Whether investors will see returns soon enough to service their debt loads is entirely another matter. I do agree the likely course of action is we get a crash of sorts, since the only way their investments pan out is if labour is replaced entirely which of course sounds unlikely in near term.

My point is the cat is out of the bag. It doesn't take massive investments to achieve iterative improvements on SOTA. As long as the technology does not plateau, smaller labs have shown it's possible to advance the frontiers independent of large companies/investments. And as these frontiers advance, more and more of economical knowledge work will be subsumed by AI. I don't see a way out of this, which is why I am a strong proponent of wealth distribution eg UBI.

> You think OAI, Amazon etc can freely put large amounts of money into this for 5-10 years?

Won't matter. The Chinese models will be running on potatoes by then and be better than ever.

Whatever you want to say about other companies, Amazon (and Meta) is quite willing to spend many years pouring billions into technology they think will pay off later.

Such are reductive and superficial way of thinking on how investments works. Makes me confident you dont really are able to make a good prediction