I feel that those who assume that everyone hates AI and that the SF tech sphere is a bubble are in a bubble themselves.

AI has a lot of people who hate it, but it is neither wholly unpopular nor useless. ChatGPT has over 1.2 billions WAUs. There are millions of people who spend hours watching AI generated media. Demand for AI is universal in white-collar professions, as it automates a large portion of previously human-bottlenecked work. Pretty much every email I get now I assume comes from an API key, as the task of copywriting was abandoned readily once chatbots could do it for us faster and better.

Sure AI has a notable unpopularity among a certain subset of erudite, well-educated near-elite liberal types, but this is far from the global majority who are driving demand for the AI boom.