If by "thought leader" you mean domain experts making criticism then yes.

For example, Nouriel Roubini calling out the risks of the 2008 Recession before it happened, Michael Pettis calling out the risks of a real estate balance sheet crisis in China before Evergrande happened, and Arvind Subramanian calling out the risks of a a shadow bank crisis in India before the ILFS collapse in 2018.

For AI/ML, I'd tend to trust Emily Bender, given her background in NLP which itself was what became LLMs originated from.

Hrm. I'd read "thought leader" to mean "hype man"; that's how the term is normally used. I certainly wouldn't read it as "domain expert"; the people generally referred to as 'thought leaders' frequently are not.

Yes. Say there are 10000 thought leaders with different thinkings. There's a chance that at least one is right.

Yep. Then they're the lottery winner that gets to go on TV and write a book about it as if it was expertise that led to their prediction.