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‘A feedback loop with no brake’: how an AI doomsday report shook US markets
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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They kind of know. The dot com crashed many companies, and also gave rise to Amazon. They're all just hoping they'll be the one that invested in the next Amazon.
Have they made a profit yet?
Amazon didn't make any profit for a decade and made 360 billion least year. They tell investors that AI will be the same.
The difference was that Amazon knew how to make a profit, but was reinvesting into infrastructure plays and bigger fish.
If they had to, they could have been a modestly profitable bookshop in 2002. AWS and monster logistics might not have developed to put them in the 13-digit club though.
Does any AI-centric play have that fundamental fallback? The services that seem to be most effective at direct monetization, the coding tools, are typically running at huge losses. If they raised costs to cover, precious few firms will pay basically the salary of a senior dev for an emulation of an enthusiastic junior dev with an affinity for footguns.
The less enterprise-focused products-- parasocial toys, image and video gen, will likely try to dip into consumer subs and advertising, but can that generate the cash volumes these platforms demand?
If people would always demand answers for those questions, we wouldn't have speculative bubbles. For now, everybody seems to still believe the "it's the worst it'll ever be right now" and the "just more scaling bro" answers.
How much of that profit less decade was just them reinvesting in their company as opposed to burning money like you're trapped on Everest and need every bit of heat you can get?
That's the part they didn't tell investors. Some call that the enshittification of the investment market. Lies everywhere.