AI feels like a real mania, a genuine collective break from reality among the ruling class. They might as well be pouring billions of dollars into an attempt to replace all jobs and knowledge with a large bronze idol of Dagon.
They also just have too much money and no vision at all for what to do with it. For all the VC money poured into tech in the last 15 years the best they could come up with was "hopefully the self driving electric taxi becomes a thing" and "what if there was more shit you could gamble on?"