6 ms·

> If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of ener

by gwern 2y ago

> If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people. Translation for the rest of us: "we need to fully privatize the OA subsidiary and turn it into a B-corp which can raise a lot more capital over the next decade, in order to achieve the goals of the nonprofit, because the chief threat is not anything like existential risk from autonomous agents in the next few years or arms races, but inadequate commercialization due to fundraising constraints".

n2d4 2y ago
Well predicted. Just two days later: > OpenAI to remove non-profit control and give Sam Altman equity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548
metacritic12 2y ago
Good point. His story is valid, but just-so happens to equal AI maximalism that most CEOs would want for their own industry too.
peppermill 2y ago
It's amazing how he can imagine wars being fought over AI but not wars being fought over resources needed to "build enough infrastructure."
- kulahan 2y ago
  Taking it a step further, building that infrastructure may contribute somewhat directly to limiting the other resources actual wars are being fought over. This man needs to get out of his own head.
  - throw_pm23 2y ago
    "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
    - p1esk 2y ago
      Sam’s ambitions are way beyond “salary”.
      - kevinob11 2y ago
        Replace salary with the thing he wants
        p1esk 2y ago
        Maybe he wants to make the world a better place?
        throw_pm23 2y ago
        Maybe :)
      - willturman 2y ago
        It's a quote from Upton Sinclair from an era where you generally had to have a profitable business and employees before you had investors.
        novok 2y ago
        There were many ventures in the past that got investors without a current profitable going concern. Oil & mining speculation, chartering boat crews to go on exploration expeditions and more.
        Terr_ 2y ago
        Indeed, public investment was born from large projects where any profit would be many years off.
- KETHERCORTEX 2y ago
  > he can imagine wars being fought over AI I wonder how did he come to such a prediction. When was the last time we had a war over advanced tech? Armies didn't fight over telegraph, radio, phones and cars. A war to get AI would also be foolish. A few hundred bombs from your adversaries and AI won't have electricity to function.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > I wonder how did he come to such a prediction. At the risk of belaboring the subtext: It's kind of prediction which flatters the predictor's ego, and exaggerates the importance of the company and its output. If believed, the claim can be leveraged to boost investor activity, land big contracts, and lobby for special legal/tax benefits.
  - empath75 2y ago
    It's arguable that every major conflict of the 20th century was over resources required by the combustion engine -- fossil fuels and rubber, in particular.
  - throwthrowuknow 2y ago
    You have to look at the late 1800s for examples. It won’t be wars over data centres and winning won’t be simple or even possible. It would look like the wars that the U.S. Army fought against indian tribes or like the British, French, German and Dutch colonization of Africa. That is assuming there is an AI side and a non-AI side. Incidentally those conflicts did involve a lot of strategic infrastructure like railways and telegraph lines. Fighting the expansionary actions of an AI enabled culture will not be as simple as bombing power plants, after all those are prime targets in any modern war and are well defended. How do you propose to win against an entire bloc of countries that have decided to use the products of AI to do whatever they wish with the world?
  - richardw 2y ago
    Telegraph, radio, phones, cars didn't guarantee success. Those things can't outthink you. Somewhat extreme case: let's say Israel saw that Iran was days away from getting AGI. It would instantly throw every nuke it had at Iran. Now, scale that up to the global superpowers and near-superpowers. I wouldn't want to put money on what e.g. the U.S. would do if China was days away from AGI. There are a lot of options below going nuclear, e.g. assassinations, hacking, destruction of equipment. Once someone has a thing that can invent, hack, assemble, strategise 24/7, replicate itself, all bets are very much off. We need to sleep, it doesn't.
