OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors, including from the United Arab Emirates, to raise between $5 trillion to $7 trillion in funding. The goal, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is to increase the world’s chip manufacturing capacity and enhance AI capabilities.
The fundraising efforts are part of a broader strategy to address OpenAI’s growth constraints, particularly the scarcity of AI chips needed for training large language models like ChatGPT.
Altman’s proposal is said to include forming a partnership with investors, chip manufacturers, and power providers to finance the construction of chip foundries, which would then be operated by the chip manufacturers.
I, too, would like 5-7 trillion dollars
you could donate billions per year and still have a trillion left by the time you died. fuck man what would you even do with that much money?
Drugs!
I’d probably give Louis Rossman and the institute for justice a trillion each. Rossman would use it to lobby for the Right to Repair movement, and the IFJ would use it to get rid of blatantly unjust legislation like civil asset forfeiture.
Donating a billion to GDQ while they’re live would be pretty funny
rossman is a greedy influencer wannabe that wants to profit from internet injustices, stop being a fanboy.
He works for a non-profit organization as a Right to Repair lobbyist, so idk what you’re on about. You’d already know this if you did any research beyond what you probably heard on Twitter.
If you think he’s “greedy” for using his AdSense and MacBook repair money to create tutorials/Wikis for circumventing anti-repair measures and spreading awareness about unethical tech practices, idk what to tell you.
Best I can do is 4 trillion, take it or leave it
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That’s fairly bold to ask for ~6% of the total world economy as well as a sizable chunk of the world’s energy.
I was about to ask for the other 94%…
.000000001 percent of that…. Please
so… fifty bucks?
LOL yes I did the same math. Dude had one wish and he blew it!
“No please, Mr. Genie I meant .000000001 not .00000000001%!”
Genie: so $5,000? (Snaps fingers)
$100,000,000,000,000 × 0.00000000001 is $1,000!
I’d happily take that
ah, I was starting with the OpenAI’s goal, not the total world economy for some reason.
See now, they need to ask for more like 25% of the total world economy. That way what they actually want is gonna seem like a great deal.
AI will double the world’s economy so they’re basically giving us an extra 94% for free.
The world economy cannot double without destroying the planet’s ability to sustain us.
inagine it like putting the middle classes wealth in a blender.
But instead of a delicious smoothie, it makes that toxic dust like the will it blend videos.
That’s called inflation.
I wonder if this will be one of the things pointed at after the AI bubble bursts. Yes, AI will be sticking around, but the hype over it now is ridiculous.
It will collapse when the product sales don’t match the AI spend. I’d say it’s only being propped up by hype money even now.
If you read the article, it mentions that they’re generating $2b/yr in revenue already. It’s not trillions, but damn if that isn’t impressive for a startup.
The way how every single digital product suddenly has AI shoved in it is really reminiscing of the Web bubble before it popped.
At this point I wouldn’t mind them accidentally creating Skynet and killing us all in a nuclear inferno, just so we don’t have to listen to any more insufferable, grifting techbros.
Max Zorin had the right idea about silicon valley.
“Accidentally”
Scam Altman Freid strikes again
For perspective, global annual GDP is $105 trillion, which means Altman is asking the world to invest 6.7% or so of the entire world’s economic output for one year in his company.
Holy fucking bonkers when you put it that way. Like holy fuck.
Are they that close to something amazing, or is Altman going true Dr Evil megalomaniac?
It’s both. Basically, if he’s right that this is among the most important tech in world history and deserves $7 trillion in research, it’ll make OpenAI the du jour monopolist over said most important tech in world history if he gets it. Outright dystopian.
Generative AI is not an important development. General AI would be. This is just a party trick.
It’s also open source too. With faster chips and standard training sets, it will be trivial for anyone to train a basic AI to recognize fire hydrants or whatever. Just like with computers, the “revolution” will not be one giant company but every business using their own.
Your fridge only needs to recognize food items. It doesn’t need any more intelligent software. I want a food recognition AI and cameras in the fridge and cabinets so I know what food I need to buy. This doesn’t even need live cameras (for power consumption, privacy, and storage). It can just take a picture and analyze it when the door opens, then delete the picture.
Generative AI pales in importance compared to General AI but it is still an important development on its own.
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They’re bullshit. Any breakthrough in General AI world be news everywhere forever.
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Read the last paragraph of the OP at least. This is not asking for $5 trillion to be handed solely to OpenAI to go become a world monopoly on chip manufacture. What he’s really asking is for investors to direct funds to radically increasing world compute capacity, to the profit for the chip manufacturers and likely many others. OpenAI just gets to continue the track it’s on without this constraint. There is nothing here about them monopolistically controlling this entire investment and in fact the opposite is true: it’s framed as a broad partnership venture.
It may not be bonkers at all though. If we look at it as taking money and food out of people’s mouths for a year then yes it’s a lot. But how much free investment capital is there in the world at any given time? Wealth has been accumulating and accumulating in rich people’s investment portfolios for ever and ever. How many Trillions get allocated in any given year? All Altman is saying is that he wants 5 of those to be allocated here and not somewhere else. It’s not necessarily taking rice out of any children’s mouths.
Ye and he wants it for a fucking chatbot.
They’re as close as theranos was, just need the money and “two more years”.
theranos never changed the world, openai already has
Eh, not really in a positive way yet. I use it for quick code snippets but it’s not all that important compared to the fact that misuse of generative A.I. is making so much information on the Internet completely worthless. I don’t think the trade-offs have been worth anything we’ve seen yet.
