Norway should buy OpenAI
onethousandmeans.com
onethousandmeans.com
- OpenAI can easily not become anything of significance in the future, even if the OP's prediction of the future becomes reality. I'd argue that being bought by a government and controlled within the ethical confines of that government would be a great way for OpenAI to quickly fall behind its peers who aren't subject to such regulations (which is the entire point of this post in the first place).
- Norway may be a great country ran by a great government, but that doesn't mean they would be a great leader of some AI revolution. Not only is the bar for being a competent government not particularly high on the world scale, but the skills of a competent government don't necessarily translate to the skills of an AI revolution Sherpa. I don't see why the OP feels Norway wouldn't use an advanced AI to simply enrich itself while leaving other countries to fend for themselves. It's not like Norway's fund is designed to serve the rest of the world as it is, nor is it the case that Norwegians would allow their government to serve other countries at the cost of their own well being.
- Those at OpenAI would either (a) never entertain this offer or (b) would sell to Norway if this exact thesis wasn't true (i.e., they'd be happy to sell if they thought OpenAI was going to become worthless anyway). Using the logic that the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global can just buy OpenAI because it has more money than a given valuation for OpenAI is embarrassing. It lacks any understanding of how businesses and investments work, let alone how investments in these specific businesses work. I mean, the OP starts this post off explaining how they think OpenAI can effectively rule the world once their expectations for their technology is realized. Why would they sell their ticket to unlimited wealth for a relatively small offer?
Behind in what? You write as if it is a univariate concern. I haven't read the post but why couldn't Norway force OpenAI to be more alignment-conscious? Then it would be ahead in safety, especially if competitors don't pay attention to that.
(they can still interfere, just not anywhere near the same scope)
You may think "but government ownership means more interference", and yes, but not radicalized, crazy assed, mercurial, emotional interference.
This is such a ridiculous, preposterously self-confident claim. Claims like this give HN (and engineers in general) a bad reputation.
Edit: relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/793/
all you've done is use some fancy words to discredit OP's claim.
what makes you think people who have built all the extremely complex and robust technical infrastructure are unable to comprehend of this amazingly complex government that you seem to be putting on a pedestal, let alone design a better one?
how about even a simpler question: why are almost all governments inefficient (except may be few like tax department) and are full of red-carpet paper pushers?
The average computer toucher with delusions of grandeur would kill themselves if they had to moderate a public assembly or do a public facing job in a municipal office. Of course you believe that's peon work and your superior intellect with unlimited power as leader would build something better, cue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project
That you can just assert that as though it is a fact universally known says a lot where your head is at. If the private sector is so efficient, how come US health care is so much more expensive than some public health systems with better outcomes? How come public utilities are sometimes cheaper than private ones? Why do public fire departments exist at all, why not have contractors? Etc.
I agree government is often inefficient. The world is just obviously more complicated then you are considering.
Efficiency is not the aim of government, except in constrained ways. Efficiency would generally run contrary to governance, transparency, innovation, responsiveness, general applicability, justice, rule following, considering the long term and not just the short term, recognition of human dignity, security etc.
All those things have a cost that takes away from maximum delivery efficiency, but generally societies decide that the cost is worth it.
"Contra a bunch of idiots at Hacker News and elsewhere.."
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/follow-up_thoughts_on_wat...
Lastly, here’s an interesting point to ponder. English is the most expressive language in the world. Don’t take my word for it — it’s the only language I speak...
There are 7170 living languages in the world today and quoting Borges doesn't improve the statistical relevance of his statement. Why does this person's blog get so much prominence on here?
EDIT: yes, also Iraq and Venezuela
Norway is an outlier.
Our principal was Jewish and we needed special permission for him to enter the country for presentations.
During one of the presentations one of our team took a photo of a fountain and it initially ended up in our presentation to be used to set the tone. While previewing our slideshow to our handlers we were told to remove the slide of the fountain. The fountain belonged to the king and could not be photographed without permission from the king.
