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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

It is clear to me that Sam has never set foot inside of a semiconductor manufacturing facility. Or, if he did he definitely wasn't paying attention to what was going on around him. I don't know how you could witness these things and then make glib statements about building 36 of them.

It will likely take well over a decade to recoup investment on any new chip fab at this point. Chasing ~4 customers on one narrow use case is nonsensical from the perspective of anyone running these companies.

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It is reasonable from his point of view - you guys sink the capital, I will have more compute. And if it doesn't work out and orders stop coming in then well that's not my problem, is it?

> It is reasonable from his point of view

If he wants to actually accomplish his objectives, he needs to get inside the minds of the executives that run these companies. Empathize with their concerns and then develop a strategy for walking them towards a path to build even one additional factory.

Throwing out a cartoonish figure and then hoping to be taken seriously is not something I'd expect from the CEO of something so adjacent.

I think OAI and especially sama as its CEO are crossing the point of being significant in their own right, and as old talent moves out of OAI we may start to hear increasingly crazy stuff coming from them. They're just becoming brands to put over the machinations of some VCs, hyperscalers and big techs.

You say that, but to me the Americans have a stereotype of making outrageous demands and then getting big wins because sometimes people say yes. And if he doesn't ask for what he wants he certainly won't get it.

Empathy is a good practice when managing others and have control over what they do, but in business negotiations it is often productive to just make your wants and budget clear.

It sounds reasonable for him because he's a podcasting bro, not a serious engineer or executive

It's entertaining when one sees it as sama trying to save OpenAI from massive costs by persuading governments to invest an order more magnitude into compute to artificially distort the actual costs of compute to make OpenAI's costs make sense.

In his recent "Intelligence Age" post, Altman says superintelligence may be only a few thousand days out. This might, of course, be wrong, but skyrocketing demand for chips is a straightforward consequence of taking it seriously.

> may be only a few thousand days out

This is actually quite clever phrasing. "A few thousand days" is about ten years, assuming normal usage of 'few' (ie usually a number between 3 and 6 inclusive).

Now, if you, as a tech company, say "X is ten years away", anyone who has been around for a while will entirely disregard your claim, because forward-looking statements in that range by tech companies are _always_ wrong; it's pretty much a cliche. But phrasing as a few thousand days may get past some peoples' defences.

"Tech CEO declares major breakthrough is within reach, less than a handful of a billion seconds..."

Only if you think scaling is the solution to AGI, which it almost certainly is not

Demand for compute will skyrocket given AGI even if AGI turns out to be relatively compute-efficient. The ability to translate compute directly into humanlike intelligence simply makes compute much more valuable.

Input and output, given that they must connect with the physical world, seems to me to be the likely limiting resource, unless you think isolated virtual worlds will have value on to themselves

An AGI can presumably control a robot at least as well as a human operator can. The hardware side of robotics is already good enough that we could leverage this to rapidly increase industrial output. Including, of course, producing more AGI-controlled robots. So it may well be the case that robot production, rather than chip production, becomes the bottleneck on output growth, but such growth will still be extremely fast and will still drive demand for far more computing capacity than we're producing today.

And I suppose you are assuming that the robots will mine and refine the metal ore themselves, and then also dig the foundations for the factories that house their manufacturing?

Since AGI isn't here yet, the eventual implementation that breaks through might be based on different technology; for example, if it turns out to need quantum computing, investing lots of money to build out current fabs might turn out useless.

The mistake isn't thinking 'scaling is the solution to AGI'.

And the mistake isn't thinking more generally about 'the solution to AGI'.

The mistake is thinking about 'AGI'.

There will never be an artificial general intelligence. There will never artificial intelligence, full stop.

It's a fun concept in science fiction (and earlier parallel concepts in fantasy literature and folk tales). It's not and will never be reality. If you think it can be then either you are suffering from 'science fiction brain' or you are a fraud (Sam Altman) or you are both (possibly Sam Altman again).

Can anyone provide a time where Sam did not come off as a slimy imposter instead of the tech visionary he would like us all to believe? Literally everything I have read on him dating back years makes him seem like a clueless buffoon who is only in it for the money. Being silver tongued, connected and cunning can make you a lot more money a lot easier than being competent and honest.

Facilities aside, I hear talent is a massive bottleneck. Especially in the US.

Skilled labor is the ultimate constraint.

It's really hard to keep good employees working at these places for a long duration. Innovation is something your customers do. Your job is to make it as boring as fucking possible.

I could only stand it for 3 years before I had to quit (Samsung). I know others who still enjoy the experience though.

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