Why has everyone with money lost their damn minds over this?
In the short term stuff doesn't need to bring in revenue - if the belief that it might make a lot of money moves share prices that is good enough.
You don't even need to believe that yourself, you just need to believe that a sufficient number of other people will be fooled.
What bugs me about recent circular dealing along these lines is, it seems like sort of trick that can be used to steal from people holding indexes. If companies like Nvidia and Oracle go up as a result of circular deals that are not creating "real" value - that nonetheless causes index funds (i.e, people's retirement accounts) to buy more of them.
The massive problem of OpenAI and others are open source models. Companies can count and if bill for AI assistants are above 100k USD, why not just buy a server for same money, run there open source model and as bonus point stop leaking your IP to 3rd parties.
Also, according to LLM Arena, all the best models are proprietary (bc trade secrets can be very powerful).