The thing that stands out to me is that AI is the most likely to succeed, which is why those previous things were so swiftly abandoned. The bottom fell out of cryptocurrency when it became a speculative asset that resulted in a chain of Greater Fools left holding the bag, while NFTs were pretty quickly exposed as the scam they are to also sell crypto.
The Metaverse at its most cohesive point was a way for one of the most fundamentally uncreative people on the planet to re-envision sitting around an office (by spending hundreds of dollars on a VR headset) while ALSO being unhinged to the point where every possible online space from Fortnite to IRC is a Metaverse, because the Metaverse has to be inevitable, otherwise how will people buy in? All of the above is too dense, confusing, restrictive, insert other descriptor here for most people to want to engage with it.
AI is different, though, since it's readily available via tools people already have with an absurdly low barrier to entry, which makes it attractive to use. It doesn't cost money, you're not putting anything on your face, there's no ugly monkey JPGs attached to it. Instead, it can do your homework, or generate art, or write a story, or tell you how to make napalm if you work your dead grandmother into the prompt. And companies have already sucked up all the data they possibly could and, after they were done, kindly told us we can opt-out in the future, maybe, if they feel like it.
It's not particularly surprising that massive companies would win out in the end, all vying to be the kingmakers of the future while a handful of others hope to feed off of table scraps so they can someday be the boot that's on everyone else's neck.
I know this is the smoke from the oftentimes literal fires of late-stage capitalism taking its final form, but I think that it hits the criteria of being fast, low-cost (or free), and easy for people to use makes it that much more of a threat and why other technologies were abandoned seemingly overnight.
