in theory, in practice you just need to be convincing enough to get greedier/dumber people to pay for your shit in the gamble they might get more in return later. (they like to call themselves "investors", but most are just degenerate gamblers) and then cover your own ass if/when the house of cards tumbles.

building and popping bubbles, and fleecing as many people as possible throughout the whole thing, is what the US financial markets casino is literally designed to facilitate

Powerful people are willing to pay a large price to manipulate the masses.

As7de from that, the plan is to lose money for years gobbling up all the data before there's laws that actually get enforced to protect against it, and to get an entire generation of college kids and workers dependant on using AI, with companies relying heavily on its usage. This is happening to a huge degree right now with data entry, "vibe coders", Law firms, and healthcare.

Those people won't really be able to transition back or away from AI. They'll be dependent on it. And AI will start charging them way more than they are now. And they'll eat the costs and pay it.

So it's stealing data while it's free or nearly free, power to manipulate all the sheeple, create dependency.

At least in the tech industry that doesn't apply if the investors believe that the technology or application is promising enough. Look at Uber's example. They lost very large amounts of money for many years before turning a profit. They were able to do this because the investors kept sustaining them through their unprofitable years.

The same thing has been happening for years with the AI companies. I heard a while back that OpenAI wouldn't turn a profit on their services even if they charged end users $100/month.