Opera browser was not profitable for like 15 years and still became rather profitable eventually to make an attractive target to purchase by external investors. And even if not bough it would still made nice profit eventually for the original investors.
You can't burn money in AI for 15 years on the off chance that it’ll pay off.
No, but you can let others burn money for 15 years and then come in and profit off their work while they go under.
I dunno, Nvidia worked on machine learning for 11+ years and it worked out great for them: https://research.nvidia.com/research-area/machine-learning-a...
Sure, but they were making tons of money elsewhere. OpenAI has no source of revenue anywhere big enough to cover its expenses, it's just burning investor cash at the moment.