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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

> OpenAI considered building everything in-house and raising capital for an expensive plan to build a network of factories known as "foundries" for chip manufacturing. The company has dropped the ambitious foundry plans for now due to the costs and time needed to build a network

That framing massively undersells how insane Sams ambitions were there, he was floating the idea of somehow raising seven trillion dollars to build thirty six fabs dedicated to making AI silicon. The TSMC execs reported more or less laughed in his face when he brought it up it them.

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Sam explicitly commented on this claim. He said we’ll _collectively_, _eventually_ need to spend 7 trillion dollars on compute to meet demand. Not OpenAI raising 7 trillion to build all the capacity itself.

This is true and I'm sad to see the hacker news crowd blindly repeating falsehoods.

After getting laughed at he walked back his initial proposals?

Can you cite a source for this? When was this said? Was this something said before these meetings or a walk back after they laughed him out of the room.

there's a recent a clip of Masa at a bloomberg conference quoting 9T on a similar idea, i think he said he thought it was actually a good buy

And to think Satya Nadella looked at this guy and his plan and said "this is the kind of stable genius we need running OpenAI."

Or he’s the perfect guy to give MS freedom to dig their claws in.

Hmmm, perhaps there's a sweet spot where someone is nuts enough that you think you can take over the stuff for cheap when they crash and burn, but not so nuts that there's nothing left to pick up.

As anyone with 2 brain cells should have.

You don't just acquire $7T.

The ENTIRE US domestic Net Investment isn't even $1T: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W790RC1Q027SBEA

Gross Fixed Capital Formation (Net Investment + Deprecation) isn't much more: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NFIRSAXDCUSQ

Google, Apple, and Microsoft together don't even spend $100B on CapEx per year. And they're worth almost $10T put together.

Asking for $7T when you're a $100B company is so ridiculous it's beyond belief.

He would have to have AGI proof to ask for this unprecedented kind of investing money.

And even them it would have to be split during a decade or two. And even then.

What's the military budget of USA?

It doesn't matter what the military budget is.

Most of it is spent on personnel and operation.

You'd want to know only what the procurement is - which is ~$146B: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

And most of that is part of Gross Fixed Capital Formation already...

It’s funny how that bit only comes up when HN wants to use it to make a point.

What is dark budget look like these days.

Dark budget? They can't even supply Ukraine with enough ammo and weapons to defend themselves and the DoD is already squealing that they are running out of everything. Dark budget..hahahaha...good one....

How is that relevant?

It seems totally possible that enough interest groups don’t want Ukraine to actually win, so they block anything more than the minimum viable amount. So it’s not much of a barometer at all for anything…

Yes, but this theory requires more and more epicycles.

There's probably some small-ish 'dark budget'. But think about it: the official budget is in the order of single digit percentage points of US GDP. That represents and enormous amount of resources. Any appreciable fraction of that in a 'dark budget' would also leave traces all over the place.

Well of course?

The world is vastly more complex than say the world of 1945, so almost certainly there are now likely several dozens to several hundreds of ‘epicycles’ that are in fact true and necessary for full understanding.

Edit: Now the pentagon doesn’t contain the entire complexity of mankind within it… but it’s probably not that far off.

I'm not actually sure that the world is more complex today. Lots of things are a lot easier and simpler, in fact.

Hindsight bias. States, like us human beings, are not nor ever have been completely in control of themselves and exist out of different "parts" making the whole. Also, when expected outcomes don't align with perceived results, it's usually best but not very human to doubt yourself. You never have all the information you need for making the best decision or opinion. "Dark Budgets" vested in firms like Dwave via firms like inQtel, steer research about quantum computing. Whoever has Shor/Grovers going first, has a advantage equitable to winning the AGI race... That too can win wars. Nothing is simple and perceived simpleness is on the clock, for everyone.

I'm not quite sure what you are on about.

What bearing does what you mention have on the question on whether things got more or less complicated?

> Also, when expected outcomes don't align with perceived results, it's usually best but not very human to doubt yourself.

Eg this seems like something that would apply equally well at any time?

> Whoever has Shor/Grovers going first, has a advantage equitable to winning the AGI race... That too can win wars.

We have plenty of quantum resistant options, and people are already switching over.

And the story of the Enigma and its encryption shows that cryptographic and its breakage was already important back in the day.

> Nothing is simple and perceived simpleness is on the clock, for everyone.

How is this different now than before, though?

It's not inherently different, how we deal with it is. Drawing conclusions from linear seemingly causal events is nuts considering that most start calculating from the future desired outcome to the present.Someone may do something stupid on purpose in order to gain later. Adversaries may do the same, the math can quickly spiral beyond human/individual comprehension. For a fact at least for a part of whoever may be involved in some way or another. Complexity is not random, and we can choose our initial conditions to our liking, causing $outcome. We now have entire DC's crunching numbers, not just a bunch of nerds at Bletchley Park. Their ability to calculate and manipulate odds for something to happen far exceeds ours, that's different now. Yet we read snippets from people speculating, drawing conclusions based on, what exactly ?

