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What is their angle with this? Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years? I’m sure the researchers there would

What is their angle with this? Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years? I’m sure the researchers there would love to do more research, with more compute, faster, but 20+x growth is not a practical expectation. Is the goal here to create a mad rush to build data centers, which should decrease their costs with more supply? Do they just want governments to step in and to help somehow? Is it part of marketing/hype? Is this trying to project confidence to investors on future revenue expectations?

p1esk 1y ago
Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years? If their goal is to train say, a 100T model on the whole youtube dataset they will need 20000x more compute. And that would be my goal if I were him.
- bix6 1y ago
  Why 20000x more compute? I thought they were at approx 1T with current compute? Edit: looked it up. 10k+ times more for training compute. Sheesh. Get the Dyson sphere ready lol.
  - esafak 1y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy6Dw9rOAFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy6Dw9rOAFQ
    - indolering 1y ago
      Now I'm more on the side of him being delusional.
      - zeroq 1y ago
        "At this point I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth." It's that dumbass at your work who thinks that solely because he landed a job that pays him more than their parents ever made combined in his early 20s he can school everyone on every topic imaginable, from nutrition to religion. Him and Elon makes way more than that dumbass so ego get inflated even more. I don't especially like Tucker Carlson, but I think the more screen time we'll give to this people with an open mic it's better for everyone to have a first hand experience of how detached from reality these people are.
        johnnienaked 1y ago
        Absolutely right, and it's ubiquitous across organizations too. I've never met an executive I respect. They're all absolute experts at appearing competent.
        aswegs8 1y ago
        I mean, they're selected for it so that's not surprising
        johnnienaked 1y ago
        I guess the surprising part is that appearing competent is more important to shareholders than being competent
        estimator7292 1y ago
        Actually checking if someone is competent requires actual work, though. Work is for lesser people. Shareholders just know if a person is or is not competent, that's why they have so much money, right?
        blitzar 1y ago
        It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt
        IT4MD 1y ago
        Thanks for the example.
        blitzar 1y ago
        The pleasure was all mine.
        FuckButtons 1y ago
      - b00ty4breakfast 1y ago
        I can never tell if these guys have come to genuinely love the smell of their own farts or if they're just constantly in sales mode. Like maybe all those hours in meetings with investors and shareholder or whatever has gotten them stuck, like your mom used to warn you about when you'd make faces at your little brother.
        llbbdd 1y ago
        When your job is to constantly be making the pitch for your company, and you live in a world where every conversation you have can be news before the end of the day, the mask can never come off.
        dmbche 1y ago
        If they know it won't bring in revenue, they can't get out of "sales mode" because when the runway stops they get left out. Like musical chairs with one chair left, you want to keep the game going if you don't think you can get it. And you're filthy rich as long as the game's going.
        Auracle 1y ago
        Have you every talked to someone that’s been in sales for a long time when they’re not at work? Some of them (almost) never turn it off. It’s unfortunate because it makes them seem completely disingenuous.
    - coffeebeqn 1y ago
      Couple of decades away from a Dyson Sphere? Recalibrating my trust in this man’s statements asap
  - kadushka 1y ago
    Mainly because global video data corpus is > 100k larger than global text corpus, so you will need to train much larger models for much longer (than current LLMs).
  - grafmax 1y ago
    It’s almost like we’re trying to boil the planet.
- Drblessing 1y ago
  That would be awesome.
- zingerlio 1y ago
  The AI bubble bursts when he stumbles to get that money.
refulgentis 1y ago
> Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years? He does, or at least, he believes if its plausible they should attempt to. We live in odd times. It sort of reminds me of Feb 2020. All you really needed to know was the Rt and rest was just math. Who knows if it'll matter or pencil out in a decade, but, it's completely reasonable at these growth rates and with the iron laws known to keep scaling.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
indolering 1y ago
In the early days of Bitcoin, we would argue security models and laugh about Bitcoin mining taking some significant percentage of global power supply. It's been giving around 1% for a while now despite the supply falling off. I wouldn't put bets on what the outer limits for AI are going to be. However, it's a huge productivity boost across a huge range of workflows. Models are still making large gains as they become more sophisticated. If I had Sam Altman's access to other people's capital, I would be making large bets that it will keep growing.
skywhopper 1y ago
He needs 11 figures of cash injected as soon as possible. The people who can give it want a big return. Given the current losses, the only way to make the math right is to lie outrageously about what’s possible.
- karmakurtisaani 1y ago
  He's been kicking this can for years now. Looking forward to the day he's forced to stop.
pram 1y ago
Perceptually, it helps to take scrutiny off the current spend? It isn't a bubble if you can just scoff at $100 billion and say like" "thats pocket change, this will actually require 10 quadrillion dollars!!"
ants_everywhere 1y ago
If they want to survive they need to outrun Google and have a differentiated service. Which as of now it's not clear that OpenAI will have a reason to exist in the near future with Anthropic and Google. They're likely betting on either training a model so big they can't be ignored or possibly focusing more B2B which means lots of compute to resell.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  If their plan was to go toe to toe with Google as a foundation model/inference provider they would 100% be getting ground to dust, that's not a winnable fight. There's a reason they've pivoted to product and retained Jony Ive. Anthropic gets a TON of hate on social media, their models are fragile, their infra is poorly managed, they're 100% going to end up in Jeff's pocket. OpenAI is a survivor.
arthurofbabylon 1y ago
The phrase you are looking for is “commodifying the periphery.” As adjacent bottlenecks open up, the bottleneck you control becomes more valuable.
tim333 1y ago
My guess: Altman figures AI will be a big deal and constrained by avaiable compute. If he locks in all the available compute and related finance before the competition then he's locked in as the #1 AI company. I'm not sure 20x or 5x or 40x matters, nor revenue expectations, so much as being ahead of the competition.
- commodore646464 1y ago
  Sounds like the commodore playbook from the 80s
jgalt212 1y ago
> What is their angle with this? My pet theory: Sam makes more money when OpenAI spends than when OpenAI earns.
Szpadel 1y ago
I believe it is because of RL you are no longer limited by training data as you generate it during learning on the fly so benchmark driven learning could scale with compute they also seem to assume that everyone will use AI from them in the future, especially with new "pulse" combined with ads. scaling this will need much more compute. is this reasonable? I'm not convinced, but this is how I believe it's their reasoning
Tubelord 1y ago
Pascal’s wager applied to tech cycles. The fervent adherence to the hype is akin to religious zealots in many ways
matt-p 1y ago
I think they could probably 'use' 10X. There are rumours that one of the reasons they're not shipping the new Jonny Ive device is that they haven't got the compute for it. If you need 10X probably better to ask for 20x and have a glut than ask for 10x and have a shortage.

