10 ms·
Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI
- panarky 3y agohttps://archive.is/wip/rDvES https://archive.is/wip/rDvES
- melling 3y agoDoes Altman want to build specialized AI chips? Can he compete against Nvidia?
- dekhn 3y agoYes, he wants to build specialized chips. He doesn't need to compete against nvidia. The market size is growing so quickly nvidia has trouble meeting demand. And it looks like the deals he's making are from folks who want their own supply that is less subject to US control. The scale and scope of what's being described seems outlandish, I think $150B would probably be enough to at least get started. that should get you two plants in a country more amenable to building and running a chip facility than the US, plus a hardware design team (to make AltmanTPU v1), a software design team (to make ATPU work with pytorch), and the business side of things. I don't see these things being sold commercial, it's more like airplanes- a few big players put up the capital to fund the construction of large batches and then get dibs on the first good volume runs. I think the real question here is what will ASML's involvement be, what process and design will the TPU have, what will the computational infrastructure surrounding the TPU look like, and how we are going to plumb all the necessary power to the TPU farms.
- aurareturn 3y agoThe scale and scope of what's being described seems outlandish, I think $150B would probably be enough to at least get started. that should get you two plants in a country more amenable to building and running a chip facility than the US, plus a hardware design team (to make AltmanTPU v1), a software design team (to make ATPU work with pytorch), and the business side of things. Ask Intel if they can just throw money at advanced chip node manufacturing. The only company that is able to do 3nm at scale with good yield is TSMC. Even at 5nm, Intel and Samsung aren't competitive.
- fbdab103 3y agoNVidia can't keep up with demand because ASML and TSMC have huge backlogs. Unless you can just buy up a competitor's slot in the queue, you are left with re-building an infrastructure pipeline that has been developed over decades.
- LamaOfRuin 3y agoAnd if they want it outside of US control, they can't involve either ASML or TSMC (or convince both companies that they can live under US sanctions).
- simne 3y agoTwo answers, each 100%. It is known very long time, that specialized AI chips are more efficient than GPUs, even when we talk about Tensor cores, because GPU is not only Tensor cores, they MUST include ramdac, all other video stuff, and network for fast communications of all this stuff, which is not of need for AI chip. Before Tensor cores, benchmarks was about 4 times against GPUs, now better but still significant lag.
- sgwealti 3y agoIf there was that large of a market for it why wouldn’t existing suppliers just scale their production?
- neom 3y agoProbably not just about scaling, if I had to guess his approach probably takes revisiting first principles, something that has time and time again proven incredibly difficult for incumbent players to do for a myriad of reasons spanning lack of will to capital constraints to lack of know-how.
- IncreasePosts 3y agoPresumably that's already happened if they know the cost of implementing it?
- neom 3y agoIndeed. I would also presume that they have a sense of what to build if they are out pitching for how to build. Pure speculation on my part: I suppose if our presumptions are right, it's somewhat akin to Tesla when it first entered the automotive industry. If I was Sam I suppose some version of that is what I'd be out pitching. (first principle is maybe a stretch with Tesla, but you catch my drift)
- coredog64 3y agoNvidia, sure. But you’ve got deep pockets companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta that don’t have a current hardware income stream to protect and have a valid business outcome that would justify the eye-watering investment that is required. Said companies have a good talent pipeline and enough prestige that they can spin up an entire business unit to work on it.
- hashxyz 3y agoThis is not going to age well. The current round of AI accelerators are going to flop hard because there is a deep hardware software mismatch. All the accelerators target GEMM and CONV, and get bottlenecked when most of the other extremely common tensor operators get mixed in. It turns out that Nvidia GPUs are already pretty close to the ideal type of chip you need to execute models people actually want to use. Nobody in the AI chip hypespace seems to understand this, it’s just stupid money running around trying to eat Nvidia’s margins. Sam Altman understands this less than plenty of people. It’s becoming harder for me to see him as anything besides someone who is very talented at growing power, but not much else. Perhaps he will succeed in misallocating a trillion dollars along the way.
- changoplatanero 3y agoDoesn't nvidia have huge margins? so if someone just makes a clone of the nvidia gpu then it can erode their margins and drive down the cost of compute
- dsalzman 3y agoAgreed. commoditizing the complement of OpenAIs models.
- 7e 3y agoCompetitors don't have access to the process node. You'll get competitors, but they won't be as fast or able to run the latest models. That means they'll compete with older versions of NVIDIA's chips.
- hashxyz 3y agoAMD will succeed at this as long as they keep it together.
- yen223 3y agoEverytime I'm tempted to think software is easy compared to hardware, I just remember that AMD is leaving about a trillion dollars worth of market cap on the table, because they haven't figured out a good alternative to CUDA.