You are way more optimistic than me about anyone actually being in charge, or humanity's ability to predict things.

Perhaps...

The rational (but cynical) policy for the DoD/NATO is to provide just enough support to Ukraine to keep the war equal and let the Russians bleed themselves until all support for continued war is gone in their population.

In monteary terms, this is barely more expensive than maintainig enough of a weapons stockpile during peacetime to counter Russia. And at the end of the conflict, anti-war sentiment within Russia might reach Germany post WW2 levels.

By comparison, more overt support to Ukraine, enough for Ukraine to at least humiliate Russia and throw them all the way out of the country, would only serve to help spread the anti-West hate within Russia, and generate support for even more ambitious rearmament in the years that would follow.

Pretty much like Germany after WW1.

Not even that. You might want it to win, not care about the outcome or not think that it will win without putting the US through a long depression, in all those cases it makes US officials reluctant to put themselves in such vulnerable position especially given the new rising world powers

There's no dark budget, it's all there, the programs are just usually listed as "Classified" or "Special Activities" like NGA funding was in the late 90s.

> This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance, cleanup, and production, which are in the Atomic Energy Defense Activities section,[90] Veterans Affairs, the Treasury Department's payments in pensions to military retirees and widows and their families, interest on debt incurred in past wars, or State Department financing of foreign arms sales and militarily-related development assistance. Neither does it include defense spending that is domestic rather than international in nature, such as the Department of Homeland Security, counter-terrorism spending by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and intelligence-gathering spending by NSA, although these programs contain certain weapons, military and security components.

> Accounting for non DoD military-related expenditure gives a total budget in excess of $1.4 trillion.[91]

The Pentagon frequently "loses" $1T here and there and then says, "oopsie!" with no actual consequences. That looks like a dark budget to me once you factor out typical government waste and overredundancy.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/pentagon-audit-2666415734/

>What's the military budget of USA?

Somewhere between $900B and $1T this year

Yeah, I mean, what else would you do with those chips? Run LLMs faster? Sorry but the killer app is still not there, the majority of people do not care and have no use for them.

Don't you dare question the usefulness of gen ai on the hacker news. Many folks haven't caught up with reality just yet.

It's not quite that bad, at least not in comments.

I wonder what proportion of students use them for homework etc. The coming generations of people will care less about writing style.

It's the new calculator.

I don't have papers but I think calculators, which are amazing and necessary, impact people's mental calculation capabilities. I know I used to he better at multiplication when i didn't have calculators all around me.

IMO, AI will have similar impact. Great advance overall but will nerf some areas of our mental capacity.

Like astronauts losing muscle mass faster in zero gravity.

AI impact on our brain, just like the calculator, might be a reasonable price to pay for the advancement it gives.

> I know I used to he better at multiplication when i didn't have calculators all around me.

My manual calculation skills were at their peak in seventh grade in school, when we were allowed to use a calculator for the first time (and thus the exercises got harder) but simultaneously I usually forgot to bring mine.

But yeah, I don't think I could think better in general, when I did arithmetic better.

There are a significant number of uses, it's just most of them involve generating slop for the purposes of fraud or feigning work.

I thought it was really damning how Apple's recent ads involved a celebrity using it to respond to their agent about a script proposal they didn't actually read.

I just paid for some graphic design work. What I got back looked pretty, but was very clearly derivative of generative AI. I feel defrauded...

You can always train more and faster, and run more experiments.

He had AGI. He still has it. You can have it too, for a $20/month subscription from OpenAI or Anthropic.

It just turns out that AGI (artificial general intelligence, which ChatGPT objectively is), is not a singularity nor even a tipping point towards causing one.

How is ChatGPT „objectively“ AGI? You don’t think there are common intellectual tasks humans are better at than ChatGPT? Can ChatGPT do math better than a human without specific prompting to use a calculator (function calls)?

I never understood AGI to mean "better than humans". A lot of people assumed it would easily be made to be, by simply throwing more silicon at it until it was, but being smarter than humans isn't what makes it "AGI".

Put this another way, suppose we create a computer program that is only as smart as a bottom 10% human (I'm not saying they have.) You can't reasonably say that is smarter than humans generally. But are you comfortable saying that bottom 10% humans lack any general intelligence at all? General intelligence doesn't mean extreme intelligence, and so Artificial General Intelligence doesn't either. You might say that the term is more than the sum of the parts, which is fair, but I still dispute that superhuman abilities was ever part of the definition of AGI. It was just a (thusfar) failed prediction about AGI.

My definition and the one I found on Wikipedia is „AGI […] matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks.“. Being better that the bottom 10% of humans on some tasks doesn’t really qualify to me.

