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Comment by Imnimo | Hacker News Reader

Would Norway be prepared to commit to huge future capex spending? Like the pitch that OpenAI is going to achieve AGI seems to rely on vast investments in more compute over the coming years. If you just pay the $800B and then take your foot off the gas, do you still have a frontier lab or have you just paid a lot of money to remove a competitor from the market?

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> achieve AGI

They might as well invest in cold fusion, warm superconductivity, curing cancer or whatever sci-fi concept you have.

Make a ship sail against the wind by lighting a bonfire under her deck???

We see in practice that the last to adopt technology do in fact have newer tech than the ones who started it. IE 3G in Asia vs land lines in USA.

So all they have to do is wait a bit and build a frontier model of their own.

I don't think it works that way for AI. Comms networks are extensive physical infrastructure that, by definition, has to cover ground. AIs cover the ground by riding the existing comms lines.

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.

> 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?

That assumes they release their models publicly. The future is leaning towards these labs air gapping their best stuff (Model 2, etc) and using it internally to snipe their competitors and charge insane amounts for monitored use in consulting environments.

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.

Getting to parity with less money means that you can go further with the same amount of money.

Norway doesn't have to fund future capex just like OpenAI doesn't have to fund future capex. They both borrow the capital.

When I think of Norway, the first thing that comes to mind is its willingness to commit to huge future capex spending. Not to mention, selling more than half its equities in order to buy one risky asset totally aligns with its investment strategy and, you know, having to pay pensions, other minor concerns like that.

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?

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