WDYM why not drugs? Strong alcohol and tobacco were a state monopoly in many countries for many years, and still are that kind of business heavily intertwined with state.

And prohibited drugs are in a similar position, just the state monopoly is unofficial. Well, officially they are prohibited. As I said. OK.

There are plenty of different kinds of drugs with different degrees of addiction, lethality, damage to the environment in production too.

Anyway, about AI - were it not profitable, it wouldn't be rolling. It might be a bubble, but it's, for the users of this kind of technology, a qualitative change from precise algorithms and industrial optimization to fuzzy decisions based on statistics. Basically machines following human orders as humans mean them. Well, kinda like that, except very computationally expensive and as good as your dataset, but there are tasks hard to do the old way and easy to do the new way. Hence (on Jingle Bells melody) bombing swarms, bombing swarms, bombing all the way. I suppose not all the way, but the essence is here. Also surveillance, detecting and stopping people harmful for some political end without ever alarming them or anyone or using direct visible force, predicting events.

It's inefficient when used for the same tasks a shell script can do. It starts being efficient when used on the scale of lives and families and groups and communities, and armies and economies. Matter of scale.