ASI (artificial super intelligence) is distinct from AGI. Not distinguishing between those two just confuses things.

By that token, you could find non-human animals that are smarter than some percentage of humanity in a few tasks. Are those animals AGI?

Now you could find a software that is smarter than some percentage of humanity in a few tasks. Is that software AGI? Is AlphaGo AGI? Is the Google Deep mind AI gamer AGI?

AGI means what it says on the tin: Artificial General Intelligence. As opposed to narrow AI, which most pre-transformer AI research was, that can only do specific categories of tasks. ChatGPT is a general-purpose NLP interface to a model which is able to be solve any category of problem that can be expressed through human language, which as far as we know is full generality.

What you are getting confused about is that there is a segment of people that have purposefully confused / conflated ASI (artificial SUPER intelligence) with AGI, due to their own beliefs about the hard-takeoff potential of AGI. This notably includes the founders of OpenAI and Anthropic, and early backers of OpenAI prior to the release of ChatGPT. Through their success they've set the narrative about AGI, but they are doing so by co-opting and redefining a term that has a quarter century of history behind it.

The core mistake started with Bostrom, although to his credit he is very careful to distinguish ASI from AGI. But he argued that once you had AGI (the ability to apply intelligence to solving any problem) you would rapidly get ASI through a process of rapid iterative design. Yudkowsky took those ideas a step further in his FOOM debate with Robin Hanson in 2008, in which he argued that the AGI -> ASI transition would be short, measured in months, weeks, days, or even mere hours. In 2022, six months prior to the release of ChatGPT, Yudkowsky has a public meltdown in which he asserted there is no time left and we're all going to die, after having been privately shown an early version of ChatGPT.

It's almost two years since the release of ChatGPT, which is absolutely AGI by the definition of the people who coined the term and have run the AGI Conference series for ~25 years, or by the definition of Bostrom or Yudkowsky for that matter. ChatGP is general intelligence, and it is artificial. Two years of AGI, yet we are still here and there is no ASI in sight. Yudkowsky was wrong.

Yet OpenAI, which was founded by a bunch of Yudkowsky acolytes, is still out there saying that "AGI" will bring about the singularity, because that was the core assumption underlying their founding and the reason for the investments they've received. They can get away with this without changing their message because they've subtly redefined "AGI" to mean ASI, and are hoping you don't notice the slight of hand.

> artificial general intelligence, which ChatGPT objectively is

I'm sorry, but that's absolutely delusional.

And if it was a 30% stake in OpenAI for that $7 trillion (kind of a standard VC round percentage) that would put OpenAI's valuation at about the same of all of the 7000-ish NASDAQ companies (including almost all public tech companies) combined.

There was probably a point of maximum hype ~12 months ago, or right after the launch of GPT-4 where the belief of imminent singularity was running high.

But, singularity is still imminent. Right? Where on the spectrum of completely useless/no AI to singularity are we at?

It’s gonna require N more hype cycles (bearing in mind that usefulness is the expected endpoint of the hype cycle)

> (bearing in mind that usefulness is the expected endpoint of the hype cycle)

I think for the people doing it, the expected endpoint is more about raising the price of shares they hold until they've been sold.

Hype cycles ride on real progress that’s first blown out of proportion, then under-appreciated. LLMs are still magic AF. We are just so tired of hearing about them and how they’re going to change everything.

Considering that what is currently passed as AI is really just statical probability of string words together that is completely unable to apply logic or reason… we ain't even close.

I don't know if we ever will get a singularity, but if we do the last comment before we're obliterated will be something along these lines.

I like the three comments above this one all seem to massively disagree or at least give off argument energy, but they all seem totally correct and don't directly contradict each other.

And atheists will speak similarly of the rapture before it happens. Repent!

When they said repent, repent

I wonder what they meant

statisticsl probability in which distribution? stringing words is not at all how gpt works.

I'd recommend educating yourself on the last few years of neural network development before spreading misinformation.

LLMs have been shown to be capable of embedding logic and reasoning. There is nothing preventing a sequence generator from learning stochastic reasoning skills. Modern LLMs don't even just output language tokens. The latent information stored in the hidden layers is far more abstract than just language.

did you not read https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229

"We hypothesize that this decline is due to the fact that current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data."

They've presented a hypothesis warranting further study.

Here is an article where a model's learned ability to carry out modular addition is recovered. https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05217

As you can see, the jury's still out.

Didn't Godel demonstrate that language can only approximate reality?

LLMs are a special type of transformer model, however several recent models have been multimodal, allowing for a variety of input and output type. So the question is if a neural network can approximate reality, not LLMs.

Though really, all embedded models of reality are approximate by nature, and based on stochastic empirical data. The real tradeoff with probability-based neural networks is whether a rigid algorithmic approach or a more flexible, but stochastic, approach solves the problem at hand.

The singularity ain't real, buddy.

