VR winter and AI winter are two regular seasons in IT. Waste of money, nothing to show for it and a lot of devs surprised it did not work out this time.
That said, companies that deliver measurable value (literally, revenue/cost-impacting) to customers and have healthy free cash flow are going to weather winters.
No big breakthroughs; what we're seeing now is spare GPU power and memory (since those the only things still advancing significantly from year to year) brute forcing black box neural nets that nobody understands or can get to work right. If that's "AI", then me using ChatGPT to write my essay is "doing my English homework".
This type of unbridled pessimism baffles me. If you think what had happened over the past, say, 24 months is "AI Winter", I can't imagine what your bar for AI Summer is.
This has all happened before and will happen again.