Re: AI is not a single thing.
You're right that AI is not a single thing. But I cringe every time anyone says "it's not really AI at all." "AI" has been the name of the field since McCarthy coined it in 1956, and it has covered everything from tree search to expert systems, planners and statistical learning ever since. It never really meant human-equivalent cognition, which is why people started calling that "AGI".
There's also the old observation that AI is whatever hasn't worked yet. Chess, OCR, machine translation, spam filtering, route-finding: all AI until they worked, then quietly reclassified as "just software".
Yes, there is a mountain of genuine AI-washing, and plenty of deployments really are IVR menus with a language model bolted on. And yes, capex has run far ahead of realised revenue. Circular vendor-financing deals, depreciation schedules on GPUs, and power constraints are all a thing. What's politely called "a correction" and more accurately called "financial meltdown" looks inevitable.
But "a natural language interface strapped on to a search engine" is just factually wrong about the architecture. A search engine retrieves documents that exist. A language model produces token sequences that have never existed anywhere, which is why "hallucination" is a failure mode at all.
