Is OCR "a scam just like crypto"? How about voice recognition, used daily all over the world? What about spam filters? Clearly useless over hyped technology right?
Even if you wanted to limit the term AI to large language models, which by the way, would make your use of the term incredibly wrong, it STILL has many common and useful application. You can use LLMs to classify text (sentiment, toxicity, etc), they can be paired with voice models to improve speech recognition or improve translation services, and so on.
I think it's better to ask what you think the major similarity is between AI and crypto, because it's hard to find any other than a subset of the crypto fanatics now jumping on LLMs as the solution to every problem. But this group isn't actually part of the AI community.
Clearly the AI being compared here is the recent boom in generative AI. OCR didn’t have companies chucking billions at experiments and make chip manufacturing stocks soar.