but many of the current crop will never return money to investors.
I largely agree with you, but the huge investments currently being made will be very hard to get a return on. Token costs will come down, performance will go up, and you want to be in the business of selling the picks & shovels, not doing the mining.
Which is of course why nvidia, google & TSMC are in pretty good positions, but even their valuations have some bubble in them.
I mean this is a sort of conspiracy theory and I genuinely don't know why people think AI is particularly hard to get money back from?
> I largely agree with you, but the huge investments currently being made will be very hard to get a return on.
Why do you find it huge? Anthropic went from $1B to $44B revenue in a few months and this is unprecedented.
1. The margins on inference are huge
2. There is genuine moat because AI models have personalities strengths and weaknesses that's so they are definitely not fungible
I think a lot of handwaving goes on but it comes in the form of some latent concern that AI might just be profitable. But the reality is that it will be.
None of the "selling picks and shovels" analogies will stick.