p1esk 1y ago

Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years? If their goal is to train say, a 100T model on the whole youtube dataset they will need 20000x more compute. And that would be my goal if I were him.

bix6 1y ago
Why 20000x more compute? I thought they were at approx 1T with current compute? Edit: looked it up. 10k+ times more for training compute. Sheesh. Get the Dyson sphere ready lol.
- esafak 1y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy6Dw9rOAFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy6Dw9rOAFQ
  - indolering 1y ago
    Now I'm more on the side of him being delusional.
    - zeroq 1y ago
      "At this point I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth." It's that dumbass at your work who thinks that solely because he landed a job that pays him more than their parents ever made combined in his early 20s he can school everyone on every topic imaginable, from nutrition to religion. Him and Elon makes way more than that dumbass so ego get inflated even more. I don't especially like Tucker Carlson, but I think the more screen time we'll give to this people with an open mic it's better for everyone to have a first hand experience of how detached from reality these people are.
      - johnnienaked 1y ago
        Absolutely right, and it's ubiquitous across organizations too. I've never met an executive I respect. They're all absolute experts at appearing competent.
        aswegs8 1y ago
        I mean, they're selected for it so that's not surprising
        johnnienaked 1y ago
        I guess the surprising part is that appearing competent is more important to shareholders than being competent
        estimator7292 1y ago
        Actually checking if someone is competent requires actual work, though. Work is for lesser people. Shareholders just know if a person is or is not competent, that's why they have so much money, right?
      - blitzar 1y ago
        It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt
        IT4MD 1y ago
        Thanks for the example.
        blitzar 1y ago
        The pleasure was all mine.
      - FuckButtons 1y ago
    - b00ty4breakfast 1y ago
      I can never tell if these guys have come to genuinely love the smell of their own farts or if they're just constantly in sales mode. Like maybe all those hours in meetings with investors and shareholder or whatever has gotten them stuck, like your mom used to warn you about when you'd make faces at your little brother.
      - llbbdd 1y ago
        When your job is to constantly be making the pitch for your company, and you live in a world where every conversation you have can be news before the end of the day, the mask can never come off.
      - dmbche 1y ago
        If they know it won't bring in revenue, they can't get out of "sales mode" because when the runway stops they get left out. Like musical chairs with one chair left, you want to keep the game going if you don't think you can get it. And you're filthy rich as long as the game's going.
      - Auracle 1y ago
        Have you every talked to someone that’s been in sales for a long time when they’re not at work? Some of them (almost) never turn it off. It’s unfortunate because it makes them seem completely disingenuous.
  - coffeebeqn 1y ago
    Couple of decades away from a Dyson Sphere? Recalibrating my trust in this man’s statements asap
- kadushka 1y ago
  Mainly because global video data corpus is > 100k larger than global text corpus, so you will need to train much larger models for much longer (than current LLMs).
- grafmax 1y ago
  It’s almost like we’re trying to boil the planet.
Drblessing 1y ago
That would be awesome.
zingerlio 1y ago
The AI bubble bursts when he stumbles to get that money.

