just hosting, and it was still too unprofitable.

This is true for the AI companies as well. Only token-priced inference is actually profitable, and companies paying for AI have now realized that it costs like $100k a year or more per developer to be able to use a frontier model all day at token-pricing and doesn't 10x developer output, it just moves the onus from code generation to prompt engineering and code review.

The general public paid nearly no attention to LLMs before ChatGPT though.

When I first read of ChatGPT, I just thought "oh, they turned the technology behind /r/subsimulatorgpt2 into a chatbot, huh, neat". I suspect that a lot of other people had never seen the acronym GPT before though.

That's too bad, that actually sounds cool.

But something has got to give with all the financial shenanigans and cut throat behavior these AI companies are doing.

The bubble is going to burst at some point.

I remember there was a subreddit that's dedicated to bots using gpt posting nonsense. No non bots are allowed to post there, and sometimes when there's gold we post it on a sister sub to comment on them. IIRC the way it works is there's a bunch of bots that scan some top something subreddits and post in the gpt sub. So for example there would be a /r/worldnews_bot, /r/aww_bot, etc. you get the idea.

Except for the small fact that current youth are all dumb as shit because they have AI do everything.

Why call out just teenagers from the 2010's then?

That is what was driving my understanding of OP's take.