This makes the dot-com bubble look like a kiddie pool - at least those companies were trying to build actual products, while today's AI spending is burning through more money than the GDP of most countries just to have the biggest model with no clear path to profitability beyond "trust us bro".

Some of them are already Google or Facebook tbh. They could run many safer gambles for the same money. But I suspect investors demand AI right now.

Every time you think of something and don't understand why it happens, it does good to ask about every neighboring assumption "what if not".

Why am I saying this?

Because AGI created this way is impractical and economically useless, that's fundamental. One can even say "elementary".

What if they are not trying to create AGI?

What if they are not trying to make money?

What if they want a bubble burst, not fear it, and want it to be as big as the sky, so that Western economies would crumble and their surveillance systems were the only thing standing, together with other functioning machines?

From the answers depends the optimal strategy for other parties, suppose, maybe turning their Big Beautiful Bubble Burst into just another dot-com bubble, via adoption of this technology for actually useful applications, is something we should strive towards.

I definitely hope so, like it will with dotcom bubble. If the bubble burst delays the rise of killer robots, then I am all for another economic recession!

It's going to be a bigger bubble than the dot com one.

The hype for AI is ridiculous:

HP acquiring parts of AI Pin startup Humane for $116 million

HP is acquiring Humane’s AI tech and talent for $116 million—but the AI Pin, once hyped as a smartphone alternative, is officially being shuttered.

Fortune (fortune.com)

Yet they are too strapped for cash for raises or to not lay off workers.

Those numbers seem odd to me. I feel like the truth is 1 billion was spent on productive programmers and hardware. The small remainder of 154 billion was used to improvise profit growth through totally valid payment to some CEOs ego account.

They see Meta paying $200 mil or more to get a single employee and think about half that is a steal for a whole team of failed AI centric people

Nobody seems to have noticed that the business model here is to funnel as much traffic and spend to the big AI corporations as possible with no foreseeable return (except vague nonsense about "productivity gains").

Just wait until someone requires one of these things to make a profit, that's when if you're a corporation that integrated this shit deeply into your business, you'll be covered top to bottom in rug burn from the inevitable rug pull of price increases.