The loss ratio revealed in the quarterly figures, with spending above revenue, has a characteristic distinguishing it from other phases of rapid expansion in technology.
In earlier cycles, the dominant cost was customer acquisition: you spent on advertising and discounts to grow, and that expense could be reduced by decision once growth reached the desired point.
Here the dominant cost is serving. Every response consumes paid compute, and the total rises with use, which means growing the user base increases losses until unit cost falls.
And unit cost doesn't fall by company decision. It depends on power prices, memory availability and fabrication capacity, three variables that were all tight in the same period.
That's why the sector's announcements migrated from capacity to efficiency, with models consuming fewer tokens, cost-based routing and cheap triage before the expensive model. It isn't refinement: it's the available lever.