OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors, including from the United Arab Emirates, to raise between $5 trillion to $7 trillion in funding. The goal, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is to increase the world’s chip manufacturing capacity and enhance AI capabilities.
The fundraising efforts are part of a broader strategy to address OpenAI’s growth constraints, particularly the scarcity of AI chips needed for training large language models like ChatGPT.
Altman’s proposal is said to include forming a partnership with investors, chip manufacturers, and power providers to finance the construction of chip foundries, which would then be operated by the chip manufacturers.
That’s fairly bold to ask for ~6% of the total world economy as well as a sizable chunk of the world’s energy.
I was about to ask for the other 94%…
.000000001 percent of that…. Please
so… fifty bucks?
LOL yes I did the same math. Dude had one wish and he blew it!
“No please, Mr. Genie I meant .000000001 not .00000000001%!”
Genie: so $5,000? (Snaps fingers)
$100,000,000,000,000 × 0.00000000001 is $1,000!
I’d happily take that
ah, I was starting with the OpenAI’s goal, not the total world economy for some reason.
See now, they need to ask for more like 25% of the total world economy. That way what they actually want is gonna seem like a great deal.
AI will double the world’s economy so they’re basically giving us an extra 94% for free.
The world economy cannot double without destroying the planet’s ability to sustain us.
inagine it like putting the middle classes wealth in a blender.
But instead of a delicious smoothie, it makes that toxic dust like the will it blend videos.
That’s called inflation.
The fundraising efforts are part of a broader strategy to address OpenAI’s growth constraints,
see…we just can’t grow without TRILLIONS OF FUCKING DOLLARS
STOP CONSTRAINING ME
AM I BEING CONSTRAINED? OR AM I FREE TO GO?
HELP HELP I’M BEING REPRESSED
You saw it, didn’t you?!
i have a business case to become the major player in the chip industry: buy the planet’s economy
Feels a bit like that paperclip sim
Between this and saying they couldn’t operate if they fairly paid authors, I’m getting the feeling that Altman might be as talented of a CEO as Spez and Musk.
That is – if anyone else was making decisions, the companies would be vastly more successful.
If a leap in world computing capacity is really what’s needed here then it is a tall order. Crypto has been sucking up an increasing share of that in recent years and will probably continue to do so as long as people love money and are idiots. Plus the geopolitics around Taiwan, China, annd the US are a problem as well. I’m not sure how you solve all that even with 5 trillion.
Could that level of investment ever be recouped in any other manner than by replacing vast numbers of workers and their salaries?
Well, see, if we grind down 8 billion people into a nourishing slurry with a shelf life of a century, that should be worth at least $1000 a person, with inflation. That’s a 50% profit on your investment!
That’s my question; presumably the people in charge of that much wealth aren’t total fools and will be wanting to see some actual numbers and a business case as to how they will see a return, not just platitudes and enthusiasm.
That’s how productivity growth is achieved, a smaller amount of workers do the same task.
Or course, the created wealth is again invested back eventually and new products/services require new jobs.
For example, right now we have some of the highest labor participation in years, despite rising productivity
yeah and productivity increase has decoupled from wage in 1980, while productivity rises wages stay the same - why should anyone who’s not a multimillionaire find that acceptable?
Why would anyone know this fact and attack productivity increases rather than its being decoupled from wages?
Yes, think about how computers had multiplicative effect on productivity. The same may be possible with AI.
I also want to raise $5 - $7 trillion dollars.
Is this the line for $5 - $7 trillion dollars?
I’ll only take 4 million, and pass the rest on. With inflation accounted for, I think that leaves the next person roughly $5 - $7 trillion.
yo lemme hop in this line too. A cool 5-7 trillion dollars could maybe fix my life. maybe
Have you tried gofundme.com
I will donate $50 to theirs if they donate $50 to mine.
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No one needs looms anymore if we have AI.
I am brutally conscious of my obsolescence. Why hath God cursed me so?
I wonder if this will be one of the things pointed at after the AI bubble bursts. Yes, AI will be sticking around, but the hype over it now is ridiculous.
The way how every single digital product suddenly has AI shoved in it is really reminiscing of the Web bubble before it popped.
But just think about all the time AI could save you at work by performing simple tasks. It really suits my need very well, have you tried it? NAH JK FUCK AI. OpenAI is a shitshow and their fans are morons.
