tl;dr: AI is built on top of science done by people just "doing research", and transformers took off so hard that those same people now can't do any meaningful, real AI research anymore because everyone only wants to pay for "how to make this one single thing that everyone else is also doing, better" instead of being willing to fund research into literally anything else.
It's like if someone invented the hamburger and every single food outlet decided to only serve hamburgers from that point on, only spending time and money on making the perfect hamburger, rather than spending time and effort on making great meals. Which sounds ludicrously far-fetched, but is exactly what happened here.
Good points, and it made me have a mini epiphany...
i think you analogously just described Sun Microsystems, where Unixes (BSD originally in their case, generalized to SVR4 (?) hybrid later) worked soooo well, that NT was built as a hybridization for the Microsoft user base and Apple reabsorbed the BSD-Mach-DisplayPostscript hybridization spinoff NeXT, while Linux simultaneously thrived.
This is a decent analogy, but I think it understates how good transformers are. People are all making hamburgers because it's really hard to find anything better than a hamburger. Better foods definitely exist out there but nobody's been able to prove it yet.
But yes: the analogy is already hyperbole, and real life is even more hyperbolic. Transforms might work really well, but no one actually seems to know how to put them to real use, compared to generating billions-of-dollars in loss and burning the planet for it
(In this analogy, we can take aim at the hamburger industry either birthing CAFO's, or putting them into hyper-overdrive, destroying the environment with orders of magnitude more CO2, etc. etc. it's a weirdly long-lasting analogy)
It's like if someone invented the hamburger and every single food outlet decided to only serve hamburgers from that point on, only spending time and money on making the perfect hamburger, rather than spending time and effort on making great meals. Which sounds ludicrously far-fetched, but is exactly what happened here.