@ljs Long before AI, while i was doing some stuff for Nokia, we sometimes had to make PoC's look worse so that some random manager would not think that the product is complete. And now it's like... well, you know how it is like.
Further, I've never been in a project, worked on an upstream open source project feature, or anything, where initial the building of "the thing" would have taken more than a few weeks. After that follows countless months of tuning, adjusting and most importantly discussing with other people about the nuts and bolts.
IMHO, the bubble in AI is really related the misconception that building some functional version of software would be the main contributing cost factor for shipping quality software.