Well, it was a bubble. There was a major burst in the turn of the century that proved it, with many consequences.

A bubble just meant that the valuation of internet companies at the time were overinflated and detached from reality, not that the Internet as a technology was useless.

I think comparing AI to the internet in terms of usefulness is absolute wishful thinking thinking. The Internet was a major inflection point in the history of the world, maybe in the same magnitude of the advent of computers or the industrial revolution.

AI (and we should be clear that we are actually talking about Generative AI in this context) is an interesting tech, may be pretty useful in some contexts, but it is not in the same league of the previous examples.