There's a little more 'there' there in 'AI' (for which read generative AI in the current bubble; no other sort will tickle a VC's fancy appropriately) than there was in Our Lord And Saviour the Blockchain, but ultimately, for many applications, there's a lot of the same sort of magical thinking; "okay, this doesn't really work _now_, but surely it will soon, and it's of questionable utility, but it is imbued with the power of blockchain/LLMs, so don't question the Emperor's tailor."
It is IMO _totally_ unsurprising that the ex-crypto people are all over it.
Whether or not AI has more meat to it than crypto isn't really relevant to the point. The point is that a whole bunch of sketchy people have shifted to "AI" and that brings more suspicion to the field.
Just so people don't misunderstand: I'm not saying that everyone into crypto was/is sketchy. I'm saying that crypto attracts a lot of sketchy people, so the percentage is much higher than in the general population.