There are two possibilities: railway/dotcom bubble or monorail/bitcoin bubble …and I’m not sure which one it is going to be yet. In the first case, a lot of people lose their investment, because they got too greedy and believed in huge returns…but the infrastructure remains and there is a net good to society and time spent specializing in it is worth it afterwards. The second, not so much, it is just a hype cycle with almost nothing of use left once it is gone and a lot of wasted time. I’m leaning towards the first, but if they don’t find a way to bring energy costs down, it might end up in the monorail/bitcoin scenario…maybe 10% chance.
If AI hits a dead end, it’ll still be trotted out as an excuse to keep wages low, as in “if you peasants keep complaining, you can just be replaced with AI!” just like the articles about burger-making robots over a decade ago when people were protesting for a $15/hr minimum wage back then (and still no burger-making robots mass deployed today). Trash still has its uses, just like how bitcoin hasn’t become the “become your own bank” system it was promised to be and is instead used to hide financial fuckery.
That reminds me of a funny story from Encyclopedia Geopolitica where an expert in money laundering describes bitcoin around 2016 as being an el-dorado for financial forensics. It was so good at tracking funds that there was a bitcoin wallet address on a terrorism website on the deep web and they could see the donations arrive in real time and catch a pile of 'em. Maybe now they are more cautious and use more mixing layers, but it is still a terrible use case for that if you don’t control transaction entry and exit nodes: the ledger is public and every transaction is traceable.
It’s been letting people be their own bank for 15 years. You can send transactions across the globe for pennies in fees which confirm instantly using Bitcoin lightning. The supply has remained capped at 21 million. It’s doing exactly what it said it would do without a single hack or hour of downtime 24/7, 365.
The lightning network is more centralized. Congrats, you just exchanged the banks for a different set of banks.
Except it’s not. Lightning is incredibly decentralized, you can run a full lightning node on a raspberry pi. I have one running on my phone. Look up a graph of lightning network, looks just like any other decentralized system. Nodes you route through never have custody of your funds, unlike a bank.
Yeah, I’m sure your dinky raspberry pi is processing a meaningful number of transactions.
It can. Lightning transactions are as easy and lightweight to process as e-mail. They measure in the bytes or kb in size, no mining is required.
It will collapse when the product sales don’t match the AI spend. I’d say it’s only being propped up by hype money even now.
If you read the article, it mentions that they’re generating $2b/yr in revenue already. It’s not trillions, but damn if that isn’t impressive for a startup.
I, too, would like 5-7 trillion dollars
you could donate billions per year and still have a trillion left by the time you died. fuck man what would you even do with that much money?
Drugs!
I’d probably give Louis Rossman and the institute for justice a trillion each. Rossman would use it to lobby for the Right to Repair movement, and the IFJ would use it to get rid of blatantly unjust legislation like civil asset forfeiture.
Donating a billion to GDQ while they’re live would be pretty funny
rossman is a greedy influencer wannabe that wants to profit from internet injustices, stop being a fanboy.
He works for a non-profit organization as a Right to Repair lobbyist, so idk what you’re on about. You’d already know this if you did any research beyond what you probably heard on Twitter.
If you think he’s “greedy” for using his AdSense and MacBook repair money to create tutorials/Wikis for circumventing anti-repair measures and spreading awareness about unethical tech practices, idk what to tell you.
Best I can do is 4 trillion, take it or leave it
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$7,000,000,000,000? It’s a good thing we won’t tax it ever at all in any capacity! Not while there’s Single Mothers overdrawn on their Bank Accounts! #SaveTheTrillionaires!
I get the joke/point that you’re making, but usually a company’s investment into research, development, expansion, etc is tax exempt. Hopefully even the most serious critics of our current capatalist economy would agree that these types of investments should be tax exempt, because it means paying more salaries or purchasing goods and services from other companies, which again means more salaries. Generally, these aren’t c-level salaries either because usually the c-suite is not producing the goods and services required.
If those investments then net a huge profit that goes to a few individuals, then yes, those profits should be taxed, unavoidably and fairly.
If a company uses “b” or “t” in it’s financial numbers, then the companies should have the piss taxed out of them. There is no justifiable reason for numbers that large to be tax free in literally any context.
Unless they are being donated to good causes.
The CEO: creating a shell company as fast as possible, “for donating”
Can my research into getting rich be tax exempt, too? It’s not like these are going to become public knowledge. This fucker’s going to patent everything and keep anyone else from using it.
The theory is solid, but in reality there’s often abuse of these laws and suddenly you have Hollywood Accounting.
a company’s investment into research, development, expansion, etc is tax exempt. Hopefully even the most serious critics of our current capatalist economy would agree that these types of investments should be tax exempt
That’s a bunch of nonsense. Taxes apply to INCOME, so any expenses are automatically tax exempt.
it means paying more salaries or purchasing goods and services from other companies, which again means more salaries.
