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Comment by joelthelion | Hacker News Reader

7 trillion is absurd. The recent advancements in AI are real, but not on the order of 7T.

I remember the story about Larry and Sergei pitching their new search engine to investors: "Will make 10B annually in maximum 10 years". Nowadays 10B is the paper clips fund at Alphabet.

You forget the money supply has been drastically inflated due to COVID, et al

I think the 7T number is his concept of what he can probably get a bunch of oil sheiks to give him.

The GDP of UAE is 500B, 1.1T in Saudi, and 230B in Qatar. It'd take them decades to provide that kind of money.

All the sovereign wealth funds of the entire Arab Gulf hold less than $3 trillion, saved over decades. And mostly illiquid assets where you can get a 20-30% haircut if you liquidate quickly. Even if they wanted to, they can't even give him $100b/yr for 10 years (i.e., $1 trillion). It's just not feasible or possible. They don't have it anywhere.

Exactly. Even the US would have to dip into their savings to show that kind of money within a few years.

It'd probably take decades to build that many fabs anyways.

they will be. Looking at the rate of progress (just tried o1mini), its inevitable.

Even if we accept that premise, why should OpenAI be the ones to manage a $7T investment in hardware and datacenter development over, y'know, hardware and datacenter companies like Nvidia and Amazon? OpenAI has zero experience in those fields.

One of these parties cares more about where the money comes from than the other.

If it was, companies like Microsoft and Apple would have acquired them a long time ago. The fact they decided to have a partnership means they have reason to believe the hype isn't real beyond what we already know today and they don't want to have to explain it to shareholders in the near future.

They haven't acquired because Open AI is not for sale.

There's no such thing. Every company is up for sale, if you have the money.

Rare exceptions are old companies where the founder is still around and rejects deal after deal on pride. OpenAI is nothing like that, as the profit/non-profit drama exemplifies.

Doesn't Microsoft have a decent amount of ownership in some aspect of OpenAI's labyrinthine structure?

Take Anthropic for a more legible example: Amazon and Google both gladly bought large stakes in it.

Why buy stakes and not the whole thing to block your competitors from making deals with them? This is big corp 101 and has happened countless times. It's even more likely if OpenAI is to be a $7T company in the future. Such an acquisition would be approved in a second... if the hype was real.

> Why buy stakes and not the whole thing

To give less reasons for people and governments to accuse them of monopolistic behaviour. Maybe. Wild speculations from my end.

I once read that on the 80s it was believed that female runners would soon outpace male runners because the trend line for them was moving up so fast. This turned out not to be the case because the curve wasn't exponential but "S" shaped - the female runners eventually plateaued. It's easy to assume that exponential growth will continue indefinitely but it's rarely the case that this is true.

Agreed, but when will the exponential bend over. Moore's law went on for a long time, industrial revolution, population growth. Very hard to know in advance.

Wow, I didn't expect this to be true (that anyone believed that) BUT

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/07/science/2-experts-say-wom...

But it was just two people and they were criticized by peers for being space cadets at the time. There are always some people ready to make a fool of themselves for recognition, perhaps.

>the rate of progress

Let's talk about that. GPT-3.5 (specifically text-davinci-003) was a massive leap over everything that came before it. GPT-4 was a massive leap over GPT-3.5. Everything since (GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4o, GPT o1) feels like steady incremental improvement (putting aside multimodal capabilities) rather than massive leaps. I'm far from convinced that the rate of progress made with foundation models in 2022-2023 has continued in 2024 let alone from extrapolating that it will continue for the next several years.

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