7 ms·
As anyone with 2 brain cells should have. You don't just acquire $7T. The ENTIRE US domestic Net Investment isn't even $1T: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series
by onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
As anyone with 2 brain cells should have.
You don't just acquire $7T.
The ENTIRE US domestic Net Investment isn't even $1T: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W790RC1Q027SBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W790RC1Q027SBEA
Gross Fixed Capital Formation (Net Investment + Deprecation) isn't much more: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NFIRSAXDCUSQ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NFIRSAXDCUSQ
Google, Apple, and Microsoft together don't even spend $100B on CapEx per year. And they're worth almost $10T put together.
Asking for $7T when you're a $100B company is so ridiculous it's beyond belief.
- hu3 2y agoHe would have to have AGI proof to ask for this unprecedented kind of investing money. And even them it would have to be split during a decade or two. And even then. What's the military budget of USA?
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoIt doesn't matter what the military budget is. Most of it is spent on personnel and operation. You'd want to know only what the procurement is - which is ~$146B: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_... And most of that is part of Gross Fixed Capital Formation already...
- dgfitz 2y agoIt’s funny how that bit only comes up when HN wants to use it to make a point.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ipaddr 2y agoWhat is dark budget look like these days.
- ChumpGPT 2y agoDark budget? They can't even supply Ukraine with enough ammo and weapons to defend themselves and the DoD is already squealing that they are running out of everything. Dark budget..hahahaha...good one....
- MichaelZuo 2y agoHow is that relevant? It seems totally possible that enough interest groups don’t want Ukraine to actually win, so they block anything more than the minimum viable amount. So it’s not much of a barometer at all for anything…
- eru 2y agoYes, but this theory requires more and more epicycles. There's probably some small-ish 'dark budget'. But think about it: the official budget is in the order of single digit percentage points of US GDP. That represents and enormous amount of resources. Any appreciable fraction of that in a 'dark budget' would also leave traces all over the place.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoWell of course? The world is vastly more complex than say the world of 1945, so almost certainly there are now likely several dozens to several hundreds of ‘epicycles’ that are in fact true and necessary for full understanding. Edit: Now the pentagon doesn’t contain the entire complexity of mankind within it… but it’s probably not that far off.
- eru 2y agoI'm not actually sure that the world is more complex today. Lots of things are a lot easier and simpler, in fact.
- colechristensen 2y ago>What's the military budget of USA? Somewhere between $900B and $1T this year
- cedws 2y agoYeah, I mean, what else would you do with those chips? Run LLMs faster? Sorry but the killer app is still not there, the majority of people do not care and have no use for them.
- Zopieux 2y agoDon't you dare question the usefulness of gen ai on the hacker news. Many folks haven't caught up with reality just yet.
- Terr_ 2y agoIt's not quite that bad, at least not in comments.
- HKH2 2y agoI wonder what proportion of students use them for homework etc. The coming generations of people will care less about writing style.
- hu3 2y agoIt's the new calculator. I don't have papers but I think calculators, which are amazing and necessary, impact people's mental calculation capabilities. I know I used to he better at multiplication when i didn't have calculators all around me. IMO, AI will have similar impact. Great advance overall but will nerf some areas of our mental capacity. Like astronauts losing muscle mass faster in zero gravity. AI impact on our brain, just like the calculator, might be a reasonable price to pay for the advancement it gives.
- eru 2y ago> I know I used to he better at multiplication when i didn't have calculators all around me. My manual calculation skills were at their peak in seventh grade in school, when we were allowed to use a calculator for the first time (and thus the exercises got harder) but simultaneously I usually forgot to bring mine. But yeah, I don't think I could think better in general, when I did arithmetic better.
- adastra22 2y agoHe had AGI. He still has it. You can have it too, for a $20/month subscription from OpenAI or Anthropic. It just turns out that AGI (artificial general intelligence, which ChatGPT objectively is), is not a singularity nor even a tipping point towards causing one.
- echoangle 2y agoHow is ChatGPT „objectively“ AGI? You don’t think there are common intellectual tasks humans are better at than ChatGPT? Can ChatGPT do math better than a human without specific prompting to use a calculator (function calls)?
- lupusreal 2y agoI never understood AGI to mean "better than humans". A lot of people assumed it would easily be made to be, by simply throwing more silicon at it until it was, but being smarter than humans isn't what makes it "AGI". Put this another way, suppose we create a computer program that is only as smart as a bottom 10% human (I'm not saying they have.) You can't reasonably say that is smarter than humans generally. But are you comfortable saying that bottom 10% humans lack any general intelligence at all? General intelligence doesn't mean extreme intelligence, and so Artificial General Intelligence doesn't either. You might say that the term is more than the sum of the parts, which is fair, but I still dispute that superhuman abilities was ever part of the definition of AGI. It was just a (thusfar) failed prediction about AGI.
- echoangle 2y agoMy definition and the one I found on Wikipedia is „AGI […] matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks.“. Being better that the bottom 10% of humans on some tasks doesn’t really qualify to me.
- fragmede 2y agoASI (artificial super intelligence) is distinct from AGI. Not distinguishing between those two just confuses things.
- wheels 2y agoAnd if it was a 30% stake in OpenAI for that $7 trillion (kind of a standard VC round percentage) that would put OpenAI's valuation at about the same of all of the 7000-ish NASDAQ companies (including almost all public tech companies) combined.
- lumost 2y agoThere was probably a point of maximum hype ~12 months ago, or right after the launch of GPT-4 where the belief of imminent singularity was running high.
- bugbuddy 2y agoBut, singularity is still imminent. Right? Where on the spectrum of completely useless/no AI to singularity are we at?