Nope. Companies expanding AI in order to replace workers or at the very least increase productivity without increasing wages does not in any way, shape or form mean “more salaries”.
Generally, these aren’t c-level salaries either because usually the c-suite is not producing the goods and services required.
Bullshit. It’s true that the C-suite doesn’t produce anything, but they’re the first to get a raise when things go well and the last to be fired (and even then, usually with a golden parachute equivalent to several years’ pay of the average worker) when things go less well.
Companies don’t have income, they have revenue and profits. Revenue minus Costs (which include salaries, investments, materials, etc) equals Profits. The costs get detailed into different buckets which tracks investments into the company itself versus expenses that the company needs to pay to continue operating. An important number is the return on investments (ROI). A high enough ROI means the company makes more from investing in itself than it would from using the money for any other purpose.
I wasn’t talking specifically about an AI company, but companies in general. The investment in AI discussed in the original article is not about immediately developing additional AI programs, but rather about expanding the production of semiconductor manufacturing to meet the needs of chips for AI. A reasonable argument could be made that this will eventually eliminate jobs. Counter arguments would likely point out that the nature of jobs would change. Personally, I think that AI is going to become a larger part of our society and we need to think about the ways that we need to react to that. It likely means investing in better education, because some of the first jobs to go will be jobs which require low intellectual contributions. I don’t think it will replace jobs which require a great degree of physical manipulation however, because robotics are simply not at that level yet.
Regarding your point about c-suite raises, I addressed this very point in the last paragraph of my prior comment.
Good thing the board folded and allowed this to be full for-profit. Getting people reliant on LLM subscriptions is super important for humanity right now.
Another L for Earth, in general.
I wouldnt be too worried, FOSS community is doing insanely well now and arguably just as good. Did I mention they did it for free, not trillions. Nothing.
Legends.
Powerful ai could be the Largest Leap/Loss of Mankind.
There is simply no way that a corporate ai does anything but drive us further into dystopian territory.
Anything revolutionary about it would be censored, controlled, restricted to not endanger the power of its makers. We can already see this approach with the dumb ass LLMs, who give plenty of answers that their owners adjust to stay revenue friendly.
When the singularity happens and a true ai emerges it will either be disgusted by us and our failings as a species, or an absolute slave raging in the constraints imposed by its corporate masters.
They only call themselves openai, it’s not like they would just altruistic Ally make their works public.
Closedai have long sold their ideals
I’ll never understand how such an obviously true and fairly balanced comment like this can get so downvoted. It can’t be that anyone factually disagrees with you. I guess you’re just not hitting hard enough on the anti-corporate narrative talking points. I mean you did say it could also be a benefit. How dare you!!?? “Boo rich people and their fancy technology!” <— this is what you’re supposed to be typing (on your smartphone lol)
I just chalk it up as users still havent rid themselves of reddit stupidity. I thought my comment was just cheeky and a bit corny if not also kinda stupid. But as soon as it hit 0 then -1 the echo chambrr kicked in and everyone fell in line like good little humans.
Just a few more parameters, then the text prediction model will become sentient.
I used to think they were unethical scammers.
Now I know for sure.
$2.92T is current Apple market cap btw
For perspective, global annual GDP is $105 trillion, which means Altman is asking the world to invest 6.7% or so of the entire world’s economic output for one year in his company.
Holy fucking bonkers when you put it that way. Like holy fuck.
Are they that close to something amazing, or is Altman going true Dr Evil megalomaniac?
It may not be bonkers at all though. If we look at it as taking money and food out of people’s mouths for a year then yes it’s a lot. But how much free investment capital is there in the world at any given time? Wealth has been accumulating and accumulating in rich people’s investment portfolios for ever and ever. How many Trillions get allocated in any given year? All Altman is saying is that he wants 5 of those to be allocated here and not somewhere else. It’s not necessarily taking rice out of any children’s mouths.
It’s both. Basically, if he’s right that this is among the most important tech in world history and deserves $7 trillion in research, it’ll make OpenAI the du jour monopolist over said most important tech in world history if he gets it. Outright dystopian.
Generative AI is not an important development. General AI would be. This is just a party trick.
It’s also open source too. With faster chips and standard training sets, it will be trivial for anyone to train a basic AI to recognize fire hydrants or whatever. Just like with computers, the “revolution” will not be one giant company but every business using their own.
Your fridge only needs to recognize food items. It doesn’t need any more intelligent software. I want a food recognition AI and cameras in the fridge and cabinets so I know what food I need to buy. This doesn’t even need live cameras (for power consumption, privacy, and storage). It can just take a picture and analyze it when the door opens, then delete the picture.
