I genuinely have no idea how some of these companies got so far over their skis on AI. It simply does not make sense to me.

I'm consistently burning over $100/day in Claude/OpenAI tokens using Codex and Claude - but I'm on the subscriptions so I'm only paying $100/month to each vendor.

If I worked for a larger company that isn't allowed to use those subscriptions and has to pay list price I'd be costing them ~$2,000/month. Now times that by a large engineering team.

They believed and were financially incentivized to embrace the hype and operationalized it because technical leadership thought rapid PoCs would apply to the rest of the tech stack.

IMHO it’s just good old fomo. They fear that the landscape will shift overnight and they’ll be left with a ton of useless meat bags instead of a pay as you go models that you can upgrade instantly every quarter.

Simple answer is that these execs live in a big bubble and goad each other into bigger and bigger investments via groupthink.

Out of touch leadership and management combined with a culture of self-congratulatory "innovation" where companies just plagiarize eachother in an endless loop... It doesn't surprise me at all, tbh.

Apple and Meta (and others) did the same thing with VR. In 2015 all these CEOs were looking for their next app store and, herd-like, settled on VR computing. They couldn't come up with anything more promising so they burned tens of billions on failed goggles that anyone with any sense could have told you was never going to work.

Groupthink. FOMO. Envy. Hubris. Greed. Those fuel Big Tech and we get to pay for the results.

Once you realize most execs are literal sociopaths driven by pure greed and power a lot of things start to make sense. Of course for simple minded folks like us none of it is remotely understandable