What is singularity anyway? I thought it was just some hypothetical point in time where making accurate predictions about the future becomes infeasible.

The singularity is a sci-fi end-of-days story. It speculates that at some point we'll invent an AI that's about as smart as a human, and smart enough to design a better version of itself.

Then a week later it'll come up with a version of itself that's twice as smart. A week later that version will come up with a version that's twice as smart again, making it 4x as smart as a human. A week after that, it'll come up with a version that's twice as smart again, 8x as smart as a human. And so on. A year later it'll be a trillion times smarter than a human.

The AI will then either solve all our problems, invent fusion power and faster-than-light travel, and usher in a Star Trek style post-scarcity world of infinite resources and luxury, or it'll take over and create a Terminator style oppressive dystopia where the few surviving humans survive on rats we roast over a barrel in our underground bunker.

At geological or biological timescales, that’s what the emergence of language did. AI can all be viewed as part of the accelerating returns of language…

You mean slowing it down, by producing large amounts of meaningless text?

> At geological or biological timescales, that’s what the emergence of language did

Elaborate on this idea please. Are you saying that human languages are self-replicating abstract entities?

There's a dystopian definition in the other comment but usually, when people say they're looking forwards to the singularity, they're referring to a version of the future where robots and computers are able to do most of not all jobs, so humans no longer have to work, and can spend all their time doing whatever, usually phrased as painting, singing, dancing, and the other leisure-type activities. Bettering themselves and helping humanity. The utopian, post-scarcity Federation from Star Trek, if you've seen it.

But without offering an objective model for how that could happen, it’s just wish-fulfillment fantasy.

The Singularity is the rapture of the nerds, and is about as likely to happen as the second coming of Jesus.

That was not a comment on the plausibility of it. Offering up a definition is still useful so people actually have conversation instead of just talking past each other.

There are many competing definitions which is why these comment threads devolve.

The technological singularity was first described by John von Neumann. Are you suggesting you understand something about technology that one of the most intelligent technologists to ever walk the earth didn't?

Does it matter how smart someone is when they make things up?

We see this in AI talk all the time "Dude is really good at coding and math, he's smart. We should totally listen to him when he makes things up like a 12 year old who just watched Terminator."

Great question, and what you're referring to is an appeal to authority, which is a common logical fallacy. It absolutely warrants further examination.

In the case of von Neumann, I mention him because he is the one who introduced the concept to the public. It is something he spent a great deal of time thinking about. He spent his life working around technology and had some incredible insights. Many consider him the smartest person to ever live, though in my opinion there are plenty contenders. He made key contributions to the development of computers, nuclear tech, quantum mechanics, mathematics and more. [0]

So I believe all of this truly does lead credence to the idea, at least enough to warrant sufficient research before dismissal. It's not his authority I appeal to, it's his experience. He didn't obsess over this idea for no reason, and his well-documented achievements aren't comparable to random flash-in-the-pan tech executives.

[0] https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-von-Neumann

It’s still an appeal to authority, not an analysis of the idea itself.

My question to you was whether you know something about technology that von Neumann, the guy behind the idea, misunderstood, such that you would so flippantly dismiss it.

The ball is in your court to prove why the singularity is not real, because many experienced, decorated technologists disagree and have already laid out their arguments. If you can't prove that, then there's no argument for us to have in the first place.

This is a epistemological problem, you think Neumann's expertise on 1950s technology gives him insight into the technology of, let's say the 2040s. You muddle the issue by calling him an expert on "technology" rather than an expert on "technology as of when he died in the 1950s".

If we don't grant that expertise on 1950s technology gives insight into 2040s technology, then there's little reason to consider his writing as something other than a cool story.

> You muddle the issue by calling him an expert on "technology" rather than an expert on "technology as of when he died in the 1950s".

That's not my intention. It's more that, he simply looked at the historical progress of technology, recognized an acceleration curve, and pondered about the end game.

My argument is that it warrants consideration and not shallow dismissal. Plenty of opponents have criticized the concept, and some decent arguments revolve around rising complexity slowing down technological advancement. That is possible. But we can't just dismiss this concept as some fleeting story made up "like a 12 year old who just watched Terminator".

Beyond the (absolutely correct) sibling comment about von Neumann's dated expertise, you are experiencing selectivity bias. Technologists who believe in the Singularity (and it really is belief, not a rigorous technical argument), are very vocal about it. Those that don't have faith, don't bother speaking about it.

There are a lot of people out there who believe in technological progressivism and continued advancement of socially beneficial technologies. They just don't speak about a "singularity" beyond which predictive power is not possible, because the idea isn't worth spending time on as it isn't even self-consistent.

It's not our job to show why the Singularity won't happen. It's the nutjobs who believe in the Singularity who have the responsibility of showing why. In the 70 years in which people have been bitten by this idea, nobody has. I'll wait.

