I expect this is the crux of the problem.

There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value.

Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. That works as a business.

But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.

In a normal world, at this point companies would say, "hmm, well we thought it could be amazing but it just doesn't work as a product or a feature of a product because we can't sell it for enough money to both cover its operation, and its development, and the capital expenditures we need to make every time someone signs up. So a normal C staff would make some post about "too early" or whatever and shelve it. But we don't live in a normal world, so companies are literally burning the cash they need to survive the future in a vain hope that somehow, somewhere, a real product will emerge.

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anthonypasq 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.

AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.

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ChuckMcM 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yup, I've been here before. Back in 1995 we called it "The Internet." :-) Not to be snarky here, as we know the Internet has, in fact, revolutionized a lot of things and generated a lot of wealth. But in 1995, it was "a trillion dollar market" where none of the underlying infrastructure could really take advantage of it. AI is like that today, a pretty amazing technology that at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do, but the hype level is as far over its utility as the Internet hype was in 1995. My advice to anyone going through this for the first time is to diversify now if you can. I didn't in 1995 and that did not work out well for me.

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lizknope an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I started working in 1997. Cisco was one of our big customers so I knew a lot of engineers there. Cisco stock hid $80 in 2000. In 2002 it was at $10.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CSCO/

I knew people who purchased their options but didn't sell and based on the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) had tax bills of millions of dollars based on the profit IF they sold on the day they purchased it. But then it dropped to $10 and even if they sold everything they couldn't pay the tax bill. They finally changed the law after years but those guys got screwed over.

I was young and thought the dot com boom would go on forever. It didn't. The AI bubble will burst too but whether it is 2026, 27, 28, who knows. Bubble doesn't mean useless, just that the investors will finally start demanding a profit and return on their investment. At that point the bubble will pop and lots of companies will go fail or lose a lot of money. Then it will take a couple of years to sort out and companies have to start showing a profit.

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RoddaWallPro 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you mean exactly by "diversify"? Money/investment-wise?

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toomuchtodo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Sell the risky stock that has inflated in value from hype cycle exuberance and re-invest proceeds into lower risk asset classes not driven by said exuberance. "Taking money off the table." An example would be taking ISO or RSU proceeds and reinvesting in VT (Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund ETF) or other diversified index funds.

Taking money off the table - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763769 - October 2025 (108 comments)

(not investing advice)

	▲	ChuckMcM 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What tomuchtodo said. When I left Sun in 1995 I had 8,000 shares, which in 1998 would have paid off my house, and when I sold them when Oracle bought Sun after a reverse 3:1 split, the total would not even buy a new car. Can be a painful lesson, certainly it leaves an impression.

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datsci_est_2015 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I find it very easy to believe. The pressures that select for leadership in corporate America are wholly perpendicular to the skills and intelligence for identifying how to leverage novel and revolutionary technologies into useful products that people will pay for. I present as evidence the graveyard of companies and careers left behind by many of those leaders who failed to innovate despite, in retrospect, what seemed to be blindingly obvious product decisions to make.

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rightbyte 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The product is the stock price, not Office or Windows. From that perspective they are doing it right.

	▲	alsetmusic an hour ago \| parent [-]
		And this is the broken mindset tanking multiple large companies' products and services (Google, Apple, MS, etc). Focus on the stock. The product and our users are an afterthought. Someone linked to a good essay on how success plus Tim Cook's focus on the stock has caused the rot that's consuming Apple's software[0]. I thought it was well reasoned and it resonated with me, though I don't believe any of the ideas were new to me. Well written, so still worth it. 0. The Fallen Apple - https://mattgemmell.scot/the-fallen-apple/

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toomuchtodo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.

Their incentives are to juice their stock grants or other economic gains from pushing AI. If people aren't paying for it, it has limited value. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, only ~3% of the M365 user base is willing to pay for it. Whether enough value is derived for users to continue to pay for what they're paying for, and for enterprise valuation expectations to be met (which is mostly driven by exuberance at this point), remains to be seen.

Their goal is not to be right; their goal is to be wealthy. You do not need to be right to be wealthy, only well positioned and on time. Adam Neumann of WeWork is worth ~$2B following the same strategy, for example. Right place, right time, right exposure during that hype cycle.

Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871172 - February 2026

This is very much like the dot com bubble for those who were around to experience it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g78sgf/...

> In the late 90s and early 00s a business could get a lot of investors simply by being “on the internet” as a core business model.

> They weren’t actually good business that made money…..but they were using a new emergent technology

> Eventually it became apparent these business weren’t profitable or “good” and having a .com in your name or online store didn’t mean instant success. And the companies shut down and their stocks tanked

> Hype severely overtook reality; eventually hype died

("Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" -- Charlie Munger)

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bandrami 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Were you around in 2008?

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reaperducer 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's happened before.

Your premise that companies which become financially successful doing one thing are automatically excellent at doing something else is hard to believe.

Moreover, it demonstrates both an inability to dispassionately examine what is happening and a lack of awareness of history.

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xyzsparetimexyz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Doesn't matter what the leaders think if the users hate it and call it slop

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-satya...