- trhway 2y ago
  >resources needed to "build enough infrastructure." Strarship will put into orbit 100tons at $10M or so. I.e. <5kg (Nvidia H100 plus 1M2 of aluminum radiator (would radiate 0.5-1Kw away at 60-70C) plus 0.5Kw of solar panels) for <$500, ie. peanuts compare to the price of the H100 or whatever NVDA would be charging $30K/card. And wars willn't be fought over AI. Wars will be fought using AI. Humans will have no chance in controlling millions of their own and responding to the actions of the millions of the enemy's simultaneously active automated high-precision munitions of all kinds, and that picture leads to a new, non-nuclear this time, AI-based MAD (that of course means that like with nuclear race back then all the parties have to build their capabilities right now as fast as possible, Manhattan project style).
  - phs318u 2y ago
    > Wars will be fought using AI. I agree with the sentiment but not the mechanism (munitions). If power equates to control of resources then destroying the resources is kind of self-defeating. Far better then to "win" a war by getting friendly regimes installed that are aligned to your interests. We're already seeing the importance of this kind of approach, but the ultimate evolution will be that what used to be called propaganda (disinformation) will not just facilitate a war of guns and bombs, it will _be_ the war - able to directly achieve the end-goals of the "war" with not a single shot fired. AI is a huge amplifier of capability in this domain.
  - com2kid 2y ago
    Heat doesn't radiate like that in space. This topic comes up on HN often enough. There isn't anything to carry the heat away because space is, by definition, empty. The energy has to be carried away by something. Cooling space stations is a legit real problem. The only thing space gets you is somewhat better solar efficiency, but we aren't lacking of land to build solar panels on here on earth.
    - trhway 2y ago
      >Heat doesn't radiate like that in space. What do you mean? I stated black body radiation numbers. >There isn't anything to carry the heat away because space is, by definition, empty. Heat radiation. Which is what Sun for example does in that empty space. >Cooling space stations is a legit real problem. Please, numbers. Otherwise it is just some hand-waving. >The only thing space gets you is somewhat better solar efficiency, but we aren't lacking of land to build solar panels on here on earth. Space gets you away from regulations, corrupt bureaucrats, and the threat of war/terrorism/etc. for example. At $100/Kg building in space looks to be just cheaper. And space allows to have solar and datacenter in the same unit, while on Earth you have to deliver your electricity from a solar farm somewhere to the datacenter. There is a reason Oracle started to talk nuclear in the datacenter. And between nuclear in the datacenter on Earth and solar+datacenter in space at $100/Kg i think the space scenario would be simpler and cheaper.
Dig1t 2y ago
I read this as: "we need to ramp up nuclear energy".
- bredren 2y ago
  Coincides with this news: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-20/microsoft-s-ai-power-needs-prompt-revival-of-three-mile-island-nuclear-plant https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-20/microsoft...
api 2y ago
> put AI into the hands of as many people as possible ... by establishing regulatory moats to prevent competition and limit or outlaw actually-open AI?
- svnt 2y ago
  He didn’t say that other people need to put it into the hands of as many people as possible, only that his company does.
goldfeld 2y ago
