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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

One difference that strikes me with the .com bubble is that I don't remember the .com companies having sustained multi-billions losses / cash burn. They were not profitable but this is quite different. If (or when) the music stops, won't OpenAI go bust immediately? That's quite a counterparty risk those companies are taking.

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Dotcom companies were basically stuff like pets.com, not things considered strategic with de-facto government backing.

Cisco was very much not "stuff like pets.com". Most of the money lost in the dotcom crash wasn't in pets.com, it was the infrastructure companies like Cisco and Sun.

Funnily enough Cisco’s stock has recently recovered back to its dotcom peak.

Thanks to the irrational exuberance of the AI bubble...

Cisco did not go bust.

And I didn't say it went bust.

I believe we'd have to tease out what proportion of that cash burn is essential to keep serving compute to customers (which I assume to have profitable unit economics), versus what percentage is optional datacenter buildouts that could be paused in this situation.

OpenAI is ten years old, dotcom companies were 2-3 years old.

Some dotcom-boom companies that survived also had sustained multi billion dollar losses afair - Amazon and Uber for example.

Uber was founded half a decade after the dot com bubble.

"half" confused me but okay 2001 and 2009 makes sense.

Massive cash burn was an absolutely key feature of the dotcom boom/bust. Admittedly, it never really went away - there's always been a free->enshittification profit taking cycle since then. It's just the scale that's terrifyingly different this time.

They are counting on 'too big to fail'.

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