And the money these companies are blowing on all of this shit is banking on them being ‘the’ dominant player in a completely world-changing commodity industry.
Being "a" player in a multi-billion $ industry is also pretty good. For example, Bing gets some small % of the search engine market, but that's still a ton of market and $. And Foursquare/Swarm is used by like 0.01% of the population, but they can still map the exact floor plan of Macy's and that Chipotle will lose 30% of their share value from people shiitting blood (both were extremely accurate).
And then Bing gets a pretty big upgrade: ChatGPT. And here we are.
Not for the amount of money they are spending to get there. Spending Money you’ll be paying back for decades to be a middling contender, without a significant moat, for something without any clearly-defined, real practical, sustainable business use cases is absolutely terrible.