where did all the other ai companies go?

sit down because this is going to bother you. cast your mind back 18 months. deepseek dropped and the internet lost its mind. "china just ended openai." it was everywhere. people were running it locally, posting benchmarks, losing sleep over geopolitics. then... nothing. it just kind of stopped being talked about. it didn't lose. it didn't win. it just... evaporated from the conversation. sora. remember sora? openai dropped that video generation demo and we were all convinced cinema was dead, hollywood was cooked, every creative job on earth had 18 months left. there were congressional hearings being threatened. think pieces everywhere. and now? when's the last time you actually heard someone say the word sora? not in a demo. in real life. used by a real person. i'll wait. github copilot was supposed to make every programmer 10x more productive. there were developers posting that they'd never write code from scratch again. entire job categories were being eulogised in real time. and now most developers i know have a complicated and slightly embarrassed relationship with it, like someone who got really into a mlm for three months and doesn't want to bring it up. llama was going to democratise ai forever. open source was going to eat everything. the big labs were cooked because you could run intelligence locally on a macbook. and you still can. but do you? does anyone you know actually do that regularly? it became a thing that's theoretically amazing and practically used by like eleven people on hacker news. cursor was the future of coding. perplexity was going to kill google search. both are still around, both are fine, both have paying customers. neither changed anything at the level the discourse suggested they would. here's what i think actually happened. we were living through a hype cycle so fast and so layered that each new thing would go through the entire arc - discovery, mania, backlash, abandonment - in about six weeks. and because the next thing arrived be