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Sam Altman Wants $7T
- megamix 3y agoSo he need more horses? Maybe spend half that budget to deal with any copyright violations.
- chefandy 3y ago"Sam Alman Wants $7T (astralcodexten.com)" Maybe I'm missing some play on words, but that should be Altman, no?
- leashless 3y agoI don't think even SoftBank would go for that. But... if... run multiple cities off the waste heat from the compute. Easy to see the chain of logic which runs from there to the Dyson sphere made of computronium. We live in interesting times!
- tw04 3y agoSam Altman seems to want power and attention. If mankind has $7t to throw away it would be far better spent moving the entire world to renewable energy and renewable powered transportation. Unless his ultimate goal is to leave earth to our AI powered overlords, “AI” is absolutely meaningless if the planet is uninhabitable for humans.
- yeknoda 3y ago7T spend would include power sources for the data centers and chip factories, and he is probably advocating big nuclear/solar builds.
- arrosenberg 3y agoWhy wouldn't we just use the 7B, build the nuclear and solar builds and use it to transition transportation and industrial processes? Why use the money to train a neural net that will likely still be less useful than a small team of humans?
- atleastoptimal 3y agoHe may want power and attention but he is FAR less power and attention seeking than Elon Musk. I think he enjoys being powerful like any human but has a genuine care for how AI could improve humanity and the world for all humans. He does see what OpenAI is doing as a "Manhattan Project", in which the technology has a tremendous amount of inherent risks, but it's better they proceed with the greatest caution and make steps towards international cooperation so that AGI doesn't emerge in the wrong hands. Since the tech is inevitable, it is best it doesn't deploy itself into the world without great disasters occurring on its release. As for the 7 trillion dollar thing, I don't think he's serious about it, as in he doesn't expect to get the money in the same way he'd expect to get 10-20 billion for OpenAI if fundraising. I think he's using the 7T figure as somewhat of a marketing tactic to elucidate the world on the compute build up that will be necessary. He probably believes that in a few years, 7 trillion will be spent to get to the gigaflops necessary for ASI. He probably feels its best to deploy the crazy number now so people are generally aware of the scale he anticipates for when AI really gets going in 1-2 years.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoHow amazing that Altman and Musk have the same therapist, and that they are posting on HN!
- atleastoptimal 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoCan you please not post like this? We're trying for something else here.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoFair. That was a shit post and not what I like to read either. >Can you please not post like this? OK, I wont
- borissk 3y agoGPT-7, a.k.a. SkyNet.
- steveBK123 3y ago$7T raise implies like a $700T valuation right? Just a casual 7 years of world GDP. At some point it might be cheaper just to let humans continue to do whatever work we imagine GPT-17 will automate.
- kamikaz1k 3y agoI think 35T, cuz like 20% stake
- adventured 3y agoI would guess it means $7 trillion spent directed at AI infrastructure over 20 years globally, or a similar multi decade premise. Even if he wanted headlines with that gaudy figure, he knows the VC industry inside and out and knows the fund raising limits.
- dvngnt_ 3y agoi do too
- neets 3y agoIsn't he just saying that people need to bring more than just money to the table?
- kungfupawnda 3y agoPeople have been scared of AGI for decades, such that it would take over and destroy humanity. Hail our robot overlords! My take is that it will do that indirectly by destroying the climate first because of the energy requirements. I find it chilling to imagine the possibility that any inevitable successful AGI would require humans to first destroy themselves. As in we are setting up the precondition for it. Just like how dinosaurs were wiped out so that the homo sapiens can evolve.
- stanleykm 3y agoSimilarly AI will cost jobs but only because companies will overinvest in it at the expense of other parts of the business.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoI kind of doubt that. Much more likely in my mind would either be we go back into an "AI winter" or AI solves the energy crisis by solving fusion.
- stanleykm 3y agois it more efficient to properly fund fusion research or give sam altman $7T and hope for the best?
- adventured 3y agoNobody is giving Altman $7 trillion and there isn't any evidence that he's actually trying to raise it (as opposed to suggesting that level of investment globally over time toward AI related infrastructure to support its build out).
