IOW, the plan is proceeding as “intended”. See: Airbnb, Uber, etc.

That's where I disagree. Uber maybe has a viable business as long as they keep finding gullible or desperate people to drive for them. Their OpEx costs are tiny, it's nothing more than a system that receives a message that someone wants a ride and sends out a bid to take that customer. Then it's a pricing algorithm that drops the price that they pay to drivers as low as possible, while driving the cost of the ride as high as possible. They get whatever slim margin is left.

AirBnB is similar, virtually no OpEx costs, a very simple set of algorithms to match places for rent with people wanting to rent them, then fiddle with the prices and extract a middle-man fee. As long as they keep staying ahead of government regulations, there's a business there.

But, nobody had to go out and explain to drivers why they might want to drive for Uber. "You drive people, we pay you money", it's a simple sales pitch. Same with AirBnB. Hotels and taxis were annoying enough that it was easy for consumers too. But, nobody has yet found a long-term justification for chatbots.

Sure, some companies are trying to use them. But, not successfully. Air Canada replaced customer service reps (presumably in a call centre in India or something) with a chatbot. But, when that chatbot hallucinated a policy when talking to a customer, the courts found that Air Canada had to honour that policy. That's a massive risk long term, especially once people get good at figuring out how to talk to them.

People are using them to generate vast amounts of code... but code is a liability, not an asset. The things code can do might be an asset, but you have to be able to understand and maintain the code for it to work. If people are using AI to generate the code, and other people are using AI to review it, nobody actually understands it. This is just a time bomb waiting to blow up.

If there really were some kind of guaranteed money making thing that chatbots could do (other than online scams), the AI companies wouldn't be out there trying to sell AI in general, they'd be buying companies and/or starting divisions that did that one thing.

IMO, the AI companies intended to hit AGI, and hand everything over to the machine god. Now they realize that it really just is a clever word-guessing machine with some vague capabilities that niche users might want (but not at the price they can meet), and they're scrambling to find a seat before the music stops.