Good point, the health of the speculative market ("people buying and selling btc and other cryptos") is a different thing from the health of the industry ("people starting crypto projects and raising VC money to fund them").

By fundraising, i meant the second one. I find it to be a better indicator because it sends the message that people are building projects with promises of value convincing enough that VCs invest in them. I personally think those promises are bullshit but if VCs are pouring 10 billion bucks a year in an industry you cannot credibly call it dead or dying.

To the more general point of the meme... some people only consume headlines. Their pattern is easily recognizable :

the mainstream (as in non-tech) news cycle has calmed down a bit so they think AI is on the brink of death
big names like Sam Altman come across as insufferable assholes so they think that's representative of the tens of thousands of people currently working the field
they don't keep up to date on the subject so they have no idea how far everything has gone in just the past 12 months
they over-invest on marginal news like the "model collapse" paper which was reposted a million times on Lemmy and Reddit

It's the same energy as QAnon when they were convinced that Trump would parachute from a helicopter at Biden's investiture to commandeer the US army and publicly execute Hilary Clinton. They really do believe the "AI hype" is about to simmer down and then they'll have been right all along lmao