There's an interesting job interview question: do you want to be more like Woz or S. Jobs? Elon Musk's management style is very Jobs-like: Motivates via manipulation and wow-factor of cutting edge, has grand visions, yet knows what factories and the market can and can't handle, tries odd drugs, etc. However, Jobs rarely stuck his nose into politics; Jobs mostly just trolled about tech.
I'm definitely a Woz. I appreciate both Jobs and Musk despite their blemishes, but I must say where Musk has Jobs beat is vision. Jobs was content to give everyone a computer. Musk is trying to bring the optimistic future to life on all fronts.
Job's vision was seeing that hardware and software vertically integrated had a strong position in the market, despite being told to sell off the hardware division and focus on OS work. His vision was to never give out dividends or buy back stock: always plough the money right back into the company.
Musk has the unbound optimism of his ability to succeed. He's good at selling that optimism to others. His decision making is often heavily seated by public opinion and the market.
Also the whole fascism thing.
Of the two Jobs actually accomplished what he sets out to do. Musk's batting record is more spotty. He's got some wins (Falcon 9) but boy howdy does he have a lot of losses, and he's just gearing up to take increasingly more L's
I think the point is that anyone can enter the AI cloud market to compete with the fat cats if they get too pricy. NVIDIA's de-facto standards are the closest thing to a market moat. If AI ends up highly tied to NVIDIA's standards, then NVIDIA could become the Microsoft of AI. It's hard to know how tool chains will evolve to answer that though, it's new territory. (It could be all moot if the bots take over and eat us humans. I taste like chicken.)
I don't think anyone is arguing it's giving zero value, only that the total value is not keeping up with investments. Look at the recent smart-speaker bubble: people indeed use them, but not often enough for profitable activities, and so the speaker market popped. Trying to goad people into shopping with them failed.
Making AI pictures of Pee Wee Herman riding a shark blindfolded is indeed fun, but not profitable for Microsoft because it's too hardware intensive for ads to cover. I gotta make more goofy pics before the bottom falls out...
Objective info is currently hard to come by, but my horse sense is that Big AI is subsidizing it for many projects, including those in other companies, to gain both market share and investor excitement (deserved or not).
If one looks at most the bubbles of the past, the writing is on the wall. AI won't go away, but will probably take longer to make profitable than anticipated, just like dot-coms and smart-speakers. Force feeding it is causing indigestion, and it's likely to PukeGPT.
