Could it be we are all scared, because if we call the Emperor naked, and 15 years from now someone finds a useful case for AI(even if its completely different to what exists today), everyone will point to our post and say "Hahaha look at those Luddites, didnt even believe AI was real LOL"
The recent high level of funding (Stargate, HUMAIN, ...), seemingly prompted mostly by LLMs, could plausibly be an emperor's new clothes fear of missing out among investors - will have to wait and see how it pans out.
But for 2010s-era machine learning this article is talking about, I feel it largely already has been validated - from shunned and unfunded at the start of the decade to being the almost universal go-to for any NLP or computer vision task by the end. The article itself lists a few use-cases (protein folding, weather forecasting, drug discovery), and I think it's unlikely you've gone through the day without encountering at least a few more (maybe search engines query-understanding, language translation, generated video captions, OCR, or using a product that was scanned for defects).
Not that every ML method will work out first try when applied to a new problem, but it's far from the case that we're waiting 15 years hoping for someone to maybe find a use-case for the field.