- kungfupawnda 3y agoI got 'triggered' into this thought by thinking about the energy requirements of a system worth 7 trillion. A system which seems to require exponentially larger resources for progression.
- 3y ago
- coffeebeqn 3y ago$7 trillion would make OpenAI the 3rd largest economy for that year
- mjfl 3y agoI thought I left a spare trillion around here somewhere...
- deadbabe 3y agoIs this peak tech hubris?
- chefandy 3y agoHonestly, given the current tech business culture, I'd be surprised if this was the peak for this quarter.
- zdw 3y agoThe "Trough of Disillusionment" can't come fast enough for this...
- rhelz 3y agoIf he wants to actually do something like dethrone NVIDIA in the next 10 years, $7T sounds about right.
- deathanatos 3y ago… NVIDIA's market cap is < $2T. You could just buy NVIDIA … and have considerable change left to spare.
- steveBK123 3y agoFor context, US National Defense budget is $1.5T/year. An aircraft carrier costs $13B. For another $10B you can put 100x F35s on it. The market cap of the entire Magnificent Seven is $12T.
- mushufasa 3y agonice writeup, pointing out the tension between quick scaling and safety. I think a bigger problem with this is more simple: there's a pretty critical assumption that the GPT-6 and GPT-7 models will need orders of magnitude more compute. On the one hand, that was true for GPT2 > 3 > 4. On the other hand, history is rife with fallacious predictions about technology development and resource usage, all the way back to Malthus. Typically, as the human race focuses on a problem, whether that be farm efficiency or AI or anything else, people invent new approaches that invalidate simplistic forecasting about resource usage. In this context specifically, I think there's a lot of promising research with different types of model architectures and multimodal models, to the extent that AGI may not be a path paved through brute forcing transformer training for LLMs. In fact, I believe Sam Altman said this himself last year!!! Also, from a pure business perspective: it's one thing to spend $7T and build a bunch of factories. It's quite another thing to beat Jensen at that game, who has a legendary history of beating the odds when his company was headed for failure by constant process innovation and strategic moves -- this podcast episode saga is a great listen: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993-2006 https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993... I think Sam is thinking too much like a VC here -- raise as much as you can and take your % management fees -- and I would not be eager to invest so much into brute forcing a hardware business at scale. I'd much rather invest that into NVIDIA or AMD, who have the battle scars to know how to build hardware profitably.
- Retr0id 3y agoThe biggest mistake people make when looking at a graph that goes up is assuming that it will continue to go up.
- rvnx 3y agoEspecially with computer-related hardware tech, prices tend to go down as competition increases and that the technology gets replaced with higher performing one. CD ROM burners were amazing technology, and now they are super cheap. Pentium II was super expensive too. GPUs cards... GeForce GTX 470, 350 USD into 35 USD today, in 10 years. There is no reason to believe that "AI accelerators" (which are +/- non-specialized GPUs for now) won't become cheap too. It may even come faster than expected, like this year, Apple may already announce specialized circuitry. And no, there is no need for 7T USD for that. The foundries are the same, we haven't discovered integrated circuits, just some cool software that is not different than running Grand Theft Auto in "the cloud".
- Retr0id 3y agoThank you for illustrating.
- mr_toad 3y agohttps://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- Thaxll 3y ago[flagged]
- empath-nirvana 3y agoThe impression I got from the WSJ article is that he wants a 7 trillion dollar investment in chip manufacturing world wide, not that he personally wants to raise 7 trillion dollars. If you put it that way, it's not that unreasonable at all.
- Mistletoe 3y agoWhat has AI given us so far that would hint that 7 trillion would ever pay off for humanity? AI seems neat so far but it's not much above a chatbot that gives me info I could find with google. It can make lots of strange images and the hands are getting better. Am I being overly pessimistic? I think people that use it for coding help are overly optimistic about it because it is awesome at that.
- willmadden 3y agoAsking for 7T is ridiculous. He needs to prove the product step-by-step, not jump three steps ahead of what exists.
- coolspot 3y agoI assume $7T is a commitment spread over many (10?) years, which is just mere 700B a year. Now get 100 largest companies/governments/funds invest just a 7B a year each and you will have it, ez-pz.