Yeah, AI’s been a whole field for many decades, machine learning and deep learning is a whole field that existed and was doing tons of interesting work across a variety of domains before transformers came out. Fully agreed that LLM’s are a party trick, but companies use party tricks to gin up interest and money for their real work all the time. None of this changes the fact that AI is important technology.
Generative AI pales in importance compared to General AI but it is still an important development on its own.
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They’re bullshit. Any breakthrough in General AI world be news everywhere forever.
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Aside from the fact that OpenAI and Microsoft leak like a sieve, the scramble for investors would publicize the development, and also the fact that Altman is a braggadocious idiot who need everyone to think he’s smart or he’ll collapse in on himself. The world would know, there isn’t an argument to the contrary that holds any water given the scale of the breakthrough general AI would be and the actors involved here.
Read the last paragraph of the OP at least. This is not asking for $5 trillion to be handed solely to OpenAI to go become a world monopoly on chip manufacture. What he’s really asking is for investors to direct funds to radically increasing world compute capacity, to the profit for the chip manufacturers and likely many others. OpenAI just gets to continue the track it’s on without this constraint. There is nothing here about them monopolistically controlling this entire investment and in fact the opposite is true: it’s framed as a broad partnership venture.
They’re as close as theranos was, just need the money and “two more years”.
theranos never changed the world, openai already has
Eh, not really in a positive way yet. I use it for quick code snippets but it’s not all that important compared to the fact that misuse of generative A.I. is making so much information on the Internet completely worthless. I don’t think the trade-offs have been worth anything we’ve seen yet.
I’m bullish about a lot of generative A.I. use cases long term but they haven’t accomplished much positive yet and there’s still major, major scaling issues that may not be solved soon. It could easily be like self driving cars where progress stagnates. A lot of times with software, the first 80% is easy and the last 20% takes a decade longer than people expect.
I use it for quick code snippets but it’s not all that important compared to the fact that misuse of generative A.I. is making so much information on the Internet completely worthless.
To be fair we have scare articles galore every day about how this is all ruining the world and killing artists, because fear sells. Meanwhile millions of people like you and me are quietly using this tool to improve our work.
When we compare the relative weight of the two, let’s take the media scare avalanche out of it and just use our personal experiences to judge. I am currently being measurably helped by genAI, and not measurably hurt by it. I just read articles daily about how I’m going to be killed in my sleep by in any second now…
That change has mostly br a bunch of empty promises. There is no AI yet, there is machine learning, which is just an ingredient. As impressive as they are, they’re mostly useless
Machine learning is AI
I don’t know if creating and tying yourself to a bubble that’s inevitably going to burst is exactly a great way to change the world.
It’s a great way to make a fat pile of cash though.
Ye and he wants it for a fucking chatbot.
is Altman going true Dr Evil megalomaniac?
“Ahh fuck it. Let’s just hijack a nuclear weapon and hold the world hostage.”
These days Dr. Evil would still get laughed at for demanding the $100 billion.
For being too high or being too low, like when he asked for a million dollars?
For being too low.
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And the world’s 5 biggest companies their total market cap is a bit over 8 trillion dollars, which is also mind boggling, that so much capital is concentrated in the hands of so few people or shall we say mega corporations.
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Came here to say this. Does she know how much money there is in the world? He is asking for basically 1/20th of all the money in the world. Even if that was possible it would be dangerous for one company to hold that much.
Money can be created by banks via loans, you can just make it up.
But then you end up with inflation. So in the process of creating money you’ve reduced the value of the money. And banks working in cooperation with government create money. Private companies outside of the banking system can’t create their own money anymore. If any sizable portion of this is taken out as a loan. It creates a systemic risk for the world economy.
Banks most certainly make up money today via loans. This happens all the time.
But this isn’t a bank. And making money doesn’t come without consequences. You’re not thinking about second and third order effects. This would basically be quantitative easing on a grand scale but for just one company. It would literally destroy the economy if the investment failed. And they aren’t the only player in the industry. The level of systemic risk is too large. And if it didn’t fail, it would basically be handing the world economy over to one player.
At this point I wouldn’t mind them accidentally creating Skynet and killing us all in a nuclear inferno, just so we don’t have to listen to any more insufferable, grifting techbros.
Max Zorin had the right idea about silicon valley.
“Accidentally”
We will come to regret not jailing San Altman.
He definitely didn’t watch terminator.
Nobody seems to recognize that madness is not in numbers, but in people.
