Who benefits from the "AI" bubble? As always: Follow The Money.
As far as I can see, the only beneficiaries, the only "winners" in the current hype-vortex, are the datacentre companies. The companies that sell "cloud". Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Netlify, Alibaba, DO, IBM, Oracle... But mainly those first three. Oh, and Nvidia.
That AI nose-candy takes a hell of a lot of compute to make and to run. The "AI" startups have spent big on building their models, on slurping up every bit of IP they can snarf off the internets without notice, permission or compensation; they've spent so big its doubtful they can ever achieve the sort of sustainable cashflow that will lead them to profitability. So it's not they who're deriving any benefit.
The companies who're supposed to become the chief consumers of that generative "AI" shit — the advertising companies, news orgs, report and proposal writers everywhere, the purveyors of elevator music — the companies that live by selling "content" but who hate paying people to create it and who really don't give a single fuck about that thing we call "quality"... those companies are waking up, really, really quickly, to the fact that what "AI" produces is so shit that it leads them to a legal sinkhole a metric mile wide. Not to mention that their customers just hate the "content" it produces and reduces the already negligible trust to something resembling a Planck mass.
So the only people actually getting any actual benefit from the "AI" bullshittery are those selling the compute capacity.
I don't say that the compute (cloud) providers came up with the scheme/scam, merely that they knew a good thing (from their warped perspective) as soon as they spotted it. No wonder Google, MS and Amazon are all-in on "AI" and ramming it down our throats like they're force-feeding foie gras geese for the slaughter. It's great for their business. Not selling enough S3? Not selling enough Cloud Compute? Just add more AI and watch Line Go Up.