I see how AI is used today and extrapolate. A lot. Everything in tech is extrapolation with the march of capital. It takes one to know one; rather it takes a smart ass to wield a smart tool. So the smart get smarter. Is it a separate phenomenon, in the big picture, from the rich getting richer, from the monopolies over means of production? Not sure, but I see as well that the dumb will surely get dumber; that "intelligence" will be a product of using intelligent humans' means of production, and not owning them of course, but being owned in the process. Populations will be literally made lighter of their smarts, outsourcing intelligence to agents out of general control (classic bait and switch.) Since AI feel my own process getting more clueless as I go, I'd better conclude somehow. I see the Age of Ignorance ahead, there was once an Enlightenment, and here light takes on its other side or meaning, the workers being enlightened, to wit, made lighter of their horrible burden which is intelligence and its obnoxious demands of upkeep. Just pay someone for upkeep and stop messing with wet messy neurons already, says the technocrat to the cheerful mob.
- throwthrowuknow 2y ago
  The people who only use the end products will be less skillful the same way people today are less skillful at cooking, sewing, carpentry, animal husbandry, etc. because they avail themselves of modern services made possible by technology. If you are utilizing AI to its fullest you won’t be less skillful but you will have to trade your current set of skills for another. The enlightenment you’re feeling is the same you have when you’re promoted to management and don’t have time to get your hands dirty.
svnt 2y ago
> If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people. The mostly-open goal of every VC-funded startup is to become a monopoly. If a strong enough monopoly in AI hardware were to exist, then the issues he describes could become a problem. Otherwise, what he is describing is just the ad absurdum of how capitalism works. Phrased differently it sounds like: “If this extremely powerful and profitable product that depends on other products gets built, then if no one else builds the also profitable substrate that it operates on, terrible things will happen!” Or again slightly differently: “We need to be able to compete with our suppliers because our core business model might not be defensible unless we can also win in their space.”
saurabhchalke 2y ago
Why can't we just go with Occam's razor, and assume that they really believe in their mission of providing access to frontier AI as freely to the world as possible?
- CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  When someone says something, but their actions or commitment don't align with what they said, they were lying. Always place more weight on what it takes more effort to do: spout a bunch of hot air, or put your money where your mouth is? Occam's Razor, duh.
- munksbeer 2y ago
  For what it's worth, I agree with you. But you're going to find it hard to persuade others because of the current zeitgeist and that humans seem to prefer a doom/villain story.
- stonogo 2y ago
  Because that doesn't account for the non-profit rugpull he orchestrated earlier in the company's history.
- jampekka 2y ago
  Occam's razor says they are saying whatever gives them as much money and power as possible. OpenAI is suspiciously bad in providing access to their models, compared to e.g. Meta, Mistral, BLOOM collaboration, Alibaba and even oil tyrants FFS.
- Gud 2y ago
  Why would that be where Occams Razor leads us?
- squigz 2y ago
  Because that isn't actually the simpler explanation. The simpler one is that he'll say anything to make money.
roenxi 2y ago
And the reason we can be certain that it is an accurate one is that the only way to put AI in the hands of as many people as possible is to commercialise the tech. Non-profits are good at many things, but not for spreading technical improvements. There aren't many alternatives here. It is commercialisation or looming irrelevance.
tyberns 2y ago
This is so true, resource management and infrastructure are going to be the bottlenecks
8note 2y ago
I'd expect "we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible" to be either exposing model weights, or making the training sets public.
gwern 2y ago
A general reply to all of the comments thus far: you are completely missing the point here. OP is not a meaningful forecast, and it's not about nuclear power or any of that. It's about laying the groundwork for the privatization and establishing rhetorical grounds for how the privatization of OA is consistent with the OA nonprofit's legally-required mission and fiduciary duties. Altman is not writing to anyone here, he is, among others, writing to the OA nonprofit board and to the judge next year.