Admittedly there was no violence but we were warned that it was very bad. This was the early 1990’s so I’m sure this are much looser now.
It was sitting at the time in the latest supply of easily exploited natural resources in the world, yet somehow could not pay its troops pensions lost Civil war, could not keep its strategic oil supply from being raided by the executive branch corruption, and could not keep it plutocrats from directing military action for the sake of bananas of all things.
Have you read about the US post-1900? I think you can leave off pre 1900s…
The USA at some point had the lions share of the world’s easily exploitable oil.
A lot is thanks to Farouk Al-Kasim [1], who helped develop the fundamental plan for Norway's petroleum industry. As far I know, his task group's plan, developed while at the Department of Industry, was essentially accepted wholesale by the government. Part of it was ensuring the government retained control, and another part of it was ensuring oil revenue was carefully managed rather than flooding every level of society and government.
this also means there weren't entrenched oil barons (or rail barons, or shipping barons, etc.) that already had massive regulatory capture and could sway the government and economy their way.
greenfields, limited rent seeking, and knowledge of the risks -- sure enough it all went right
Of the other countries where petroleum is >10% of the national economy, I think Norway might be the only one that isn't a brutal dictatorship, a failed state, or both?
> Of the other countries where petroleum is >10% of the national economy, I think Norway might be the only one that isn't a brutal dictatorship, a failed state, or both?
I found this graphic from CNBC that summarises data from the World Bank: https://assets.weforum.org/editor/0GAQbN2nVTxgIqOLjWpWSZYh-9...
One thing I want to point out: Kuwait is the most dependent upon oil and gas of any nation in the world (about 50% of its GDP). However, I think it would be a stretch to call them "a brutal dictatorship, a failed state, or both". Sure, it isn't a Western liberal democracy, but people live pretty good lives and the state does not have a strong reputation for suppressing its people. (I'm not here to apologize for their gov't... but I think it would be a bit harsh to put in your categories.) UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Brunei, and Qatar: I would put in the same category: Non-democracy or flawed democracy, but life is pretty good for the locals. I guess that we can call all of the countries that I mentioned before: "benevolent dictator" gov't model. Interestingly, Ecuador is about 20% of GDP, but I would call them a developing/emerging democracy. The rest of the list... sheesh: It does not look good!
What do you think about my analysis? Do you agree?
> I think Norway might be the only one that isn't a brutal dictatorship
Just because you don't like a government doesn't mean it's doing a bad job at, well, holding a state together.
Totalitarian, and trending toward failed state.
> US
Not eligible for the reason I stated: the US economy is much less than 10% petroleum. We have a lot of oil, but we have a lot more of everything else.
> gulf states
Mostly brutal, repressive dictatorships (especially Saudi Arabia and Iran) - some are better than others, but the trend is poor.
> Just because you don't like a government doesn't mean it's doing a bad job at, well, holding a state together
You're moving the goalposts a fair amount here. The thread started with "good governance", and I said "well run" - it's hard to say that the bar for either of those is simply maintaining superficial order. But even if you set that aside, consider the famous quote from the Shiekh of Dubai about the fragility of the petrostates that haven't figured out how to build strong civil societies with their wealth: "my grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel."
Well it's clearly more than superficial or the state would be collapsing.
Regardless, I don't think the form of the government itself implies any sort of governance quality. Both Russia and Iran are the subjects of such heavy propaganda I don't expect anyone to evaluate them in good faith—but I would certainly prefer to live in either place compared to, say, Mississippi.
This isn't an accident. Yes, there has been a oil-and-gas boom (fracking, mostly), but it is a great place to do business, so many other non-petro industries have been furiously expanding there in the last 25 years.
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/naep-test-scores-mississippi-m...
I don't think the UK ever really had an option to create a fund though. Deficit was too high. Doubt there would have been anything left to invest even with an increased cut for the state. UK had an IMF bailout in the 70s and was in a mess. Norway was in much better shape I think.
