> How many years will it take to recoup the investment
> in AI?

There's two related ways of looking at this. One is that many (possibly most) of the LLM investments made are actually "circular financing": swapping shares between companies before the ink's dry. ("My parents don't give each other Chrismas presents any more .... they just swap fivers.") One of the initial offenders, one Sam Altman, should be an expert in this financial levitation trick, as his previous (*ahem*) scheme was cryptocurrencies.*

Everybody is now looking nervously at everybody else before cashing in; nobody wants to be first, everybody wants to be second, and whoever's third is wiped out. With luck, most of the alleged monies will evaporate like so much cryptocurrency speculation, and the hedge funds paying my pension won't be hurt too much. But ....

The other way of looking at this was neatly encapsulated by Max in the zeroth episode of Dark Angel (quote approximate):

They used to say one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. It was sort of a joke, until the June morning those terrorist bozos whacked us with an electromagnetic pulse from 80 miles up. [ ... ] Turns out all that money was just a bunch of ones and zeros in a computer someplace, and after the pulse turned all those ones and zeros into plain old zeros, America became just another broke ex-superpower looking for a handout and wondering why.

* Guess where the first batch of GPUs for LLMs came from?