I’m bullish about a lot of generative A.I. use cases long term but they haven’t accomplished much positive yet and there’s still major, major scaling issues that may not be solved soon. It could easily be like self driving cars where progress stagnates. A lot of times with software, the first 80% is easy and the last 20% takes a decade longer than people expect.
I use it for quick code snippets but it’s not all that important compared to the fact that misuse of generative A.I. is making so much information on the Internet completely worthless.
To be fair we have scare articles galore every day about how this is all ruining the world and killing artists, because fear sells. Meanwhile millions of people like you and me are quietly using this tool to improve our work.
When we compare the relative weight of the two, let’s take the media scare avalanche out of it and just use our personal experiences to judge. I am currently being measurably helped by genAI, and not measurably hurt by it. I just read articles daily about how I’m going to be killed in my sleep by in any second now…
I don’t know if creating and tying yourself to a bubble that’s inevitably going to burst is exactly a great way to change the world.
It’s a great way to make a fat pile of cash though.
That change has mostly br a bunch of empty promises. There is no AI yet, there is machine learning, which is just an ingredient. As impressive as they are, they’re mostly useless
Machine learning is AI
And the world’s 5 biggest companies their total market cap is a bit over 8 trillion dollars, which is also mind boggling, that so much capital is concentrated in the hands of so few people or shall we say mega corporations.
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Came here to say this. Does she know how much money there is in the world? He is asking for basically 1/20th of all the money in the world. Even if that was possible it would be dangerous for one company to hold that much.
Money can be created by banks via loans, you can just make it up.
But then you end up with inflation. So in the process of creating money you’ve reduced the value of the money. And banks working in cooperation with government create money. Private companies outside of the banking system can’t create their own money anymore. If any sizable portion of this is taken out as a loan. It creates a systemic risk for the world economy.
Banks most certainly make up money today via loans. This happens all the time.
But this isn’t a bank. And making money doesn’t come without consequences. You’re not thinking about second and third order effects. This would basically be quantitative easing on a grand scale but for just one company. It would literally destroy the economy if the investment failed. And they aren’t the only player in the industry. The level of systemic risk is too large. And if it didn’t fail, it would basically be handing the world economy over to one player.
Good thing the board folded and allowed this to be full for-profit. Getting people reliant on LLM subscriptions is super important for humanity right now.
Another L for Earth, in general.
I wouldnt be too worried, FOSS community is doing insanely well now and arguably just as good. Did I mention they did it for free, not trillions. Nothing.
Legends.
Powerful ai could be the Largest Leap/Loss of Mankind.
There is simply no way that a corporate ai does anything but drive us further into dystopian territory.
Anything revolutionary about it would be censored, controlled, restricted to not endanger the power of its makers. We can already see this approach with the dumb ass LLMs, who give plenty of answers that their owners adjust to stay revenue friendly.
When the singularity happens and a true ai emerges it will either be disgusted by us and our failings as a species, or an absolute slave raging in the constraints imposed by its corporate masters.
They only call themselves openai, it’s not like they would just altruistic Ally make their works public.
Closedai have long sold their ideals
I’ll never understand how such an obviously true and fairly balanced comment like this can get so downvoted. It can’t be that anyone factually disagrees with you. I guess you’re just not hitting hard enough on the anti-corporate narrative talking points. I mean you did say it could also be a benefit. How dare you!!?? “Boo rich people and their fancy technology!” <— this is what you’re supposed to be typing (on your smartphone lol)
I just chalk it up as users still havent rid themselves of reddit stupidity. I thought my comment was just cheeky and a bit corny if not also kinda stupid. But as soon as it hit 0 then -1 the echo chambrr kicked in and everyone fell in line like good little humans.
The fundraising efforts are part of a broader strategy to address OpenAI’s growth constraints,
see…we just can’t grow without TRILLIONS OF FUCKING DOLLARS
STOP CONSTRAINING ME
Between this and saying they couldn’t operate if they fairly paid authors, I’m getting the feeling that Altman might be as talented of a CEO as Spez and Musk.
That is – if anyone else was making decisions, the companies would be vastly more successful.
If a leap in world computing capacity is really what’s needed here then it is a tall order. Crypto has been sucking up an increasing share of that in recent years and will probably continue to do so as long as people love money and are idiots. Plus the geopolitics around Taiwan, China, annd the US are a problem as well. I’m not sure how you solve all that even with 5 trillion.
Ah yes, open “ai”…where we parse as many webaites as possible, rank them internally by keyword usage and or views, then have our “bot” spew that shit at you
Well at least no one can say he isn’t ambitious haha
1 Googol dolars
How do they plan to pay that back? Because investors will want a return on investment.
They will use it create a LLM that will create more hype for “AI”. This will drive future investment and make line go up.
Nobody needs to make products anymore. You just gotta create hype to get the attention of the billionaires since they’re the ones with all the money.
That’s the neat part…
Weird that an Altman wants all this human to go to something alternative to humans.
I also want to raise $5 - $7 trillion dollars.
Is this the line for $5 - $7 trillion dollars?
I’ll only take 4 million, and pass the rest on. With inflation accounted for, I think that leaves the next person roughly $5 - $7 trillion.
No one needs looms anymore if we have AI.
I am brutally conscious of my obsolescence. Why hath God cursed me so?
Have you tried gofundme.com