Maybe build something useful that solves a real problem?

That’s the problem. For now at least, we’re at the end of “new tech make line go up”. Crypto wasn’t it, neither were NFTs, LLMs are no different. All the low hanging fruit was picked a while back so they’re stuck trying to make us believe that there’s a Next Big Thing just around the corner when, at best, there’s some fairly niche and difficult to monetize tech requiring vast resources to work.