The term "Dutch Disease" is a bit more general than that:
>...The term was coined in 1977 by The Economist to describe the decline of the manufacturing sector in the Netherlands after the discovery of the large Groningen gas field in 1959.[1][2]
>The presumed mechanism is that while revenues increase in a growing sector (or inflows of foreign aid), the given economy's currency becomes stronger ("appreciates") compared to foreign currencies (manifested in the exchange rate). This results in the country's other exports becoming more expensive for other countries to buy, while imports become cheaper, rendering those sectors less competitive.
Ideally a temporary windfall should be used to invest in the future. Taking a temporary windfall and spending it on basically buying votes should have a name, but that isn't generally what the term Dutch Disease refers too.
> $34T for the Netherlands
> That kind of money spigot is hard to wean a country off from, and tends to mask all sorts of governance failures, so it was inevitable the oil windfall would be used to plug the imperial shortfall.
> The difference with Norway is it was never a colonial power.
The immediate after-war years were quite grim, even after £1B Marshall plan ($13B in 2026 dollars) reconstruction aid, almost as much as Germany got. In 1850 the colonial income represented half of all government revenues, but in 1870 that was dismantled and privatized to benefit the elite. Most of the UK’s imperial looting went to the elite from the very beginning, of course.
Norway was in personal union with the kings of either Sweden or Denmark, so not quite the same as being a colony, but they themselves were not colonizers (unlike Denmark in Greenland).
must you whistle so loud, i'm deaf now
> homogenous country
I know I will be downvoted for this.
> This must require a *shocking* cultural adaptation.
The real trick to seeing the best parts of US culture: Get away from the east and west coasts. Once you go inland, especially to small cities, people are very welcoming. I have seen many YouTube videos were foreigners travel to "parts unknown", and are pleasantly surprised when random people stop to have a chat and wish them a good day. For example, lots of Peter Santenello's YouTube videos[1] are about visiting lesser known parts of countryside US. The people are overwhelmingly friendly (to a fault!).
Honestly, I think a lot of continental Europe isn't so different. In small cities and towns, all kinds of random people will wave and say hello in the local language, even if they guess that you cannot speak their language. Usually, they are excited to see some obvious foreigners visiting their place.
They're basically rebuilding Google books, and keeping it private. That's privatizing all of humanity's knowledge. Then from what I see some other missing books are just rephrasings of other books, which can already be done with synthetic data using another LLM to generate it. I would assume a lot of those books are school text books as well, which are almost never digitized and are rephrasings of university text books. Maybe they are not able to generate synthetic data of sufficient quality and are resorting to human books that rephrase information instead
I'm pretty sure they've already consumed everything on Anna's Archive, The Pirate Bay etc., and they are now buying books to fill the gaps and to legally launder the corpus they already had. It has little to do with ethics (one could also question the ethics of buying rare, second-hand books and then destroying them).
I believe that is exactly what the parent post is doing
Because a cartoon mouse's parent company used regulatory capture to extend copyright for decades.
Mostly back from exploiting the easily exploited and not paying for externalities.
I think Norway would have too much sense to entertain buying this, of course it would be fun because you'd hope they would remove Sam Altman and you might have an AI company not run by someone who spouts the absolute rubbish that current AI leaders do, they are all completely cringeworthy.
Folding proteins and cure cancer?
Deciphering animal languages?
Revolutionizing accessibility technology?
I don't disagree with what you're saying. But the premise of this blog post is that Norway's government would be a good owner of OpenAI because they'd influence the company to operate in a "good" way for society. My comment assumes this is the case for the sake of argument.
This dynamic is definitely not limited to AI companies and it's pretty obvious to anyone who has ever contemplated the ethics of capitalism as a whole. And if it matters, I don't think these companies behave particularly unethically compared to other large companies. You can take issue with where the baseline of ethics has been set of these kinds of companies, but at the end of the day ethics is a constraint that limits the success of a company in terms of our capitalistic system. Inducing a stronger version of this constraint in a single company, regardless of how preposterous the scenario is, will necessarily lead to that company doing worse than it would have otherwise. The OP doesn't address this dynamic in their post, but it's also a fundamental dynamic of the premise of their post.
