So if a few AI companies survive but most go bankrupt in the next 5 years, which is almost certainly what will happen, it will not have been a bubble?

More recently the ride sharing Bubble.

For years the consensus on Hacker News was that the ride share companies were a bubble and it was all going to collapse. Nobody would pay profitable rates once the early discounted rides ended, everyone said.

Then the rideshare companies became sustainable and they’re accepted as a normal part of life.

It was part of the bubble. Amazon's stock lost over 90% of it's value. The company survived, but many other companies did not. A bubble does not mean a company fails just that valuations are too high and that there will be a massive correction over a short period of time. Some companies fail, others survive.

You mean the dot com bubble, which was in fact a major bubble that caused a lot of huge financial issues in the country? You'd think someone on a tech forum would have heard of it, but I suppose some of us would rather make asinine clapback comments than think about what we're saying.

Are you arguing that the government shouldn't be prepared?

Companies themselves can’t be economic bubbles. Amazon survived the economic bubble it was in, but many others didn’t.

> the .com days...

Oh, you mean the period that is colloquially referred to as "the .com bubble?

And how many of their peers survived?

The vast majority of companies failed almost immediately.

It was a bubble.

Bubbles don't mean the tech won't one day be great and materialize into something great.

They mean there is a mismatch in valuations/equity/debt to revenue today, putting far too much emphasis far too quickly on potential revenue some time tomorrow.