The problem is that those "signs" don't really point to it?

Like, new technology with bunch of hype appears, demand goes up, the hardware industry raises prices, prices probably won't go down to how they were before because the industry is pretty cartel-like.

That happens is every poorly-regulated market.

You don't need a secret cabal of people making computer parts expensive on purpose to make people dumb to have that make sense, and requires extra justification.

Conspiracies exist. Many are well documented, or at least documented enough to call out specific people for specific behavior.

A conspiracy mindset ignores those, and instead suspects conspiracy everywhere else, and usually without substantial evidence. Easy instances are detectable when the sentence goes they do something to harm us in a vaguely related way.

The latter is all over YouTube, and what influencers make money with. The former is sometimes reposted on YouTube after some journalists publish it in a serious media outlet.

Its not like in dot com where companies without revenue got to borrow tons of money they could never pay back.

It’s exactly that, but much worse. These companies do not make money. They lose tons of money every quarter. They have revenue but it doesn’t even cover their operations cost. But that’s not even the expensive part; training new models is hideously pricey and that will not change. And they must keep training new models lest they “fall behind” in this race to the bottom. OpenAI owes a Trillion and a half dollars to their investors. They have at least a trillion in obligations to compute providers. They keep taking more investor money, most recently with SoftBank who sold junk bonds to raise it.

Not to worry, OpenAI may lose money on every sale, but they make up for it in volume!