> It's not our job to show why the Singularity won't happen

No, but shallow dismissal of a subject that many intelligent technologists have spent their life considering just comes off as arrogant.

Predicting technological timelines is a largely pointless exercise, but I wouldn't be hard pressed to imagine a future N decades or centuries from now in which, assuming we do not destroy ourselves, human affairs become overshadowed by machine intelligence or technological complexity, and an increasingly complex technosocial system becomes increasingly difficult to predict until some limit of understanding is crossed.

We'll get the singularity within 2 years of perfecting self-driving cars.

Only a few thousand days away. /s

The singularity is always just around the corner. It's like a whale in a casino. The big reward is always just around the corner. You need to drop a few more coins and soon you will be rich

Does anyone have a source for this “$7T” number?

I read it on the internet myself with “sources saying” but I think it’s BS.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/business/openai-plan-elec...

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-execs-allege...

So somebody in another country with another language and another currency allegedly said… and came across several people and translations (did they translate currency?) before landing at a journalists inbox. Might as well as have heard about it on Twitter.

Have a look at the TSMC executives: https://www.tsmc.com/english/aboutTSMC/executives

There’s a 68% chance that Altman met with someone who got their degree in the US (if only one executive attended, otherwise chances are higher).

And the others probably also have little difficulty communicating in English or calculating the cost of 36 fabs in any currency, since that’s their business.

I very much doubt the CEO of TSMC spoke to the NYT about a private meeting they had with a potential customer. Give me a break!

Much more likely they talked about 3-6 fabs, some other person laughed about 36 fabs for podcast guy, someone else overheard that and posted on Weibo. That made it to NYT eventually.

I remember reading these tweets back then https://x.com/jimkxa/status/1758683405875871841 not a direct source but maybe of interest?

Sound like the beginning of Universal Paperclips

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips

See also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benderama

Time for this year’s play through!

The first time I came across this link I got sucked in for six or seven hours and pretty much dropped a ball on an entire workday as a result. Evil, evil game.

You should have a look at Factorio, if you want to lose a month or two.

My brother told me the same and I believe it, so I have been keeping my distance from that game. :D

Also Dyson Sphere Program for a slightly prettier version.

Or Satisfactory for strictly worse trains but massively improved graphics.

Less eyeball melting as well.

ESPECIALLY with the new DLC that was released last week!

>As anyone with 2 brain cells should have.

>You don't just acquire $7T.

Perhaps the goal was only 1-2 Trillion but you should start high. I would have asked for 10 Trillion.....

2T is still ridiculous.

My guess is that since they are so sure of AGI being achievable soon, that they think they can squeeze out any amount of money they want out of investors.

After all, AGI would be worth way more thab 7T right?

Asking for more than you want only works if your ask is too large but still somewhere in the realm of feasibility so the other party doesn't write you off as a crazy person and end the conversation right there.

If you're applying for a job as a fry chef at a burger joint, asking for $25/hr is a good idea. Asking for $1000/hr will convince the shop owner that you are a crazy person who isn't serious about wanting the job.

I assume that the $7T ask was to try to spend a lot of time in the news cycle when he wanted to be there. Obviously it was an impossible ask.

Indeed. A smart PR person. Same with him appearing in the Oprah documentary about AI. He's a very calculating person.

But maybe it was a successful marketing strategy to find investors? It was a moment in time to give people FOMO and nudge them into getting on the OpenAI train. Now it is more obvious that other models can catch up. Grok became competitive with top models within a month for example.

The fact it was reported and Altman didn’t deny it shows how ludicrous and wild his thinking is

It might be a $100B company on paper but that’s propped up by Microsoft investment. It’s hemoragging money still isn’t it?

Yes, they're apparently not expecting to turn a profit until 2029, with their losses peaking at $14 billion in 2026. Their recent $6.6 billion funding round would barely buy them 6 months of runway at that peak.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-projections-i...

$100B is crazy, no one would buy OpenAI for $100B.

Perhaps Microsoft, so they can push the losses to the shareholders of Microsoft instead of their own balance sheet.

Microsoft only gave them an exorbitant price because they were paying in Azure credits for GPUs. That's something like a 50% discount for Microsoft compared to giving them cash, and it also incentivizes OpenAI to continue using their stuff after the credits are burned through.

I’ve heard Microsoft customers got burned by this. GPU availability and inference workloads is prioritized for OpenAI

They would have, 1.5 years back. Now there are other players in town.

Why not? My ChatGPT to google usage is easily 10 to 1 at this point. How long will it be until everyone is basically doing the same thing as I am?

That would only be meaningful if ChatGPT made as much money as Google did per query (as is, I believe they lose money on each, so they can hardly make it up in volume).

They could throw an ad platform on it in 5 minutes if they wanted to.

LOL

It took Google 15 years to build an ad empire.

And they still have trouble filling ad slots on YouTube.

