> You’re reading it wrong

No, I don't think I am.

> AI hype had been common (but not the majority position) in tech contexts for a while, especially from those that have something to sell you.

There's a whole lot of that for quite a long time targeting normie contexts, too; in fact, the hate in normie contexts is directly responsive to it, because the hype in normie contexts is a lot of particularly clumsy grifting plus the nontechnical PR of the big AI vendors (which categories overlap quite a bit, especially in Sam Altman’s case), and the hate in normy contexts shows basically zero understanding of even what AI is beyond what could be gleaned from that hyper plus some critical pieces on broad (e.g., total water and energy use, RAM price) and localized (e.g., from fossil fuel power plants in poor neighborhoods directly tied to demand from data centers) economic and environmental impacts.

> What you derogatorily call normies

I am not using “normie” derogatorily, I am using it to contrast to tech contexts.