To clarify why the S1s are so important here. There are a ton of laws that prevent companies that have their shares bought and sold on public stock markets from outright lying about the state of their business to the public. This is to ensure that companies can’t just lie to push up share prices.

Since the most important model providers are currently private, they have not been bound by these laws and have basically been allowed to say what ever they want. With them going public, and the release of the S1s, they need to publicly display accurate financials, not just vague and un verifiable numbers.

The question of “is this just a fad or is this a revolutionary technology that will reshape the economy” is easily answered if we have accurate accounting of the costs to run these business.

This stuff has been there. Just not much reporting or investigation has been done on it, instead a lot of news outlets focused on interviews with the heads of these companies and thoughtlessly reiterated press releases. Those who have criticized it have mainly just done so in ways that play in to the narrative convenient for the industry “but what if it’s TOO good?”.

The failure of tech journalism on this topic has been frankly catastrophic.