by gwern 2y ago

n2d4 2y ago

Well predicted. Just two days later: > OpenAI to remove non-profit control and give Sam Altman equity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548

metacritic12 2y ago

Good point. His story is valid, but just-so happens to equal AI maximalism that most CEOs would want for their own industry too.

peppermill 2y ago

It's amazing how he can imagine wars being fought over AI but not wars being fought over resources needed to "build enough infrastructure."

kulahan 2y ago
Taking it a step further, building that infrastructure may contribute somewhat directly to limiting the other resources actual wars are being fought over. This man needs to get out of his own head.
- throw_pm23 2y ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
  - p1esk 2y ago
    Sam’s ambitions are way beyond “salary”.
    - kevinob11 2y ago
      Replace salary with the thing he wants
      - p1esk 2y ago
        Maybe he wants to make the world a better place?
        throw_pm23 2y ago
        Maybe :)
    - willturman 2y ago
      It's a quote from Upton Sinclair from an era where you generally had to have a profitable business and employees before you had investors.
      - novok 2y ago
        There were many ventures in the past that got investors without a current profitable going concern. Oil & mining speculation, chartering boat crews to go on exploration expeditions and more.
        Terr_ 2y ago
        Indeed, public investment was born from large projects where any profit would be many years off.
KETHERCORTEX 2y ago
> he can imagine wars being fought over AI I wonder how did he come to such a prediction. When was the last time we had a war over advanced tech? Armies didn't fight over telegraph, radio, phones and cars. A war to get AI would also be foolish. A few hundred bombs from your adversaries and AI won't have electricity to function.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > I wonder how did he come to such a prediction. At the risk of belaboring the subtext: It's kind of prediction which flatters the predictor's ego, and exaggerates the importance of the company and its output. If believed, the claim can be leveraged to boost investor activity, land big contracts, and lobby for special legal/tax benefits.
- empath75 2y ago
  It's arguable that every major conflict of the 20th century was over resources required by the combustion engine -- fossil fuels and rubber, in particular.
- throwthrowuknow 2y ago
  You have to look at the late 1800s for examples. It won’t be wars over data centres and winning won’t be simple or even possible. It would look like the wars that the U.S. Army fought against indian tribes or like the British, French, German and Dutch colonization of Africa. That is assuming there is an AI side and a non-AI side. Incidentally those conflicts did involve a lot of strategic infrastructure like railways and telegraph lines. Fighting the expansionary actions of an AI enabled culture will not be as simple as bombing power plants, after all those are prime targets in any modern war and are well defended. How do you propose to win against an entire bloc of countries that have decided to use the products of AI to do whatever they wish with the world?
- richardw 2y ago
  Telegraph, radio, phones, cars didn't guarantee success. Those things can't outthink you. Somewhat extreme case: let's say Israel saw that Iran was days away from getting AGI. It would instantly throw every nuke it had at Iran. Now, scale that up to the global superpowers and near-superpowers. I wouldn't want to put money on what e.g. the U.S. would do if China was days away from AGI. There are a lot of options below going nuclear, e.g. assassinations, hacking, destruction of equipment. Once someone has a thing that can invent, hack, assemble, strategise 24/7, replicate itself, all bets are very much off. We need to sleep, it doesn't.
trhway 2y ago
>resources needed to "build enough infrastructure." Strarship will put into orbit 100tons at $10M or so. I.e. <5kg (Nvidia H100 plus 1M2 of aluminum radiator (would radiate 0.5-1Kw away at 60-70C) plus 0.5Kw of solar panels) for <$500, ie. peanuts compare to the price of the H100 or whatever NVDA would be charging $30K/card. And wars willn't be fought over AI. Wars will be fought using AI. Humans will have no chance in controlling millions of their own and responding to the actions of the millions of the enemy's simultaneously active automated high-precision munitions of all kinds, and that picture leads to a new, non-nuclear this time, AI-based MAD (that of course means that like with nuclear race back then all the parties have to build their capabilities right now as fast as possible, Manhattan project style).
- phs318u 2y ago
  > Wars will be fought using AI. I agree with the sentiment but not the mechanism (munitions). If power equates to control of resources then destroying the resources is kind of self-defeating. Far better then to "win" a war by getting friendly regimes installed that are aligned to your interests. We're already seeing the importance of this kind of approach, but the ultimate evolution will be that what used to be called propaganda (disinformation) will not just facilitate a war of guns and bombs, it will _be_ the war - able to directly achieve the end-goals of the "war" with not a single shot fired. AI is a huge amplifier of capability in this domain.
- com2kid 2y ago
  Heat doesn't radiate like that in space. This topic comes up on HN often enough. There isn't anything to carry the heat away because space is, by definition, empty. The energy has to be carried away by something. Cooling space stations is a legit real problem. The only thing space gets you is somewhat better solar efficiency, but we aren't lacking of land to build solar panels on here on earth.
  - trhway 2y ago
    >Heat doesn't radiate like that in space. What do you mean? I stated black body radiation numbers. >There isn't anything to carry the heat away because space is, by definition, empty. Heat radiation. Which is what Sun for example does in that empty space. >Cooling space stations is a legit real problem. Please, numbers. Otherwise it is just some hand-waving. >The only thing space gets you is somewhat better solar efficiency, but we aren't lacking of land to build solar panels on here on earth. Space gets you away from regulations, corrupt bureaucrats, and the threat of war/terrorism/etc. for example. At $100/Kg building in space looks to be just cheaper. And space allows to have solar and datacenter in the same unit, while on Earth you have to deliver your electricity from a solar farm somewhere to the datacenter. There is a reason Oracle started to talk nuclear in the datacenter. And between nuclear in the datacenter on Earth and solar+datacenter in space at $100/Kg i think the space scenario would be simpler and cheaper.

