The thing about ARR numbers is that in most cases they didn't really recur, especially for an 8-month-old company. Also, I don't really care about these numbers anymore unless they share how much they spent on marketing.

IMHO at least some spending on AI are FOMO driven. Companies think how they can adopt AI faster than competitors in a fear being left behind and loose the race. They don’t yet know if ROI of AI adoption is above zero. Even if adopting AI is the only right decision some of AI users may go out of business having overspend on AI and either way AI customer base will decrease.

Yes if they are losing on unit economics can they make it up on scale (facetious saying but there may be truth to it for some AI startups)