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I have rarely seen those arguments mixed like that. Do you have any examples?

"all good stories about AI are faked by boosters and a negative margin would prove demand isn't there"

Externalizing negative margin to customers gives one a pretty long runway. Know plenty using AI in a busn sense, but to a one all of them are doing worse, and are doing more worse faster. Isn't cause (tho exacerbates their worst instincts), but kinda have to lean in due to macro and comps.

Yea, verily, for the multitude are deceived. They believe themselves to have written code; they believe that the code executed. But all of that is Bubble. And while Bubble doth glister and shine with the colors of the rainbow, all of that passeth away, for substance and value belong only to Profit.

Blessed are the profitable, for theirs is the kingdom of Real. But woe unto ye who saw the code run and believed; the Market hath looked upon thy works and found no EBITDA therein, and cast thee into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Simpler: Because it's some people's only hope for AI to *go away*. If it's inherently unprofitable on a unit economics level compared to hiring humans, it means AI might *stop* one day without active measures. But it isn't and won't.

It isn't and won't, and also a couple of frontier labs in the US aren't the same thing as "can the technology persist" or even "can it be profitable." It just mystifies me.

I mean, partly, though I think its more that most people's contact has been through hype and pressure, and its just 'we want to see the hucksters humiliated' which ended up becoming almost a faith that the humiliation would be a transcendent moment that would resolve all grievances.

The capitalist mysticism take I think is a real blind spot, but its almost a reflected one - people are being bombarded with claims centered in the market by sleazy rich investor types who do undervalue other things, so an 'and maybe also' becomes a 'only because of'.

And that has become the myth that AI only exists and continues to exist by being constantly propped up by massive amounts of money. So there's the fantasy - if the bubble pops, the bad things people don't like will just evaporate like shadows before dawn.

I like that you're pausing the celebration and the mourning to ask what the IPO is actually supposed to prove. If profit becomes the only test, we lose all the slower, social ways AI is already changing how people work.

people really wanted it to be like crypto and NFTs.

I suspect it will turn out that the bubble and hype made financially possible, legally insulated, and imaginatively plausible the very infrastructure required especially for training the transformative technology, while still being very likely predicated on an implausible business model.