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I really don’t see the issue if OpenAI makes rational buying decisions for its hardware. As long as they aren’t paying a premium in terms of model generations p

I really don’t see the issue if OpenAI makes rational buying decisions for its hardware. As long as they aren’t paying a premium in terms of model generations per dollar or per mwh versus Nvidia’s GPUs, it seems obviously a net good thing for OpenAI given how much of a gating factor hardware availability has gotten to be. Also, they know all their own special tricks that could be implemented directly in hardware to dramatically reduce energy consumption or performance per dollar, and might not want to tell Nvidia all that stuff. Sam is already so rich, and he really doesn’t strike me as being primarily motivated by personal financial gain at this point. I just can’t see this all being some ploy to extract money from OpenAI by forcing them to buy his own company’s hardware at unfavorable prices.

jsnell 3y ago
> Also, they know all their own special tricks that could be implemented directly in hardware to dramatically reduce energy consumption or performance per dollar, and might not want to tell Nvidia all that stuff. You seem to be saying that the good reading of the situation is that Altman will take OpenAI's internal secrets (so secret they don't even want to tell their existing chip suppliers) to his own side hustle. But that's not actually good; in fact it's exactly the kind of thing that a CEO should not be doing. If OpenAI wanted to influence non-Nvidia chip makers into building the perfect next-generation chip, not one of them that would turn down that call. > Sam is already so rich, and he really doesn’t strike me as being primarily motivated by personal financial gain at this point. The man started a fucking cryptocoin just a couple of years ago. That doesn't exactly scream "not motivated by personal financial gain". > I just can’t see this all being some ploy to extract money from OpenAI by forcing them to buy his own company’s hardware at unfavorable prices. Agreed on this. The company would never ship anything for OpenAI to buy. But what he appears to be doing is trading on the OpenAI name to hustle stupid money into the biggest money pit since WeWork.

jsnell 3y ago

> Also, they know all their own special tricks that could be implemented directly in hardware to dramatically reduce energy consumption or performance per dollar, and might not want to tell Nvidia all that stuff. You seem to be saying that the good reading of the situation is that Altman will take OpenAI's internal secrets (so secret they don't even want to tell their existing chip suppliers) to his own side hustle. But that's not actually good; in fact it's exactly the kind of thing that a CEO should not be doing. If OpenAI wanted to influence non-Nvidia chip makers into building the perfect next-generation chip, not one of them that would turn down that call. > Sam is already so rich, and he really doesn’t strike me as being primarily motivated by personal financial gain at this point. The man started a fucking cryptocoin just a couple of years ago. That doesn't exactly scream "not motivated by personal financial gain". > I just can’t see this all being some ploy to extract money from OpenAI by forcing them to buy his own company’s hardware at unfavorable prices. Agreed on this. The company would never ship anything for OpenAI to buy. But what he appears to be doing is trading on the OpenAI name to hustle stupid money into the biggest money pit since WeWork.