So all they have to do is wait a bit and build a frontier model of their own.
In telecomms, the late mover has the advantage of not having legacy networks to maintain, and having better technologies available at rollout time. What is the "late mover advantage" in AI? Being able to distill from every bleeding edge frontier lab? That gets you near parity at best.
So they don't spend 20 trillion dollars to achieve AGI, and in the end they still end up at parity for a tiny fraction of the cost.
How can you claim that this isn't a win?
You can't distill or catch up if you can't access the models. You'll basically have a situation where nation-states will need to try and steal the models Oceans 11 style.
They might as well invest in cold fusion, warm superconductivity, curing cancer or whatever sci-fi concept you have.
In all seriousness though it is pretty interesting to consider if it really happened, a sovereign wealth fund pivots to the crazy high risk strategy, writes a blank check and tries to actually win. If it works does that country just become the rulers of the world?
The inevitability narrative is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it ends if we decide not to keep telling it.
That's wishful thinking, what are you saying, labs/people across the world will selflessly decide they're not going to pursue further research if we on HN stop saying it?
People would sell piglets and would try to sell "a pig in a poke" (where a poke is a bag).
That's why you don't buy a pig in a poke because you can't see what you're buying.
Letting the cat out of the bag is because you've revealed that it was a cat rather than a piglet. You've revealed the deception.
I've actually seen the "genie back into the bottle" phrase used in contexts that refer to secrets, e.g. where "the cat is out of the bag" would actually be more appropriate, so there's definitely some overlap there. For example, I've seen people talking about nuclear proliferation say "you can't put the nuclear genie back into the bottle", meaning that the secret of how to build a nuclear weapon is well-known, and it's not really possible to make it secret again. But I've also seen people use the same "you can't put the nuclear genie back into the bottle" expression referring to a nuclear weapon exploding: once the radioactive material in the bomb has gone critical, there's nothing anybody can do to stop the explosion that's about to happen.
Personally, I like the "genie back into the bottle" phrase better. But some people like more grounded-in-reality phrases rather than fantasy-based phrases, and they prefer "toothpaste back into the tube". Either one works well, though.
The saying means that you can't un-tell a secret... once a secret is known to the public, you can't make it a secret again.
I think the more appropriate saying would be a similar, but slightly different, one: "That ship has already sailed"
That one is more about "it is too late to do anything about this" and less about information.
I just think AI is so much bigger than one company. We already have 3 major frontier labs + Chinese labs releasing at near-frontier levels.
My thesis is that someone will solve the high inference hardware cost problem and another paradigm shift will come where AI becomes even more decentralized and democratized. Obviously that is a hunch but that is what my gut tells me.
We would have done the same if it is about virus or nuclear weapons, and AI could become serious existential threat in the next 5 years.
Would you had said the same thing if a country like was developing and testing deadly virus on live population. I think in 5 years, it is possible that the AI will become that topic(if we assume AI becomes good and start hacking and controlling everything).
Sam Altman: "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could."
Trolley problem: on the left track is a class of schoolchildren. On the right track is a a computer which a Harry Potter fanfic author argues has magic powers and the marketing department of Apple kind of agrees. Do you let Eliezer persuade you to kill the kids?
And in this case we're not talking about bombing sites if they appear to be used for uranium enrichment which isn't exactly an everyday need, we're talking about bombing them if they appear to be optimised to contain lots of computers. You don't even have to be an AI sceptic to imagine a policy of threatening to launch missile strikes on Chinese businesses if they build out capacity in a way distant observers don't like might be more likely to result in millions of deaths than the whatever runs on the Chinese business' computers...
Cerebras is only 700 people. I wouldn't buy it, but since it's only 700 people, you can probably build something like it with 1400 people in a couple of years if you set the goals right and hire the right people to lead it.