You think ChatGPT is just going to "turn on" $100B in online ad spending overnight?

That's not how it works.

Why do you think it would take so long to throw an ad system on ChatGPT?

Personally, if I could buy OpenAI stock at 100B market cap right now, I would back up the truck.

adding ads is easy, adding ads that work is not.

Google can easily monetize a search for "dentist in $city" where your intent is to spend money, OpenAI would have to monetize "sum up this email" where money is not involved at all.

If you have enough eyeballs on your pixels you can make money on ads. They are just deliberately choosing not to do it (Altman has made statements to this effect).

> If you have enough eyeballs on your pixels you can make money on ads.

sure, but Google makes _way_ more money than X or Reddit or Pornhub, not all eye gazes are the same.

Which would slow down user uptake, I imagine.

IMO this is because Google is kind of shit now, because of ChatGPT and LLM spam in general. It's hard to find information on Google that isn't shallow attention thievery. I mean, finding a recipe that doesn't start with "the year is 1974. I was just born" is near impossible these days.

Google seo spam predates LLM's.

Right, but it's undeniable that LLM's are a core part, if not the most important part, of modern SEO spam. Particularly because they're much harder to spot.

I don't think it's fair. There many $100B+ companies with less IP, and much less access to talent. I don't even see people lining up to work for Apple or dreaming to work for Google anymore.

Altman did deny it.

https://www.fierceelectronics.com/electronics/openai-ceo-alt...

It doesn't seem like a denial to me, more of a deflection. From that article:

> He added the number is not known, adding that the $7 trillion came from a report with an anonymous source. “You can always find some anonymous source to say something, I guess,” he added.

Yesthat’s a deflection not a denial

Perhaps, but he did say "I never said like we're raising $7 trillion"

SOTA AI companies are modern airlines. They're selling a capital intensive commodity that has little meaningful differentiation once you pass a certain threshold. Customers just want the lowest price available.

Wow fascinating comparison. Who makes all the money in the airline industry?

Lobbyists?

Oil companies? Airports? Servicing companies? Frequent flier and credit card programs tied to the airlines?

Airlines themselves are perfectly fine. It's relatively hard to break into as a disruptor, but the employees of the established players are mostly well-paid. The executives are even better-paid. The investors can earn steady, predictable, positive returns as long as the stock is reasonably priced and doesn't make assumptions about impossible levels of future growth. Airlines are not super-profitable, but with sufficient volume, you don't need high margins, and they're at least profitable as long as we don't have 9/11 or Covid happening.

I'm not personally knowledgeable about this or anything, so look into it yourself, but just picking a random really big one, United Airlines, it looks like they consistently beat the S&P 500 for most of the past 20 years, until Covid, and the past four years since then have been pretty bad.

They are profitable regardless in the face of 9/11 and COVID because we will bail them out.

What they don't seem to be able to weather is significant changes in the structure of pension obligations, and dramatic fatal crashes.

There is also an impending shift into electric short-haul flights that is going to cause some changes to the business model, with whoever can't adapt exiting those markets.

During the post-2001 crash in airline passenger demand US airlines lost more money in that one slump than all profits from all US airlines, combined, from the Wright Brothers to September 11th 2001.

That was why you had such rapid consolidation, as America West became US Airways became American, United bought Continental, and Delta bought Northwest, to remove so much competition that they could be profitable again.

Wow, do you have a source for this?

https://transtats.bts.gov/Data_Elements_Financial.aspx shows 2001-2005 net income losses were 57 billion dollars, then a brief profitability in 2006-7 but the losses of 2008 and 2009 wiped that all out again (in net income terms).

I read that thing about the integral of all profits back to the Wright Brothers back around in 2010, and I can't find a good source on aviation profitability in the 1970's right now.

Not only the capital, doing it well and doing it correctly is another huge mess, you can't just throw money at the problem and Sam's reputation is wearing thin, so the best of the best won't jump ship to join him anymore.

It's just anchoring. If you ask for 7tn, 500bn seems comparatively more reasonable. If you ask for 500bn in the first place you'll probably be lucky to get 100bn. Of course you sound like a twat in the process, but a price worth paying.

Let's have some sympathy, he probably gets advice from gpt and we know it's not that great with numbers yet.

I think asking for trillions was pretty ridiculous but I don't think its out of the real of possibility of getting a few T from nation states run by monarchs and oligarchs. They have pools of dark money nobody can plumb the depths of, and they're looking for diversify.

They wouldn't have more than the USA's army.

Sure they would. The USA's military is given a yearly budget. They're spending that. The oil monarchies have socked away trillions from their countries.

The USA's military budget is bigger

It's kind of admirable, though. If you start asking for $7T, only asking for $1T becomes quite reasonable ;-)

Only if they stop laughing long enough for them to hear your second offer

Well they did stop laughing, hence this thread.

