edit: sorry about that, I thought I couldn't reply for a bit. What he means when he says "nobody gives a hoot about profits" is that "They only care about...pe

edit: sorry about that, I thought I couldn't reply for a bit. What he means when he says "nobody gives a hoot about profits" is that "They only care about...personal success", in a system where stock price is seen as a measure of corporate health and success but itself can be driven by things other than good corporate health. One can achieve personal success by guiding the company effectively and making it healthy, but that's not the only way. Another way is by hopping on the AI train, because that's what's hype right now. That will communicate to investors that you're well-positioned to take advantage of the latest and greatest thing, regardless of whether you actually are. To turn it into a metaphor because I just had my second espresso of the day and that's what I feel like doing, imagine a chef you pay on a per-meal basis, but you have to pay him during the cooking process. For argument's sake lets say the meal takes 6 months to deliver, and the chef himself has to eat food and sleep indoors in the meantime. You only want to pay for a quality meal, and the final judgment in quality can't take place until the meal is fully complete and served. So you look for lead indicators, and you happen upon two: smell, and whether the chef is using the latest and greatest techniques. These two things are pretty strongly correlated with good, high quality meals and for the most part people who pay for good smells and good techniques end up getting good meals. But I, as the chef, can exploit this gap between what you want and what you look for. Imagine castoreum is the latest and greatest technique, beaver anal gland extract. I can deliver a meal that smells great, uses castoreum and tastes amazing, or I can spend your money for six months then deliver boiled beaver buttholes in scented paraffin wax. The meal is a product, I'm the CEO, and the boiled beaver buttholes is AI. I can exploit the market's expectation that this tech will make everything better by shoehorning it in places it won't fit or half-assedly delivering a product whose primary source of anticipated value is just the fact that it uses AI, and by the time people realize that it hasn't actually delivered the promised product I've collected salary for 6 months and now I get to write myself a golden parachute check on the way out the door. Thus, the company's profits are completely divorced from my own profits as CEO, I hit all the KPIs, did exactly what investors asked me to do, the stock price went through the roof and we've created nothing at all of intrinsic or exchange value.