Euclyd, VSORA etc. exist. If they were buying American, why not Groq.
Then once one has good hardware without an enormous markup, then one can start thinking about building LLMs with it.
Because they're too stupid and stubborn to rename themselves.
I can say with a high sense of certainty, that this is not going to happen. There is no political appetite to do anything this radical, and anyone trying to get this done. Would run into a problems with an electorate that would view this a playing games with its money, and a political establishment, that could easily be even more horrified over this idea.
I could buy a local sweetshop for a 100 billion dollars, just because I might do that, that doesn't mean it's actually worth that.
I think the argument you’re really looking to contradict is this: if 1% of a company is worth $1B to somebody, then somebody would pay $100B for the whole company. That does not follow (and indeed the acquisition price of a company is almost never exactly its “market valuation”).
You are assuming that the money that I buy the sweet shop for is what I evaluate the value of the sweet shop to be worth. That's not necessarily true.
You're also assuming I'm not insane.
If I offer to buy an apple from you for 1 trillion dollars because I believe consuming that specific apple will make me a god, that apple is not actually worth 1 trillion dollars.
If I have an apple and you agree to buy it for $1T, then the apple is indeed worth $1T at that moment.
After the purchase is complete it is worth ~$0, or whatever the next person is willing to pay you for it.
Alternatively you can say “it is still worth $1T to me” and that would be true as well.
When we are specifically talking about companies, their value is where buyers meet sellers in the order book.
Are you selling me just the apple?
Whether someone else will share your judgment of its worth is highly unlikely, but it is also entirely irrelevant. Worth has never meant "objective value to literally everyone."
I think your definition of value / worth should be based on the seller, not the buyer.
There are contracts that involve exchanging $1 to satisfy some legal requirement of consideration, but the relationship created is worth much more than $1. And of course there are barter transactions where items are exchanged directly without any specific valuation in money involved at all.
The acquisition price is almost always significantly more than its market value. The reason is that if you start buying shares on the open market each transaction of yours will raise the stock price, and eventually you will price yourself out of the purchase.
So what buyers do is negotiate directly with the board and propose an inflated price that >50% of shareholders are okay with.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ferrar...
What else does worth mean?
I buy a sweetshop for 1 billion dollars.
Now, immediately after I have bought it, what's it worth?
I could have bought bike shop, or an apple.
That value wasn't associated with that specific item. It's an arbitrary choice.
The issue is that buying something for the memes isnt worth less, it's 'what you are actually buying'?.
If I arbitarily decide to buy an apple for $10 that I could have bought for $1, what did I actually buy with the $9.
Publicity? Goodwill?
I don't believe I only bought an apple, even from the person I bought it from.
Now he's been pursued by the press to comment, and he's the guy that sold that thing for $X for the rest of his life. I bought that from him too.
If I paid the market price, that doesn't happen.
So what did I really buy?
Is a buyer asking to buy it? If yes, whatever you sell it for.
If no, then you really have no idea what it's worth now, all you know is it was worth 1B to you when you bought it.
At the least OpenAI is worth what the market is willing to pay for it.
I think OpenAI’s does not have ANY moat. They are currently a leader but lack the piles of cash required to stay a leader in the medium/long-term. (They can not in anyway compete with AWS/Alphabet on that front, and they know that too.)
Researchers and engineer will want big comp, as they can get it elsewhere, if you stop paying that, then you loose the knowledge necessary to stay a leader, even though it’s a losing race in the long-term anyway. The company will become a growing pile of non-SOTA techniques and models + old hardware in no time.
Why waste that money…?
Seriously why would Norway do that? With a fraction of that amount of money they can build energy and computing facilities. They can distill OpenAI models. Why would that bet all on one single company?
The US won't let Norway do that anyway. Biden blocked Japan's Nippon Steel from buying US Steel[0]:
1. Imagine AI replaces all jobs.
2. Since AI is controlled by a very small number of people, they will be the ones that get all the money, since they are doing all the work.
