The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop.
The question is whether AI is useful enough to justify valuations that dwarf the GDP of all but the top 20 countries in the world. As it stands right now, it's not even close! The leaked OpenAI financials put these AI companies in the same profitability territory as utilities, with zero justification for these crazy valuations.
And nukes are useful by some metric too.
AI (llms) is not useful in any way that we as humanity should be pushing for. It’s more harmful than good in every way possible. It’s honestly astounding to me that everyone’s ethics are so weak as to believe that somehow these incredible destructive companies are somehow good for humanity.
Close, it's the time-discounted expectation of future returns. This seems related to future profits but it need not be. Historically, stocks tend to perform poorly after IPOs. There's no guarantee that (say) Anthropic's stock price would ever recover after a post-IPO drop.
The recent attempts by Anthropic et al. to circumvent the usual rules for inclusion in indices have raised red flags all over the place, with many calling it a naked attempt to raid everyone's pension funds for hundreds of billions in ill-gotten capital.