- rKarpinski 3y ago> OpenAI chief pursues investors including the U.A.E. for a project possibly requiring up to $7 trillion 7 Trillion? The U.A.E's GDP is only 509 Billion [1] ... Something seems off with those fundraising numbers [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_Arab_Emirates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_Arab_Emi...
- skybrian 3y agoI doubt they would be the only investor.
- fbdab103 3y agoYou think multiple nation states will commit their entire GDP?
- aeonik 3y agoMy mortgage was 3 times my gross household GDP.
- moralestapia 3y agoWait, you really think multiple nation states will commit their entire GDP?
- fbdab103 3y agoA house is an asset which can be liquidated for ~the price of the note (black swan dependent). Moonshot R&D has a long history of leaving unlucky investors bankrupt.
- FredPret 3y ago509 Billion here, 509 Billion there, soon you're talking real startup capital
- mmmmmbop 3y agoSaudi Arabia's GDP is only 833 billion, but Saudi Aramco's market cap is 7.43 trillion. This is just to show that GDP is not necessarily reflective of investment power.
- mandeepj 3y ago> including the scarcity of the pricey AI chips required to train large language models They should focus on fixing that problem instead of creating more expensive chips. There should be at least a dozen start-ups working on just that
- RobertDeNiro 3y agoIt’s hard not to see this as a bubble at this point. LLMs are useful, but are they bringing trillions in added value to our economy?
- j0hnyl 3y agoThe valuations and money flowing around are not necessarily relevant to today, but say something about future expectations. I think that LLMs and other tools will bring trillions in added value eventually. EDIT: Typo
- FredPret 3y agoNvidia itself had a sky-high valuation for many years and still do. People were always expecting exponential growth to kick in and make it all add up. Looking at their profit charts, it's currently happening [1] [1] https://valustox.com/NVDA https://valustox.com/NVDA
- blihp 3y agoSure, but the question is would OpenAI be around to see the investment bear fruit after such a spend? In the 90's infrastructure companies (you know, the 'rock solid' infra companies who were going to be around forever) spent billions to lay a lot of dark fiber that was to be the future of the Internet, went bankrupt during the dotcom bust and then Google and other Internet companies gobbled up said fiber at fire sale prices. Of course it was the future of the Internet... just not for them. On second thought... go for it, Sam! I'm looking for some powerful AI hardware at great prices...
- willsmith72 3y agoyeah timing is everything for an emerging company the thing is you can't know if it's the right time, it's indeterminate. all you can do is go for it. usually the world will benefit, whether you win or lose
- eldenring 3y agoLanguage models are a path to Super Intelligence. Not the most efficient one, but it might be good enough to be able to brute force it.
- stormwave 3y agoThe proposed investment is unfathomable. Multiple nation states would be required for such a sum. And for what exactly? If the promise of AGI is true, then wouldn't we be able to ask it how to become more efficient? While it has taken millennia, mother nature has created an incredibly efficient mobile intelligence system. I struggle to understand how one could stake so much on the chance to replicate it. Humanity can do better. Maybe not forever, but certainly for the moment.
- hackernewds 3y agoI would rather we take care of our humans with the trillions rather than manifest a being that might eradicate or replace them
- tivert 3y ago> I would rather we take care of our humans with the trillions rather than manifest a being that might eradicate or replace them Quit it with the speciesism. How could you question the wisdom of aloof techie galaxy brains?
- jjtheblunt 3y ago"according to people familiar with the matter" as a phrase makes me think there should be something for articles with that phrase, a law like Betteridge's, for example.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yigalirani 3y ago10 years and 7 trillions dollar later, someone comes up with much faster and smarter algorithm and make all that obsolete
- tetrisgm 3y agoRight. We should stop funding openai and wait for project to happen in 10 years. Of course someone will make breakthroughs. Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants.
- zug_zug 3y agoI feel like it's incredibly likely that we find an algorithm 100x as performant for less than 10 trillion dollars. I say that mostly because we built an algorithm playing around with math and plugging in different functions and it seems to work in a way that we fundamentally don't understand. As evidence - if I learn a new game, like chess, my rate of mastery per game is going to be orders of magnitude higher than an AI (which will take millions or billions of training sessions). Granted my brain has more synapses than GPT4, but it's unclear how many of those I use playing chess (I wouldn't be surprised if it's less). And regardless I don't think that anybody's arguing that adding more layers accelerates training but rather increases the peak. So perhaps a place to start is studying cases where AIs learn much slower than humans and trying to understand better algorithms of training/reinforcement that may come closer to what the human brain does.
- spookie 3y agoTrue understanding will always topple these attempts at brute forcing our way through, but here we are. I really think we should focus on the science first, as you've hinted at, and these desperate pursuits for compute are making that ever more clear.