refulgentis 1y ago

> Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years? He does, or at least, he believes if its plausible they should attempt to. We live in odd times. It sort of reminds me of Feb 2020. All you really needed to know was the Rt and rest was just math. Who knows if it'll matter or pencil out in a decade, but, it's completely reasonable at these growth rates and with the iron laws known to keep scaling.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

indolering 1y ago

In the early days of Bitcoin, we would argue security models and laugh about Bitcoin mining taking some significant percentage of global power supply. It's been giving around 1% for a while now despite the supply falling off. I wouldn't put bets on what the outer limits for AI are going to be. However, it's a huge productivity boost across a huge range of workflows. Models are still making large gains as they become more sophisticated. If I had Sam Altman's access to other people's capital, I would be making large bets that it will keep growing.

skywhopper 1y ago

He needs 11 figures of cash injected as soon as possible. The people who can give it want a big return. Given the current losses, the only way to make the math right is to lie outrageously about what’s possible.

karmakurtisaani 1y ago
He's been kicking this can for years now. Looking forward to the day he's forced to stop.

pram 1y ago

Perceptually, it helps to take scrutiny off the current spend? It isn't a bubble if you can just scoff at $100 billion and say like" "thats pocket change, this will actually require 10 quadrillion dollars!!"

ants_everywhere 1y ago

If they want to survive they need to outrun Google and have a differentiated service. Which as of now it's not clear that OpenAI will have a reason to exist in the near future with Anthropic and Google. They're likely betting on either training a model so big they can't be ignored or possibly focusing more B2B which means lots of compute to resell.

CuriouslyC 1y ago
If their plan was to go toe to toe with Google as a foundation model/inference provider they would 100% be getting ground to dust, that's not a winnable fight. There's a reason they've pivoted to product and retained Jony Ive. Anthropic gets a TON of hate on social media, their models are fragile, their infra is poorly managed, they're 100% going to end up in Jeff's pocket. OpenAI is a survivor.

arthurofbabylon 1y ago

The phrase you are looking for is “commodifying the periphery.” As adjacent bottlenecks open up, the bottleneck you control becomes more valuable.

tim333 1y ago

My guess: Altman figures AI will be a big deal and constrained by avaiable compute. If he locks in all the available compute and related finance before the competition then he's locked in as the #1 AI company. I'm not sure 20x or 5x or 40x matters, nor revenue expectations, so much as being ahead of the competition.

commodore646464 1y ago
Sounds like the commodore playbook from the 80s

jgalt212 1y ago

> What is their angle with this? My pet theory: Sam makes more money when OpenAI spends than when OpenAI earns.

Szpadel 1y ago

I believe it is because of RL you are no longer limited by training data as you generate it during learning on the fly so benchmark driven learning could scale with compute they also seem to assume that everyone will use AI from them in the future, especially with new "pulse" combined with ads. scaling this will need much more compute. is this reasonable? I'm not convinced, but this is how I believe it's their reasoning

Tubelord 1y ago

Pascal’s wager applied to tech cycles. The fervent adherence to the hype is akin to religious zealots in many ways

matt-p 1y ago

I think they could probably 'use' 10X. There are rumours that one of the reasons they're not shipping the new Jonny Ive device is that they haven't got the compute for it. If you need 10X probably better to ask for 20x and have a glut than ask for 10x and have a shortage.