For the same reason that people were selling crypto mining boxes rather than just plugging them in:

The only guaranteed profit in a gold rush is to be the one selling shovels.

See Nvidia for details.

The reality is the product is the easy part.

Actually selling it, maintaining it, selling more of it and running a profitable business is the hard part.

So the AI makes the product really easy to make, but selling it is the hard part.

They’re working on it. They just need a little more of your internal documents and source code.

In a gold rush it is better, on average, to sell the shovels then to mine the gold.

Because it is a scam. Just like the people selling, instead of using:

• healing crystals
• essential oils
• blockchain
• penis-enlargement pills
• JIRA

Because its a scam.

I'd wager it's simply not possible to be profitable using AI for most use-cases. You either burn way too many tokens on your queries or risk your business falling victim to an under-tokenized AI hallucination.

Because nobody but nvidia profits from LLMs.

That's like asking why doesn't Adobe make their own content and keep the tools internal.

The real reason isn't that they can't turn a profit, it's that they don't have to.

They don't have to be profitable because they aren't fueling growth with profits, they're fueling it with debt and investment. Like many have noted, they cannot do that forever and will eventually pass that cost to consumers. A significant portion of their existing cost is driven by research, which they can scale back by lobbying for legislation, so that peers getting a leg up is more difficult and small players catching up is almost impossible.

Also, both Anthropic and OpenAI have planned IPOs, where they will inevitably raise a ton of cash. It's a game of chicken though. How long can they fuel growth without being publicly accountable to balance sheets and shareholders? Whether we like it or not, they will almost certainly transition to being profitable businesses, but only when it is advantageous for them to do so. Right now, it's not a priority; the priority is growth to the point of diminishing returns.

If I recall correctly, shovel companies made a lot of money while only a few of their shovels actually struck gold.

This is exactly the question i ask "investment advisor" services when they call asking if i want help managing investments.

For you to have a system that works well enough for me to be interested , there'd be no need for you to spend money on call centers full of people ringing up strangers for money, you could take all of that money and invest it in the plan you are trying to sell me.

When potatoes came over from the New World, a lot of Europeans grew them as decorative plants. New shit makes people do weird stuff.

Not everybody is trying to make a business with so-called AI. The peddlers are just the loudest.

The companies promise their models can do all this stuff for paying customers. If the models were truly that capable, the so-called AI companies ought to be doing everything with them and be raking in the dough like mad. Which they're not because they know the limitations of the models. It's what economists call the bullshit gap between marketing and reality. And by economists I mean me.

Better question is if you can really build an app as easily as writing a prompt, why would anyone pay you for your app?

Somehow AI bros like to pretend that AI is some secret lifehack despite it being one of the most mainstream things in human history.

They are going for the gold rush pick axe business model

Been shouting this from the rooftops since the beginning. If it was half as good as claimed, I would NOT have access to it.

The AI companies could probably be profitable if they weren't dumping tons of money into new model research, but then they would stagnate and die to the ones who keep moving forward.

Companies using their AI don't need to worry about that expense.

It's a definite risk. They do steal your inputs and the outputs they send back to you. They will always have even more powerful models that aren't released yet. If you avoid sending them all of your code, they could hack you to steal it. They will certainly copy any good ideas their competitors come up with (Meta Muse agent, jev) within weeks, as they all copied claude code and open claw. Answer to OP is "just not yet".

The unified US establishment goal is to create skynet for global and domestic domination. Theoretically, the AI bond villains could make sufficently sophisticated weapon/control systems to threaten the government, but why bother when it already wants to give them all of our money. "Whoever wins AI, wins" means only first to skynet, wins. Zero relevance to any AI customers, who obviously win through the widest competition/choices on what to use to help them. Not the nationality of the oligarchs that profit off them.

https://naturalfinance.blogspot.com/2026/09/a-global-prosperity-manifesto.html

If you come to seminar at the Holiday Inn, I'll teach you why! Only $500, and at the end you'll be able to start your own AI powered business and make millions per year!

They want AGI, not LLMs. They're pretty much betting everything on getting there first knowing that if they do it'll pay them back a millionfold what they invested up front. They're taking a massive risk for a potentially massive reward. They're coaching a college kid to become a professional athlete. It's not profitable yet but they're investing heavily in them in the hopes that one day it will be.