Dig1t 2y ago

I read this as: "we need to ramp up nuclear energy".

bredren 2y ago
Coincides with this news: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-20/microsoft-s-ai-power-needs-prompt-revival-of-three-mile-island-nuclear-plant https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-20/microsoft...

api 2y ago

> put AI into the hands of as many people as possible ... by establishing regulatory moats to prevent competition and limit or outlaw actually-open AI?

svnt 2y ago
He didn’t say that other people need to put it into the hands of as many people as possible, only that his company does.

goldfeld 2y ago

I see how AI is used today and extrapolate. A lot. Everything in tech is extrapolation with the march of capital. It takes one to know one; rather it takes a smart ass to wield a smart tool. So the smart get smarter. Is it a separate phenomenon, in the big picture, from the rich getting richer, from the monopolies over means of production? Not sure, but I see as well that the dumb will surely get dumber; that "intelligence" will be a product of using intelligent humans' means of production, and not owning them of course, but being owned in the process. Populations will be literally made lighter of their smarts, outsourcing intelligence to agents out of general control (classic bait and switch.) Since AI feel my own process getting more clueless as I go, I'd better conclude somehow. I see the Age of Ignorance ahead, there was once an Enlightenment, and here light takes on its other side or meaning, the workers being enlightened, to wit, made lighter of their horrible burden which is intelligence and its obnoxious demands of upkeep. Just pay someone for upkeep and stop messing with wet messy neurons already, says the technocrat to the cheerful mob.

throwthrowuknow 2y ago
The people who only use the end products will be less skillful the same way people today are less skillful at cooking, sewing, carpentry, animal husbandry, etc. because they avail themselves of modern services made possible by technology. If you are utilizing AI to its fullest you won’t be less skillful but you will have to trade your current set of skills for another. The enlightenment you’re feeling is the same you have when you’re promoted to management and don’t have time to get your hands dirty.

svnt 2y ago

> If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people. The mostly-open goal of every VC-funded startup is to become a monopoly. If a strong enough monopoly in AI hardware were to exist, then the issues he describes could become a problem. Otherwise, what he is describing is just the ad absurdum of how capitalism works. Phrased differently it sounds like: “If this extremely powerful and profitable product that depends on other products gets built, then if no one else builds the also profitable substrate that it operates on, terrible things will happen!” Or again slightly differently: “We need to be able to compete with our suppliers because our core business model might not be defensible unless we can also win in their space.”

saurabhchalke 2y ago

Why can't we just go with Occam's razor, and assume that they really believe in their mission of providing access to frontier AI as freely to the world as possible?

CatWChainsaw 2y ago
When someone says something, but their actions or commitment don't align with what they said, they were lying. Always place more weight on what it takes more effort to do: spout a bunch of hot air, or put your money where your mouth is? Occam's Razor, duh.
munksbeer 2y ago
For what it's worth, I agree with you. But you're going to find it hard to persuade others because of the current zeitgeist and that humans seem to prefer a doom/villain story.
stonogo 2y ago
Because that doesn't account for the non-profit rugpull he orchestrated earlier in the company's history.
jampekka 2y ago
Occam's razor says they are saying whatever gives them as much money and power as possible. OpenAI is suspiciously bad in providing access to their models, compared to e.g. Meta, Mistral, BLOOM collaboration, Alibaba and even oil tyrants FFS.
Gud 2y ago
Why would that be where Occams Razor leads us?
squigz 2y ago
Because that isn't actually the simpler explanation. The simpler one is that he'll say anything to make money.

roenxi 2y ago

And the reason we can be certain that it is an accurate one is that the only way to put AI in the hands of as many people as possible is to commercialise the tech. Non-profits are good at many things, but not for spreading technical improvements. There aren't many alternatives here. It is commercialisation or looming irrelevance.

tyberns 2y ago

This is so true, resource management and infrastructure are going to be the bottlenecks

8note 2y ago

I'd expect "we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible" to be either exposing model weights, or making the training sets public.

gwern 2y ago

A general reply to all of the comments thus far: you are completely missing the point here. OP is not a meaningful forecast, and it's not about nuclear power or any of that. It's about laying the groundwork for the privatization and establishing rhetorical grounds for how the privatization of OA is consistent with the OA nonprofit's legally-required mission and fiduciary duties. Altman is not writing to anyone here, he is, among others, writing to the OA nonprofit board and to the judge next year.