I think those that immediately correlate AI with the internet is doing lazy writing. There are a lot of different AI uses. Just because the popular one right now are LLM, doesn't mean AI is limited to that. AI has existed for a long time; there are the chess AI, AI in robotics, and even in applications and games.

I agree that with the different paths open to AI, there are a lot of ways to earn and make use of it. Crypto is definitely up there because of how its security and transparency which I think is important.