Not really. The plans to build a foundry have been dropped. It's more a cautionary tale that at some point you will end up in an environment that's closer to reality where your bullshit is a liability. It was reported that the TSMC people called him a 'podcasting bro'. In other words, they lost all respect for anything he was saying.

That only works if the initial request isn’t so bonkers that no one can trust subsequent ones.

True. I think Sam might get a "bonkers" pass because of his track record that the rest of us might not.

He’s exactly the person I wouldn’t give a pass to, because of his track record. I wouldn’t give a penny to a cryptocurrency scammer.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

Especially not one whose business plan is “let’s invent fairytale technology then ask it how to make money”.

https://x.com/geepytee/status/1778859803735113950

If all of that sounds good to you, I know of a bridge you may be interested in purchasing.

What track record does he have?

Shoot for the stars and you get to the moon.

and fake it before you make it ...im still waiting for GPT's version of H.E.R.... many months later nowhere to be found yet no doubt that juiced their revenue.

The startup playbook lie ur ass off and make sh!t up. Musk still does it to this day with the recent demo of his Optimus robots implying they were all AI driven.

I have to say I’m really weirded out by the decision to sort of pretend they weren’t remotely controlled

why that's what many start-uppers do to win the startup game ..fake it .. lie. Would you trust your life to Elon's self driving tech which you sign away your rights to sue lol

Some with deadly consequences like Uber's attempt at self driving and what was that other recent self driving company that ran over / mangled a pedestrian?

Yes but in this case it was clearly apparent to most and to those who spoke with the robot and believed it must have felt like morons for being filmed thinking they were real. I just felt the benefits weren’t there as it was an obvious fakery.

Tbh when they had the real person on the suit I wouldn’t have approved that it would give the impression I’m ok with pretending to an extent.

I understand having a half working prototype iPhone on stage but literally pretending the robots are real just felt dishonest and a bad idea.

But hey I’m not a Vc

I would say the less morality you have and hold onto and or care about the more successful you will be at tech start-ups.

> Yes but in this case it was clearly apparent to most and to those who spoke with the robot and believed it must have felt like morons for being filmed thinking they were real.

If you spoke with the robot and believed it was AI controlled you should feel like a moron, considering the robot explicitly stated that it was remote controlled in that demo. https://x.com/zhen9436/status/1844773471240294651/

I'm not sure why you don't seem to understand my point or what seems pretty clear to me what happened that night. Here are 2 points.

1) "that" demo? I never mentioned "a" demo. That one clip, which you found, the robot answers a specific question to one user.

There were hundreds of interactions that night, and in many that I saw atleast one person clearly didn't realise they were.

2) Regardless of whether it was their fault for being morons, my point is they FELT like morons, which TO ME is not good publicity.

I like Elon and I think the demos were incredibly, I am saying it weirded me out they were trying to pretend the robots were sentient, which I am sure they are not far away from. I just think it was short sighted. But maybe I give people too much credit.

I would 100% have not told anyone to pretend shit. It wasnt even required. It just made me feel uneasy about the products.

Maybe I'm just jaded, but I think even one fab deserves a laugh. Design, sure. Fabrication? Hah.

>he was floating the idea of somehow raising seven trillion dollars

when i read that news back then, i read it as "billions" and thought "that sounds very ambitious, hardly he'll get that money". Man, i'm 3 orders of magnitude behind the current state of the art in tech, and need to start thinking in trillions (while it was only recently when a billion dollars was large money).

It’s just 1/5th of the current USA national debt of $35T, bro. Just have fed run those money printers 365/24/7.

Nah, just have their AGI hack the Fed to print those trillions. No need for pesky human politicians to get involved.

You don’t go into debt by printing money.

I truly wonder how long it would’ve taken for something like ChatGPT to exist and takeoff if Sam hadn’t had such crazy ambitions.

Along with the grandiose promotional nutty-ness of "You need to support my company because countries will fight wars over AI", whatever that FOMO scarcity is supposed to mean in practice.

Approaching Adam Neumann-levels of grandiosity.

Could it be possible that OpenAI's new autocomplete will be as transformative to the global economy as WeWork's short term office rentals?

Part of what is so nutty is that 36 fabs don't cost $7T. That would put the cost of each fab at around $200B.

Sam may be talented in other areas but HW, chips, and infrastructure is obviously not his forte and he should probably delegate discussion on this topic to someone who knows what they are talking about.

It could have been strategy instead of insanity. By starting conversations at $7T you anchor high and potentially drive a greater outcome than starting an order of magnitude lower.

Usually when doing anchoring you want to end up at a result less than what you originally asked for but crucially more than zero, and OpenAI immediately folded on building any fabs whatsoever, so I don't think it worked.

When you do something that stupid - starting at $7 trillion - you end the conversation before it really begins because you lose all credibility with the people that matter (eg TSMC and other investors).

