[retrochameleon]

This feels like an attempted primer and justification for major bailouts to the big AI companies. And this is all a problem that the companies have created for themselves by going so hard into AI investments based on wild speculation about the near future of AI. And the bailouts will probably happen because A: these companies have politicians in their pocket, and B: most of the government / politicians will frame this as a national security problem we can't afford to ignore. This all serves to entrench and centralize power and access to data for the major AI companies that managed to stay in the game up to this point.

[expedition32]

How would a bailout help? At the end of the day these companies need products people want to pay for. We know from the dot com bubble that you can burn money for years but eventually investors want to see some returns.

[retrochameleon]

Keeps them running until a breakpoint they hope is coming where all the AI investments and infrastructure they have places them at the top of the world. I (and it seems most tech companies) believe high quality data corpus and access to compute will become strong forms of hard power in the near future. The question is if they can survive long enough for that to come fruition, and if it's before all their investments deteriorate and deprecate.