Some of them are inventing completely new ways of doing things

No, they're not. All the money is now on the LLM autocomplete chatbots.

Real progress on AI won't resume until after the LLM bubble has burst. (And even then investors will probably be wary of putting money in AI for probably a few decades, because LLMs are being marked as AI despite having little to do with it.)

It's quite depressing, really.

Anything you learn from an LLM has a margin of error that makes it dangerous and harmful. It hallucinates documentation and fake facts like an asylum inmate. And it's so expensive compared to just having real teachers that it's all pointless. We've got humans, we don't need more humans, adding labor doesn't solve the problem with education.

Fair, I thought they all got recalled but I guess they're back. but I'd also counter that Waymo is extremely limited about where it can operate - roughly 10 miles max - which, relevant to my original point was entirely hand-mapped and calibrated by human operators, and the rides are monitored and directed by a control center responding in real-time to the car's feedback.

Like my printing press example - it still takes a large human team to operate the "self" - driving car.