AI has always had the concept of a “winter” or bust. [1] As in computer science in general we have had people shift concentration on what can make the most and that can occur during a PhD. The thing about the AI winter this time is that ML and Deep learning and LLMs advanced so quickly that a large bust in AI didn’t really occur. Also, I have heard about people getting the AI jobs and then complaining it’s all about cleaning data and nothing about applying new AI techniques to solve a big challenging problem. For CS in general and IT I can sort of see this as a business cycle and LLMs doing some replacement of jobs or it could just be a business cycle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter?wprov=sfti1#