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.