- a_bonobo 3y agoFor comparison's sake: to regenerate the data that enabled AlphaFold, you'd have to spend about $20 billion. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-02103-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-02103-0 >A major distinguishing factor of the sciences (specifically, biology, chemistry and physics), as compared to AI fields such as natural language processing and computer vision, is the relative lack of publicly available data suitable for these domains (see Box 1). There are simply vastly fewer data existing in the sciences, and these are often siloed by academics and companies. Acquiring appropriate scientific data for AI typically requires not only highly trained humans, but also high-end facilities with expensive equipment, making for an overall costly and slow endeavor compared to humans simply going about their day by adding to the vast trove of images, text, audio and video on the World Wide Web. As one example, it has been estimated that “The replacement cost of the entire PDB [Protein Data Bank] archive is conservatively estimated at ∼US$20 billion”1 —these are the data used by DeepMind to train AlphaFold2.
- kart23 3y agosmelling like weird crypto hype all over again. I don't think anyone could seriously claim gpt-4 is 30x better than gpt-4.
- farhanhubble 3y agoAs history has taught us sometimes the impossible happens in an instant and sometimes the "should be easy" takes millennia to solve. The "AI" we have today is definitely usable in very narrow use cases versus the just paper-worthy "AIs" of the past however there is nothing to suggest a seven trillion endeavor will have even a marginal utility.
- Fomite 3y ago"My current impression of OpenAI’s multiple contradictory perspectives here is that they are genuinely interested in safety - but only insofar as that’s compatible with scaling up AI as fast as possible." I'd rewrite this as "...they are genuinely interested in safety - but only insofar as it doesn't get in the way."
- CyberDildonics 3y agoI would rather own 1/7th of all the houses in the US then whatever he is up to. At one point yahoo was supposedly worth more than the entire 300 million person economy of indonesia and amazingly, it didn't last.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoThe 7 Trillion figure seems to come from a single source reporting on Altman's discussions with the UAE on a large chip making venture to boost the world's fabrication and deployment capacity for AI compute. It is reported to cost between 5-7 trillion. So a single source has the high number 7 trillion, which doesn't include over how long this amount will be invested, the structure of this initiative, etc. I think people read this and think the gist is "Sam Altman is requesting 7 trillion dollars personally for OpenAI to build chips right away" like it's another funding round. I think the general premise is that he anticipates that much money will be needed to get to ASI compute and he's citing the amount now so people are apprised of the scale. Until more explicit reporting emerges the speculation seems to be more revolving around people's seeming dislike/disillusionment with AI and its impact on tech than the actual facts.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zer00eyz 3y agoNone of that changes HOW MUCH 7 trillion is The GDP of India + Japan 10 ish years of us military budget. Buy all of apple, twice, and have money left over. It's an astronomical sum of money and your post does NOT indicate that at all.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoIt's a lot of money, but spread out over let's say 10 years it isn't crazy. Nvidia's market cap has increased by 1.2 trillion over the past year alone. That's just a single firm. 10 years ago Apple's market cap was 469 billion. Now it's 2.86 trillion. Microsoft's was 350 billion. Now it's 3 trillion. Perhaps the amount assumes growth in tech will continue at a similar rate. In 10 years, Microsoft would be worth 30 trillion. It may sound crazy, but how crazy would it sound to tell someone in 2014 that Nvidia would be worth the price it is now? If the amount is describing the cost of the investment over a time period of that scale, it starts to make more sense, ambitious as it is.
- 3y ago
- avidphantasm 3y agoThis is absurd. The increasing amount of compute and energy it is taking to training subsequent generations of models is all you need to look at to see that this is not and never will be the path to AGI. This is a slightly more useful boondoggle than BitCoin, but will more detrimental to society by orders of magnitude as these ersatz "good enough" AI tools put countless people out of jobs and jeopardize safety when these "AI" tools are put in the loop of critical systems. You all have been warned.
- antisthenes 3y agoCan someone in AI spice chime in on this: Let's say we somehow have $7T to train GPT-7 or an equivalent model. Is there even enough content in the world for this? Or is the training effort completely unrelated to the amount of needed content?