3. Since there are no jobs, everyone else will die because they won't have money to buy anything.
But this causal chain makes no sense.
Imagine that I find a Magic Lamp that grants me unlimited wishes. Suddenly, I don't have to work! I wish for a sandwich, I get a sandwich. I wish for a car, I get a car. Etc.
Does the economy collapse? Of course not, because everyone else still has to work for a living (the poor fools). The fact that I don't need a job has effectively removed me from the economy.
One day I discover that I can wish for another Magic Lamp! I give the new Magic Lamp to another family and now they remove themselves from the economy. After a few weeks, 10,000 people have their own Magic Lamp. Has the economy collapsed? No, because the remaining 8 billion people still form a robust economy.
In this scenario, the economy won't suffer until a significant percent--maybe 50% or maybe 90%--have Magic Lamps. But at that point, it's no longer controlled by a "small number of people."
One argument is that once I have a Magic Lamp, I can disrupt the economy by (e.g.) creating cars for free and selling them for cheap. There's no incentive for me to do this--I don't need money--but let's pretend I'm doing it just to help people. Now a lot of people have cars but also a lot of car builders are out of a job. That sucks.
But wait! More cars also means more jobs. If you don't have to pay for a car, then you can use the money to pay for a driver. You have more cars, so you're paying more for insurance, so now there are more insurance jobs. There are more accidents, which sadly require more hospitals. And we need to hire people to dispose of all these cars at end-of-life.
If I use the Magic Lamp to get rid of part of the economy, the other parts get bigger because (a) there is more money to spend on it, and (b) there is often more need.[1]
The only way I can really destroy the economy with a Magic Lamp is to give everyone a Magic Lamp. But that's not a dystopia--that would be paradise!
---------------
[1] If you don't believe this, just consider farming. Farming used to be 90% of the economy. Now the revenue from farming is concentrated in less than 5% of the people of the US. Did everyone else starve? Are we all out of jobs? No--the rest of the economy grew.
There is no inherent property to those model makers that they will capture the value of the AI boom. The model companies have a lot of competition from chinese models. Of course the US government will likely still keep some model makers alive (just alone for DOD supply chain reasons), but the chinese models will certainly compress margins.
It might as well be a chipmaker, a power company or a cobalt mining company.
Ultimately, it's up to the US government to decide if OpenAI can capture the value provided by AI: if chinese models get banned from the F500, then maybe one of america's famous duopolies can establish themselves.
But this hinges on congress mostly to pass certain laws to put OpenAI into that position. But which value does congress have? If OpenAI is owned by a bunch of Forbes 400 people like right now, then of course those will lobby the hell out of congress and ensure their stakes in OpenAI make them extremely rich.
But Norway doesn't have that access to lawmakers, they would see it as external influence by an alien power. They can certainly benefit from this trend though by being a shareholder.
To give a concrete example of the US government making life hard for foreign investors, take the T-mobile and sprint merger. T-mobile is majority owned by Deutsche Telekom AG, whose biggest shareholder are various institutions of the german federal government.
In this case, the US government just had to _approve_ the purchase, something very standard that happens all the time, but they still dragged that approval out as long as possible, even though Germany is a fellow NATO country.
If Norway, or any other country, wanted to, for far less money than buying a problematic company, they could fund a public cloud and rent it out at below-market rates to citizens, universities, and small businesses.
They can't just put half their account on black and spin the wheel.
If you want to jump on the bandwagon just build a semi fab. Lots of clean water, lots of electricity, lots of geologically stable ground, lots of money that can't be invested locally - can't see why that haven't been done already. And it will still be useful after the fad is over.
Great technology, but $20-$200 a month technology, with a lot of people going for free options. Like the telecom industry. Average is probably going to be like a phone bill. Basically: you can become Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile. $450 billion a year in revenue. A superb business, but merely a superb business.
The financials of OpenAI make no sense at all unless you're a True Believer.
“Invade Greenland and we switch it off!”
