Everyone can see it coming, but they believe the AI companies’ hype that the AGI breakthrough will be here “soon”. Which if actually true, might be worth the bet.
For my money they either hit AGI and then we all die, or there is a crash before that. Yay.
It’s only pervasive because the AI companies are losing money on every generated token while burning investor money to keep the lights on. If people had to pay for what it really costs they’d be using it a lot less.
And even if they solve some problems with AI and make them smarter, they still have to solve the “actually making a profit” problem to justify these share prices. LLMs already have some use at their current level, but certainly not for the price they’d need to charge to break even, let alone actually making a profit. If they double the smarts but double the training and/or inference cost, they’ll still end up in the same place.
They don’t care about making profit by selling a product or a service, it’s all a speculative bet. They think if they “simply” make AGI they will win all the economy forever, and that there is no second place.