[dnnehgf]

yeah my read is that this industry was for a long time underlevered; these companies were generating so much cash that the only meaningful candidates for investment were in effect moonshots with highly unpredictable returns, and you can't fund those bets with debt.

but now the story is different. while the effects of ai on other industries and classes may be unpredictable, (a) the tendency toward ai itself (the market demand for economically useful intelligence) seems plausibly more inevitable than any tendency in the history of capitalism (certainly more inevitable than any in the history of these big tech companies) and (b) the technical scaling laws have been eerily steady (intelligence as log of compute). taken together, (a) and (b) make it much easier to finance than anything meta or google or microsoft have ever worked on. there are risks, but there is at least also a model, a projection; that model did not formerly exist, for these companies. anything outside their core business was literally a guess.

the upshot of these stabilizing patterns is that the industry is in a certain sense just maturing. that is, its financial profile is starting to look more like other mature industries that are mostly juggling around known quantities to try to get a small edge that they can, with financial leverage, magnify enough to M&A the competition away and thereby secure the only relief possible in a well-delineated, well-populated niche: monopoly by scale/consolidation rather than by differentiation. (which is not to say that these mature industries are less competitive! they are actually more competitive; the intensity of the competition is what drives the "anti-competitive" behavior.)