An Ouroboros made of shit

offer nothing substantive

Like industrial farming, there is nothing new, but now everybody can create memes and create software. Society will change.

The leaders of the companies are not stupid. If they started seeing a net loss from their sales strategy, they'd change strategies.

Unless money is not the goal. Not the sole goal at least. As you said, they're not stupid. It's entirely within reason to assume they may be aiming for more than just money.

Who knows what they're planning. Nothing good for us - that's for sure.

While I agree with not buying being better that giving them money. I can't agree with leadership being smart.

This thing was never going to be profitable. So they either:
a) they're actively malicious — they were never planning on profiting which means this is basically a pump and dump scheme capable of triggering some form of recession;
b) they're fucking morons for believing their own fantasies, which judging by their public appearances would track.

Former seems just as plausible, but my bet is on the latter. These AI bro CEOs seem to be woefully average at best.

Counterpoint:

They already are losing money. They themselves do not project that they will be profitable until 2030. The idea that "smart people with spreadsheets won't let them lose money" is obviously wrong because they have done nothing except lose money, ever.

They get thier operating capital from funding, not sales.

Now, I agree that the gambit is wrong. So you're right. You're just right for the wrong reason.

Funding is just the cash value of market optimism for the future of your product. High usage props up optimism. Social media IPOs were valued very much based on active users, the idea being that more users meant more opportunity for profit.

The more people actively using these tools, even if they're just maliciously burning tokens, just add to the "active users" metric. Which makes funding easier. And funding is the ACTUAL way these companies "make thier money".

Despite the popular fantasy, the rich and powerful are not stupid.

Uh... famously untrue. Mental illness has plagued monarchs, pharaohs, and caesers for millennia. That's long before you get to all the quirked up white boys and trad rad girl bosses currently running things.

You don’t know more about a company or market from passively consuming headlines than the leadership of that company.

Okay, but you can review their balance sheets and their primary lines of credit. Case in point, Sam Altman is heavily reliant on three big financial partners - Softbank, Oracle, and NVIDIA. Two of these are - themselves - hemorrhaging money thanks to large capital outlays that have failed to produce substantive returns.

There are finance journalists who get out ahead of this and report their own analysis. And you can find that in a thousand different private journals, substacks, and podcasts. But you can also go do the grunt work yourself if you're ambitious.

OpenAI's financials have been disclosed already (although the official SEC filing is still upcoming). So... just read them if you doubt what you're reading in the news. But it's not some kind of secret that the business is operating at a loss, with a fixation on debt-fueled growth. The argument is over future projected revenue, which isn't something business leadership can be any more certain of than a passive media consumer.

I definitely get the knee-jerk impulse to announce "business professionals know more about business than internet idiots". Because, sure. True. But the idea that business professionals don't routinely make bad decisions has some pretty historic well-established counterpoints.

"The business people know more" line is akin to saying "This used car dealer must know more about the vehicles on his lot than I do, so I can trust him".

The only way to stop them is give them more money.

I think companies these days are more about valuation (how much people think they are worth) vs profit (what they actually earn). AI companies are loss leaders, yet vcs still fund them anyways. Paying them more money will just add to hype and valuation (eg "our XX service grew YY% which projects to ZZ potential profit")

Bailout in 3...2...1....

I see a lot of people in this thread stating and insisting that people should give them more money, which fells so surreal. I guess people's mind have been shaped into consumerism to such a degree that they can't think about a solution to things that doesn't involve buying something anymore. It's so hard to believe

use their cheapest plan, burn their tokens, burn the hole in their budget. could backfire though as then "clever analysts" will claim that demand is up and eager bankers will shell out more cash

The datacenters largely aren't built yet, as someone else pointed out. That doesn't even matter though, to your point.

The Epstein class has successfully destroyed large portions of the Internet through bot traffic. They've scraped virtually all human contributions and stolen it, while ruining traditional vehicles for information gathering. They've eviscerated consumer hardware, and thus shifted control of compute away from the masses. They've successfully manufactured consent for mass surveillance including harvesting our biometric data.

Once the AI bubble bursts, it will be one of the largest transfers of wealth in history as they force us to bail out this fradulent industry. If it doesn't throw us into another great depression, the damage it will do will ensure that things never go back to how they were pre-AI. Once that reality becomes apparent to the masses, they'll be primed and ready for Peter Theil's vision of "Freedom Cities"

The data centres are far from up. Many of them look to have a few steel beams in place and that's it. Others are sitting empty due to lack of hardware or lack of power.

I can run an open weights amazon from my house?

Apples & oranges.

The AI industry is fundamentally judged based on its symbolic similarities to bygone eras. Buying GPUs and building data centers sort of feels like Amazon Web Services, even though the $765 billion that big tech will spend in 2026 will be more than ten times Amazon’s combined capex during the period where AWS was being built. ChatGPT sort of feels like Google Search or Facebook Ads or next app store, but only because it’s a culturally-relevant piece of software, largely driven by the larger cargo cult of tech crystalizing around it.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/cargo-culture/