What's a plausible future trajectory here?

So, I think we're all in agreement that the Singularity-in-2027 people are full of shit, and that the current paradigm of burning billions of dollars of VC for compute-intensive services that never look poised to turn a profit isn't sustainable.

The bubble will almost certainly pop...at some point.

But at the same time, this technology isn't going to go away. Sometimes I feel like AI cynics talk as though the bubble will pop and we'll just go back to tech as it was in 2020 - that all this GenAI stuff will have ultimately been a huge whiff.

That seems naive to me, though. Even if we acknowledge that huge LLMs in their current forms are unsustainable and that the entire field is grossly over-inflated with hype, I can't imagine that people will just walk away from generative AI, pretend it never happened. I can't think of any time in history when a really breakthrough technology just...stalled out and people put it back in the box. And from a technical/scientific perspective, generative AI is breakthrough technology (even if you don't personally like it).

So what's the path forward for this tech here? The bubble pops, we descend into the economic consequences...and there's another AI research winter? Or do people start working on low-energy intensity models (maybe using spiking neural networks)? Or do governments keep trying to prop the industry up as part of the "AI-arms race" with China?

No matter how much of a boondoggle OpenAI turns out to be, I don't think we're ever going back to a pre-GenAI world. But it's very unclear to me what exactly that looks like after the current hype bubble has deflated.