- netdevnet 2y agoThe singularity is always just around the corner. It's like a whale in a casino. The big reward is always just around the corner. You need to drop a few more coins and soon you will be rich
- bckr 2y agoIt’s gonna require N more hype cycles (bearing in mind that usefulness is the expected endpoint of the hype cycle)
- Terr_ 2y ago> (bearing in mind that usefulness is the expected endpoint of the hype cycle) I think for the people doing it, the expected endpoint is more about raising the price of shares they hold until they've been sold.
- bckr 2y agoHype cycles ride on real progress that’s first blown out of proportion, then under-appreciated. LLMs are still magic AF. We are just so tired of hearing about them and how they’re going to change everything.
- sroussey 2y agoDoes anyone have a source for this “$7T” number? I read it on the internet myself with “sources saying” but I think it’s BS.
- ano-ther 2y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/business/openai-plan-electricity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/business/openai-plan-elec... https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-execs-allegedly-dismissed-openai-ceo-sam-altman-as-podcasting-bro https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-execs-allege...
- sroussey 2y agoSo somebody in another country with another language and another currency allegedly said… and came across several people and translations (did they translate currency?) before landing at a journalists inbox. Might as well as have heard about it on Twitter.
- ano-ther 2y agoHave a look at the TSMC executives: https://www.tsmc.com/english/aboutTSMC/executives https://www.tsmc.com/english/aboutTSMC/executives There’s a 68% chance that Altman met with someone who got their degree in the US (if only one executive attended, otherwise chances are higher). And the others probably also have little difficulty communicating in English or calculating the cost of 36 fabs in any currency, since that’s their business.
- sroussey 2y agoI very much doubt the CEO of TSMC spoke to the NYT about a private meeting they had with a potential customer. Give me a break! Much more likely they talked about 3-6 fabs, some other person laughed about 36 fabs for podcast guy, someone else overheard that and posted on Weibo. That made it to NYT eventually.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- croes 2y agoSound like the beginning of Universal Paperclips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips
- rubyfan 2y agoSee also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benderama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benderama
- mat_epice 2y agoTime for this year’s play through!
- tomashubelbauer 2y agoThe first time I came across this link I got sucked in for six or seven hours and pretty much dropped a ball on an entire workday as a result. Evil, evil game.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoYou should have a look at Factorio, if you want to lose a month or two.
- tomashubelbauer 2y agoMy brother told me the same and I believe it, so I have been keeping my distance from that game. :D
- robertlagrant 2y agoAlso Dyson Sphere Program for a slightly prettier version.
- FeepingCreature 2y agoOr Satisfactory for strictly worse trains but massively improved graphics.
- aetherson 2y agoI assume that the $7T ask was to try to spend a lot of time in the news cycle when he wanted to be there. Obviously it was an impossible ask.
- michelb 2y agoIndeed. A smart PR person. Same with him appearing in the Oprah documentary about AI. He's a very calculating person.
- ChumpGPT 2y ago>As anyone with 2 brain cells should have. >You don't just acquire $7T. Perhaps the goal was only 1-2 Trillion but you should start high. I would have asked for 10 Trillion.....
- Wheatman 2y ago2T is still ridiculous. My guess is that since they are so sure of AGI being achievable soon, that they think they can squeeze out any amount of money they want out of investors. After all, AGI would be worth way more thab 7T right?
- lupusreal 2y agoAsking for more than you want only works if your ask is too large but still somewhere in the realm of feasibility so the other party doesn't write you off as a crazy person and end the conversation right there. If you're applying for a job as a fry chef at a burger joint, asking for $25/hr is a good idea. Asking for $1000/hr will convince the shop owner that you are a crazy person who isn't serious about wanting the job.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoBut maybe it was a successful marketing strategy to find investors? It was a moment in time to give people FOMO and nudge them into getting on the OpenAI train. Now it is more obvious that other models can catch up. Grok became competitive with top models within a month for example.
- stogot 2y agoThe fact it was reported and Altman didn’t deny it shows how ludicrous and wild his thinking is It might be a $100B company on paper but that’s propped up by Microsoft investment. It’s hemoragging money still isn’t it?
- jsheard 2y agoYes, they're apparently not expecting to turn a profit until 2029, with their losses peaking at $14 billion in 2026. Their recent $6.6 billion funding round would barely buy them 6 months of runway at that peak. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-projections-imply-losses-tripling-to-14-billion-in-2026 https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-projections-i...
- mrweasel 2y ago$100B is crazy, no one would buy OpenAI for $100B.
- rvnx 2y agoPerhaps Microsoft, so they can push the losses to the shareholders of Microsoft instead of their own balance sheet.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoMicrosoft only gave them an exorbitant price because they were paying in Azure credits for GPUs. That's something like a 50% discount for Microsoft compared to giving them cash, and it also incentivizes OpenAI to continue using their stuff after the credits are burned through.
- stogot 2y agoI’ve heard Microsoft customers got burned by this. GPU availability and inference workloads is prioritized for OpenAI
- sekai 2y ago
- kaliqt 2y agoNot only the capital, doing it well and doing it correctly is another huge mess, you can't just throw money at the problem and Sam's reputation is wearing thin, so the best of the best won't jump ship to join him anymore.
- nprateem 2y agoIt's just anchoring. If you ask for 7tn, 500bn seems comparatively more reasonable. If you ask for 500bn in the first place you'll probably be lucky to get 100bn. Of course you sound like a twat in the process, but a price worth paying.
- mirekrusin 2y agoLet's have some sympathy, he probably gets advice from gpt and we know it's not that great with numbers yet.
- cdchn 2y agoI think asking for trillions was pretty ridiculous but I don't think its out of the real of possibility of getting a few T from nation states run by monarchs and oligarchs. They have pools of dark money nobody can plumb the depths of, and they're looking for diversify.