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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> There are trillions invested to recoup and at most billions in sales. It doesn't add up to tokens making a profit any time soon

But this isn't "a ticking time bomb for enterprise." It's an issue for the AI companies' investors.

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Good thing the entire nation's economic growth outlook isn't tied to these companies then. For a second I thought we had a potentially dangerous situation on how we misappropriated trillions of capital.

For anyone doubting this, total private investments in the US grew 2% in 2025 relative to the prior year, adjusted for inflation.

But within that big pie, the "IT-related" investments grew 15.7% whereas non-IT actually shrank 2.0%.

Not really, because investors will sooner or later want to see real returns on what they invested. Tokens are suddenly not dirt cheap and enterprises are screwed.

It's like selling dope, once they're addicted, a dealer could turn the screw on them

That's why it's an issue for investors. Their investment may not payout. But the things that were built will still have been built and available to sell for related purposes, the models that were trained will still be trained, and so on.

If things don't end up working out a lot of people have already been (and in the future will be) paid. It's the investors that will lose out, not the subscriber.

When I compare different foundational models on the problems I solve with AI, the differences are not that large to prevent a switch if the price gets too high. I do this like each 6 months, just to assess what is the risk of getting dependent on one provider. It's not yet worring, at least for my use-cases.

Not if they IPO and some other sucker buys the stock.

That's not an excuse to pillage the commons.

Steal from, you know, people who actually work.

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