I just took over as society executive director specifically focused on the issues from this article: bridging that gap
You can see our discussion here:
The announcement at AGI 26 a few weeks ago which starts at 19:00
https://www.youtube.com/live/qRA1DoMCCSc?si=a2DJeT1vi0JoaWnY
Massachusetts, the small state in the US, has a population 25% larger than Norway. The New Jersey suburbs of NYC, not even the whole state, has a population comparable to Norway.
Norway is cool, but it's not very useful as a guide for managing a country.
OpenAI is a mess.
Start with a fresh slate, using open models and you can actually build a company that makes sense.
Then set up a pipeline between the human generated content from the colleges back into future AI models. Everyone gets an education and there is ongoing non AI training data to advance AI without any model collapse.
If AI really becomes effective enough to displace so many white collar jobs then it'd be far more efficient to fund free AI tutoring for everyone that wants it. A system where you get at best an hour daily of discussion with a human expert is grossly inferior to one where you can have 24/7 discussion with an AI expert that has infinite patience for dumb questions. There'd be no reason for college to exist in a future where AI professors are at least as smart as human professors but far far cheaper.
And have you guys seen the compression ratio of models capabilities? The new Qwen3.8 27B is insane. I can run it at 85-95 tokens per second on my personal PC, and it is, according to artificial analysis benchmarks, around the same level as GPT 5.4 xhigh from march, OpenAIs leading model at that time.
If things keep going this way, OpenAI and it's infrastructure is worth...very little.
All countries should back open source projects with their combined funds and data centres.
This information to train the LLM's is already in their library resources, they stole it already from lib gen.
Isn't OpenAI running on investor money right now?
j/k. I love the outside of the box thinking here, but that doesn't seem like what the annuity was setup for. Of course thats up to Norway.
Norway isn't dumb enough to make the same mistake.
What's the point of writing something like this? Surely the writer isn't delusional enough to actually expect this to affect state leadership decision-making?
A guest post by Zachary Jones “My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”
Canada can buy either Microsoft or Amazon, Europe buys the other.
The USA vs Rest Of World problem: solved.
OpenAI wants someone or party to buy it?
It's too late, the sun is being down.
Meanwhile, Chinese companies are creating SOTA models and make them available for free, strongly limiting the amount of money that OpenAI and Anthropic can demand for their similar models via API. Their sky high valuations are likely to suffer as chinese models are considered "good enough" and safe to use when hosted in the West. They even have fewer safeguards and are thus more suitable for cybersecurity tasks.
tl;dr: They're fucked. Don't buy them.
The incentives in north america favor software-esque plays where the players are racing towards % of marketshare based on usage.
China on the other hand is driving towards winning of manufacturing and % of hardware produced by them. China is competing with Nvidia, OpenAi and Anthropic are collateral damage.
IOW China almost definitely sees their own open-weight models as a pressure release valve to ensure the US AI companies, and by extension the US economy, doesn't get too big, and to ensure that these companies don't become the dominant global force (the way that e.g. US cloud companies did originally).
Author seems to have read on a magazine or something that Norway's Pension Fund assets amount to ~2 trillion US, which he confuses for having 2 trillion US cash but you cannot really expect much from room temperature IQ.
Then, just because 2,000B US > 800B US, he goes on to propose that Norway should buy it ... that's it, that's the whole argument.
Then he elaborates with some of the most deranged ideas I've read like (taken verbatim):
"Such an intervention would clearly be blocked by the United States government, though if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awards Trump the bauble then perhaps there will be an opening of political possibility."
As if Norway would even be remotely interested in acquiring that company anyway.
How can somebody put their own name on something so infantile as this article? What influence does this author or any of you think you have over the Norwegian sovereign fund?
The entire EU and Norway could simply block all clankers and US propaganda and experience an intellectual renaissance. For $0.
Nice reminder that even the most successful socialist societies still depend on someone somewhere being productive to generate wealth to redistribute. North Sea oil money doesn't hurt.
Some may not be aware that SpaceX is also an AI company.
I do not see any chance that this may happen