If he had said $250 billion and six fabs, it would have been a lot to ask but people wouldn't think he was ignorant or irrational for saying it. Big tech for example has that kind of money to throw around spread out across a decade if the investment is a truly great opportunity.

Asking for $7T is - seriously - only slightly more absurd than asking for infinity dollars.

I guess he thinks his glorified markov chain will lead to ASI if scaled up sufficiently. Even if we get ASI, the likelihood that anybody will ever make any money from it is so delusional. This isn't going to be your average brainwashed peasant, crushing these capitalist pigs is probably the first thing it's gonna do.

This comment honestly feels delusional.

I guess a valid criticism is the idea that ASI would care about the ideologies of literal ants, or that it would be so alien that it doesn't even make sense to anthropomorphize it like that. But I guess the delusional part you got offended about was either the criticism of capitalism or to describe LLMs as glorified markov chains (which they technically are, look it up).

The technical term for this is “zone of possible agreement”. If your opening is outside the counterparty’s ZOPA, then they’re likely to disengage/exit.

That strategy only works if the anchor is in the realm of reality. If I'm selling a 20 year old Toyota Corolla and initially ask for $900,000 that's not going to help me get a higher price.

there are millions of corollas there’s only one openai

It's become a running theme that there are in fact a lot of OpenAIs, with how frequently their models get matched or leapfrogged by competitors.

Not really that many fabs either. They do this on that scale, they only need the AI to fill demand lol

Anchoring bias probably works with numbers outside of the realm of reality as well. But I doubt it's very useful in these cases (or even any stronger than asking for say 300B), otherwise everyone would always start a funding round by asking for a 7T investment, right.

It's also probably less-effective when the other side has their own teams of accountants making projections.

in a negotiation where you have experts with good intuition for costs and practicalities on one side of the table and a non-technical failing-upwards-megalomaniac-kid on the other side, i doubt that's a sensible strategy

> The TSMC execs reported more or less laughed in his face when he brought it up it them.

Reminds me of:

Musk flew there with Cantrell, prepared to purchase three ICBMs for $21 million. But to Musk's disappointment, the Russians now claimed that they wanted $21 million for each rocket, and then taunted the future SpaceX founder. As Cantrell recounted to Esquire: “They said, 'Oh, little boy, you don't have the money?”

> The TSMC execs reported more or less laughed in his face when he brought it up it them.

Source?

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-execs-allege...

Make no small plans ... Make bombastically ridiculous ones?

And that's 7T just to build the fabs, then they'd need tons more money to build the hardware to put the chips in, datacenters, staff, software, etc.

For reference seven trillion dollars is 25% of US GDP.

Yeah, that's um, wild.

If you don't believe ASI is possible, 7T is way too high. If you believe ASI is possible, 7T is wayyy too low, thus 7T is a compromise if you believe there's a non-certain chance of ASI being possible

Surely this “logic” applies to every positive amount of dollars. Why not 700T

So the question is, if you have AGI/ASI how much productive work could you get done with it?

When looking at things like mechanization and the productivity increases from around 1880 to now, you took an economy from around 10 billion a year to 14 trillion. This involved mechanization and digitization. We live in a world that someone from 1880 really couldn't imagine.

What I don't know how to answer (or at least search properly) is how much investment this took over that 150 year period. I'm going to assume it's vastly more than $7 trillion. If $7 trillion in investment and manufacturing allowed us to produce human level+ AI then the economic benefits of this would be in the tend to hundreds of trillions.

Now, this isn't saying it would be good for me and you personally, but the capability to apply intelligence to problems and provide solutions would grow very rapidly and dramatically change the world we live in now.

> If $7 trillion in investment and manufacturing allowed us to produce human level+ AI then the economic benefits of this would be in the tend to hundreds of trillions.

Sure, but right now that "if" is trying to do 7 trillion dollars of unsubstantiated heavy lifting. I might be able to start creating Iron Man-style arc reactors in a cave with a box of scraps and all I ask is 1 trillion, so you all should invest given how much money unlimited free energy is worth.

The amount is just how quickly you scale up. Invest more money now and get ASi earlier.

How do you even define ASI? How do you know it will run on silicon? If it will run on silicon, what kind of silicon? GPU? TPU? Binary? Ternary? Von-Neumann architecture? How can you even start to build chips for something completely imaginary?

ASI is just AGI but scaled to the point of superhuman ability in all cognitive tasks. Surely it will run on the architectures used to build AGI before ASI takes control itself in the design and deployment.

> ASI is just AGI but scaled [...] Surely it will run on the architectures used to build AGI

The words "just" and "surely" are doing so much heavy lifting here that I'm worried about labor-laws. :p

If scaling up was "just" that easy and the next step would "surely" begin in the exact same architecture... Well, you've gotta ask why several billion general-intelligence units made from the finest possible nanotechnology haven't already merged into a super-intelligence. Or whether it happened, and we just didn't notice.

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