- ithkuil 3y agoYeah, your brain has been pre-trained over an incredibly long evolutionary period to be able to learn stuff efficiently. We may eventually build machines that are able to do that, but it may well take us enormous amounts of "brute force" training in order to produce something that then no longer uses brute force to learn further. As an analogy, look at the history of CPU design. The first CPUs have been designed manually, even "drawn" manually. Each generation of CPUs empowered engineers of the future generation to build more complex tasks because they could tap the computation power to assist them in the design and realization of the circuits. Development is incremental. Yes, sometimes you can come up with some new groundbreaking idea that will invalidate what's currently being worked on, but usually these ground breaking ideas come up later when the ground is fertile because you already live in the next generation.
- synergy20 3y agoMicrosoft, Google, Amazon, Meta are all building or using their in-house chips already and are working hard to replace Nvidia as much as they can, especially on the inferential side. OpenAI is basically doing similar things, nothing magic other than Altman wants to use his own chip design. Further, on the hardware side, you have Nvidia, AMD, Intel that are competing fiercely. OpenAI is already under attack from Meta and Google and who know how many LLM companies, while it's the first runner for now, that might change fast. In the worst scenario, its LLM will become just one of a few in 2024, and its chip design will be a few years away if anything and might just turns out to be nothing, just look at Musk's Dojo AI chip, which started years ago and still he is buying Nvidia. Keep acing at your LLM, and leverage Azure's platform for now, then also use some AWS to be safer. Forget about making your chip, it's too far away, and it's too crowded there and too late, you don't need to do everything to be successful, at least, no rush for that now.
- hackernewds 3y agoMost of the companies trying to make their own chips will most likely fail. There are 15 year lead times at foundries and the equipment makers. TSM and ASML still retain almost global monopolies at what they do for a reason - it's highly highly specialized
- chipgap98 3y agoTotally agree with this. The current AI wave is creating a lot of financial incentive to find ways to speed this up though. Interested to see if there ends up being a way around the TSMC / ASML bottleneck.
- LamaOfRuin 3y agoIntel, considering their new partnership with an also-ran Taiwanese contract fab company, has a plausible play for competing with TSMC for leading edge manufacturing in the next few years. Beyond all the existing scaling up started based on pandemic shortages, that's the only thing I've heard of that has a chance of making a dent within 5-10 years. Of course, all that already started scaling up might already be more than enough if you're not a true believer.
- zx8080 3y agoDoes it mean he is creating another for-profit company in addition to the non-profit OpenAI? Would it (eventually) lead to a conflict of interests?
- maximilianroos 3y agoFor context in WWII, industrial defense production reached 10% of GDP in the US. World GDP is now $100T. If the $5T is spent over 5 years, that's 1% of GDP — incredibly high, but within the realm of possibility if we become singularly focused on building out AI.
- __loam 3y agoMaybe I'm crazy but GPT just does not seem compelling enough to command these kinds of insane moonshot capital expenditures. We're essentially betting on a breakthrough that might never come here.
- p1esk 3y agoWe will find out soon enough - GPT5 should be out later this year.
- __loam 3y agoI'm anticipating a disappointing run in with diminishing returns unless the approach changes radically.
- aik 3y ago1. We know they have more big breakthroughs already that have not been released. 2. We know the current tech can keep scaling. They have not hit a limit with the current approach yet. Given gpt-4 is already ridiculously useful and we’ve barely scratched the surface, it makes complete sense to me. More capacity + faster gpt responses unlocks massive amounts of more potential/use cases.
- azinman2 3y agoMakes sense to commit 1% of the world’s total money? I don’t think so… No one is even talking about these kind of figures being used for climate change, which is a far more pressing problem.
- _sword 3y agoI wonder if he's pitching fusion power and AI to the middle east as a post-peak oil hedge for their economies
- dcchambers 3y agoSo Altman really thinks the way to AGI, or at least an "AGI" he can sell to everyone is to brute force his way with LLMs eh? Joking aside, I do think the US needs massive semiconductor investments in places that arent Taiwan. Ideally in the US itself, but anywhere further away from that geopolitical time bomb would be great.
- __loam 3y agoIt's a good thing the government just passed the CHIPS act to invest in domestic semiconductor production then
- onepointsixC 3y agoIt passed a bit ago and nearly none of the funding has been actually given out. Fabs are already being delayed awaiting funds.
- qgin 3y agoRiding across North America in a covered wagon might not be the best way to do it, but if you're in 1800s and you're planning to wait on jet airplanes before you try, you're going to have bad time.
- quickthrower2 3y agoIf you have the ability to raise trillions why do this. Why not get that money into tech to reduce global warming which is more of a threat than not having GPT 6 quadrillion parameter model or whatever.
- justrealist 3y ago> If you have the ability to raise trillions why do this. I mean this should be obvious but the "ability to raise trillions" is because those people think they will get X returns on the money. Your "ability to raise trillions" will quickly evaporate if you offer to throw the money into a pit and set it on fire. If national governments offered a $10T bounty for solving global warming, then sure, you could raise $1T to moonshot it... but there needs to be an incentive.
