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Comment by ralph84 | Hacker News Reader

Or they stay private and raise more capital. Until they have a failed round people predicting bankruptcy are getting way ahead of how this would actually play out. Some of us are old enough to remember the "Amazon can never make a profit and will go bankrupt" predictions of 25 years ago.

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The early years Amazon wasn't profitable by choice. They could have stopped that at any time and even did demonstrate it by having a single quarter with $1 profit or some such.

Anthropic and OpenAI have no choice but to go public if they want to avoid bankruptcy. Venture capital firms are struggling to raise more capital, the bond market is so saturated that the borrowing costs are getting too high and big tech is also at the limit of how much they can invest, all while AI companies' costs are going through the roof. Retail investors is the last market they haven't tapped into and to do that, they have to go public. There's just no way around it.

The scale current of money-burning is just wild. I'm not sure you can compare it to anything else this century.

The tech industry is currently spending more on AI infrastructure every single year than the United States spent during the absolute peak annual years of the post-9/11 wars.

That said, $2T was spent during GWOT with another $8T in veteran care, DHS, interest in debt.

Current AI spend this year is expected to be $2.59T (chips, infra, etc)

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