overlord? I'll give you there is more hype and money these days.
However I also read Kurzweil / Moravec stuff which has been predicting human level intelligence around now since at least 1990 and that to me is the interesting bit, and not really at all corporate, rather than open-whatever has raised $x bn etc.
You must not work in big tech, then. At my company, AI-companion tools were forcibly installed in everyone’s browser, soon followed by a press release parading how “100% of people at our company now use AI because it’s so great”. Attempts to uninstall the tool are explicitly blocked. Similarly, AI coding tools are forcibly installed in IDEs.
Every single hackathon or team workshop has been turned into a AI-specific hackathons or training. Managers have been told explicitly that they must come up with yearly goals that include the use of AI. Every project proposal must include a section answering how this project plans to utilize AI.
However I also read Kurzweil / Moravec stuff which has been predicting human level intelligence around now since at least 1990 and that to me is the interesting bit, and not really at all corporate, rather than open-whatever has raised $x bn etc.