- yigalirani 3y ago7t is ridiculous. maybe drug induced uophoria?
- gnabgib 3y agoPreviously: [0](149 points, 5 days ago, 208 comments) [1](56 points, 4 days ago, 61 comments) + at least 6 other posts (low chatter). Tech Meme ride home podcast it last Friday [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39310563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39310563 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39315786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39315786
- dang 3y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Sam Altman wants to raise up to $7T. That's, uh, a lot of dough - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39343762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39343762 - Feb 2024 (3 comments) Why the world should say No to Sam Altman - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39328945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39328945 - Feb 2024 (32 comments) Sam Altman seeking trillions for AI chip fabrication from UAE, others - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39318848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39318848 - Feb 2024 (37 comments) Sam Altman seeks to raise up to $7T for new chip project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39315786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39315786 - Feb 2024 (61 comments) OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seeks as much as $7 Trillion for new AI chip project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39315206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39315206 - Feb 2024 (6 comments) Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39310563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39310563 - Feb 2024 (208 comments) Now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants billions for AI chip fabs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39088423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39088423 - Jan 2024 (4 comments) Now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants billions for AI chip fabs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39080214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39080214 - Jan 2024 (11 comments) OpenAI's Sam Altman in talks with Middle East backers over chip venture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074297 - Jan 2024 (2 comments) Altman seeks to raise billions for network of AI chip factories - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39058366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39058366 - Jan 2024 (9 comments)
- izzydata 3y agoHave LLMs done anything to stimulate the world economy or improve peoples lives? As far as I can see the only thing its done so far is drain energy and money.
- Vecr 3y agoWhen you spend money it does not go away. Actually, sometimes it does, but in this case quite a lot of it goes to companies that build physical items.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoRelated source story discussion from a few days ago: Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39310563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39310563
- riscy 3y agoThat 7T to replace future people’s jobs could also go to producing the people to do those jobs. But I guess it’s too hard to make money investing in people.
- lsy 3y agoWhat isn't really discussed here (and I wish was!) is the corollary to the price scaling of successive generations: the outcome isn't proportionate to the increased cost. GPT-4 cost thirty times as much as GPT-3 to train, but it isn't thirty times better. It's not even twice as good! I suspect the majority of people using an OpenAI product are still using GPT-3.5 in the free tier and are mostly satisfied with it, because the basic proposition — plausibly fluent English text — is still there, and GPT-4's improvements aren't needed for most of the use cases an LLM satisfies. Following this out, you have the prospect of this company burning multiple trillion dollars to create a foundation model that is slower than GPT-4 and possibly only 5-10% better. The only way this makes any sense financially is if you think that extra 5-10% takes us to some kind of AGI that solves all of the reasons GPT-4 hasn't put everyone out of a job. I suspect OpenAI doesn't think this, but maybe "training another model" is easier to pitch than whatever the process would be to find product-market fit for their current model.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago> GPT-4 cost thirty times as much as GPT-3 to train, but it isn't thirty times better. It's not even twice as good! Any small percentage gain in general intelligence is well worth it given the huge implications. If you believe AGI is possible, and it certainly makes sense to believe that given the performance improvements in foundation models over the past 5 years, then even an inordinately large sum justifies getting there. But more practically. Let's say GPT 4 is not good enough to completely replace any human. Let's say GPT-5's improvements allow it to replace the bottom 10% of white collar jobs. That alone, discounting the productivity improvements for people who use it but aren't replaced by it, would offset the even enormous upfront costs.
- dns_snek 3y agoYou're just using wishful assumptions and circular reasoning to promote a silly investment ("Let's assume our investment pays off, that alone makes it worthwhile to invest in."). You could just as easily spend trillions and end up with less than 20% improvement over GPT-4. Future gains are not guaranteed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwboatyface 3y agoIn "The Population Bomb" (1968) Robert Ehrlich claimed that within 10 years there would be catastrophic famines because of exponential population growth. A lot of people have blind faith in just extrapolating numbers out into the future with no context.
- andrewstuart 3y agoAsking for $7 trillion dollars is simply how you go about getting $700billion. $700billion looks sane next to $7T. However if you START asking for $700B then people will say you are crazy.