- sham1 3y agoYou'd think that "preventing a large chunk of the biosphere, especially the part with humans in it, from going FUBAR" would have enough financial incentives behind it as-is (after all, the human-part of the biosphere going FUBAR would just wreck the economy which in turn would lead to no profits to be had), especially with the promise of all the possible clean-tech stuff and innovation that would get birthed from the process of trying to solve climate change. I suppose a big part of this is that the problem doesn't seem urgent enough that it would inspire this sort of ability to raise money.
- justrealist 3y agoThat sounds like a valuable thing for a coalition of governments to put an enormous bounty on! But it's a collective action problem and you're not going to accomplish anything by guilting investors into burning cash singlehandedly solving a tragedy of the commons.
- spencerflem 3y agoit's a coordination problem. it's better for everyone if we do, but not any individual company, which is why the free market will never solve it
- throwaway892238 3y agoYou've got to love the bravado of rich men and how easily they can take other people's money and flush it down the drain
- smegsicle 3y agoand women!
- throwaway892238 3y agoyeah, that's true
- wnc3141 3y agoeh I think he just wants to go vertical, as his current moat is unstable.
- 15457345234 3y agoUnstable? I don't see why people are still talking about OpenAI. Isn't the current consensus that Mixtral-whatever outperforms the OAI product while being runnable locally on your damn macbook? They had an edge, they lost it, this is now desperate scrambling for cash
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y agoIt's unlikely that anything beats GPT-4.5-base. Mistral is good but still far behind.
- wnc3141 3y agoI'm curious to see which the market demands, the highest performance, the most cost efficient, or the best integrated llm?
- iamleppert 3y agoWow he really jumped into the deep end of the pool, and is about to find out how hard hardware is, let alone custom chips! Apple didn’t even attempt it until the not so distant past and it was still seen as incredibly risky for them. And they weren’t innovating a whole new ASIC and nascent industry at the same time. He’s got guts, but does he really have enough relevant experience in hardware (the hardest parts of it too) to think this will be successful? Where is all the confidence coming from?
- theGnuMe 3y ago>Where is all the confidence coming from? We already know it is possible. You just need to hire the right people. Elon launched reusable rockets into space using the same philosophy. Jobs built a personal computer likewise.
- maxamillion2020 3y agodo you believe Jobs invented the PC?
- AlbertCory 3y agoWaiting for the movie. The Altman character is going to say, A billion isn't cool. You know what's cool? A trillion.
- fieldcny 3y agoHow is this not a giant red flag that there is a massive fraud there?
- marton78 3y agoIt seems Altman is turning into a paperclip maximizer.
- throwaway4good 3y agoSo maybe amounts loose their meaning when they become really big. And maybe this is a bit of: Hi mom. Will you invest 10 USD in my startup valued at 7 T USD. I am making an electronic god. But 7 T usd is about 1/3 of the US GDP. That is another way of saying the value of 100 million Americans working for a full year. It is really ridicolous.
- choppaface 3y agosama thinks OpenAI will "capture the light cone of all future value in the universe" so betting now on 1/3 of US GDP is probably in his mind actually very conservative. https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/18/sam-altmans-leap-of-faith/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/18/sam-altmans-leap-of-faith/
- throwaway4good 3y agoI consider Altman to be a salesperson. Had his orb cryptocurrency project taken off instead of OpenAI then I imagine he would be touring the world with similar silly statements about the orb. What I find amazing is that this stuff sells even though it is way beyond common sense and I am sure in couple of years will be subject to ridicule.
- 6510 3y agoI knew the robot overlord was going to take our money in some ingenious way, the plot doesn't disappoint, we are just going to hand it over?
- beezlewax 3y agoAll aboard the hype-train! This guy is starting to look more and more like Elon Musk everyday.
- thelastgallon 3y agoHe needs Adam Neumann to make the pitch work.
- jgalt212 3y agoCongratulations on saying the biggest number, you ** morons!
- ilikehurdles 3y ago“According to [one person of] people familiar with the matter” the amount sought “could be” $7 trillion. This is journalistic malpractice.
- simne 3y agoIt is known for electronics designers, that specialized circuits outperforms GPUs for few times. Before appear Tensor cores, GPUs was about 4 times worse (speed, power consumption). With Tensor cores, GPUs become better, but they still need to carry video hardware (ramdac, video connectors, 3D processing units, network to connect all this stuff), so they still late. Really GPUs are interest just because current AI applications are not achieve enough revenue to pay for large scale production of special chips. I don't know, if Altman have something Big to get revenue to pay for special chips. Exists speculations that GPT-5 will be enough to replace human at work. If this is real, AI chips will be worth it.
- bparsons 3y agoHe is seeking 1/11th global GDP to build a chip?