Here's an example of where AI does something of economic importance:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/google-intr...

Accurate weather forecasts save money. Doing them on super-computers costs a lot of money. But with Google's AI solution that gets cheaper.

As for QC I'm not saying it does much useful things yet, but companies are starting to use it and there is progress going on.

What in your view are better lanes of progress than QC and AI?

I sloppily used "AI" as a collective term for the currently hyped LLMs and image generators, where especially LLMs are being applied enthusiastically regardless if it works

It's very true that there are many areas of ML where considerable progress has been made and is delivering value

Are companies using QC? It's not like it can do much currently, as I understand it

We're making a lot of progress all over the engineering side of computing. A lot of it is incremental, but a faster or more energy efficient processor is very practically useful in a way that QC isn't yet. We might well get optical interconnects on cpu dies before we get anything tangible from QC