For the same reason that people were selling crypto mining boxes rather than just plugging them in:
The only guaranteed profit in a gold rush is to be the one selling shovels.
See Nvidia for details.
They’re selling hype, not technology
That’s like asking why doesn’t Adobe make their own content and keep the tools internal.
The reality is the product is the easy part.
Actually selling it, maintaining it, selling more of it and running a profitable business is the hard part.
So the AI makes the product really easy to make, but selling it is the hard part.
Why don’t they ask ai how to sell it. After all, isn’t it super intelligent?
I do work for a software company, and sales is part of my job. And yes, sometimes I get the AI to review a tricky sale. Not usually though.
However, the reality is it takes years and years to build relationships, get into markets, get visibility.
Basically embed yourself into a market. So the product is the easy part. The sale is the hard part.
The AI companies could probably be profitable if they weren’t dumping tons of money into new model research, but then they would stagnate and die to the ones who keep moving forward.
Companies using their AI don’t need to worry about that expense.
It’d be so funny if research hits a breakthrough that absolutely collapses the cost of inference, allowing anyone to self host frontier models, eliminating the ability for all the main AI companies to ever recoup their costs.
Well, except where everyone’s data gets sold at bottom dollar in liquidation. Actually, that’d be pretty funny too.
Self host on what? The way we’re going 16GB of RAM to run the models will be a capital investment…
I don’t know if that’ll happen to frontier models, but I definitely see it happening with models that work well enough for the vast majority of personal use.
To be fair, a reasonable answer would be the same as any reseller or value-added business. They have some skill, capital, or existing market capture that the whole seller does not.
Don’t get me wrong it can still be bullshit, but it’s actually pretty common.
It’s a definite risk. They do steal your inputs and the outputs they send back to you. They will always have even more powerful models that aren’t released yet. If you avoid sending them all of your code, they could hack you to steal it. They will certainly copy any good ideas their competitors come up with (Meta Muse agent, jev) within weeks, as they all copied claude code and open claw. Answer to OP is “just not yet”.
The unified US establishment goal is to create skynet for global and domestic domination. Theoretically, the AI bond villains could make sufficently sophisticated weapon/control systems to threaten the government, but why bother when it already wants to give them all of our money. “Whoever wins AI, wins” means only first to skynet, wins. Zero relevance to any AI customers, who obviously win through the widest competition/choices on what to use to help them. Not the nationality of the oligarchs that profit off them.
https://naturalfinance.blogspot.com/2026/09/a-global-prosperity-manifesto.html
The real reason isn’t that they can’t turn a profit, it’s that they don’t have to.
They don’t have to be profitable because they aren’t fueling growth with profits, they’re fueling it with debt and investment. Like many have noted, they cannot do that forever and will eventually pass that cost to consumers. A significant portion of their existing cost is driven by research, which they can scale back by lobbying for legislation, so that peers getting a leg up is more difficult and small players catching up is almost impossible.
Also, both Anthropic and OpenAI have planned IPOs, where they will inevitably raise a ton of cash. It’s a game of chicken though. How long can they fuel growth without being publicly accountable to balance sheets and shareholders? Whether we like it or not, they will almost certainly transition to being profitable businesses, but only when it is advantageous for them to do so. Right now, it’s not a priority; the priority is growth to the point of diminishing returns.
Why did the snake oil salesman grow old and die? Same reason.
In a gold rush it is better, on average, to sell the shovels then to mine the gold.
Slop image
Because its a scam.
A scam that will inevitably end humanity on a global scale…… probably.
Nah mankind will continue, but it’ll definitely hurt when this shitshow implodes and possibly takes out the current economic model and quite a few governments with it.
They’re working on it. They just need a little more of your internal documents and source code.
And a lot more money. And so much more power and water. And more data. And more money, too.
They’ll announce soon that personal ai assistants require a blood sacrifice to run, on top of the monthly and metered fees.
They’ll need child-cannibalist rituals minute of work.
Because it is a scam. Just like the people selling, instead of using:
- healing crystals
- essential oils
- blockchain
- penis-enlargement pills
- JIRA
LOL Love the (accurate) JIRA inclusion there
Q: Couldn’t this JIRA ticket just be an email?
A: No! Because JIRA will send you like, 10 emails.
Jira, lol.
Jira is awful 😞😔
I mean yes, I hate the manager who set up JIRA that way, but JIRA is marketed to and designed for managers to over-complicate it. It is not designed as a tool for engineers to track their work. It is designed for managers to mis-manage teams, because that sells at volume.
I also have other reasons for hating JIRA:
- no ticket hierarchy
- no multiple owners
- slow. so very slow
- sometimes keyboard shortcuts work, sometimes they don’t. There is no apparently pattern.
I mean, it kinda fits with the rest of that category, other than I’ve never been harassed about healing crystals.
Because nobody but nvidia profits from LLMs.
How’s TSMC doing these days?
Yeah, all right, “hardware suppliers” in general.
Shovel salesmen
This is exactly the question i ask “investment advisor” services when they call asking if i want help managing investments.
For you to have a system that works well enough for me to be interested , there’d be no need for you to spend money on call centers full of people ringing up strangers for money, you could take all of that money and invest it in the plan you are trying to sell me.
I’ve always thought that as well. Surely it wouldn’t take them long to become ludicrously wealthy with their top investing acumen.
Ikr. If I knew a “foolproof” investing strategy to “make loads of money”, I wouldn’t spend my time trying to teach other people about it, id just be using that strategy myself and actually NOT want other people to know about it.
