> We are particularly excited to build a lot of this in the US; right now, other countries are building things like chips fabs and new energy production much faster than we are, and we want to help turn that tide.
"As AI gets smarter, access to AI will be a fundamental driver of the economy, and maybe eventually something we consider a fundamental human right. Almost everyone will want more AI working on their behalf."
I don't buy it at all.
This sounds like complete and total bullshit to me.
> If AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will, then amazing things will be possible. Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer.
At least the statement starts with a conditional, even if it is a silly one.
If you know your growth curve is ultimately going to be a sigmoid, fitting a model with only data points before the inflection point is underdetermined.
> If AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will
Is a statement that no amount of prior evidence can support.
I think AI compute is one of the biggest grifts of century. A capital that is being redistributed from talented people to this compute when we can clearly see it is not making a huge difference (oai vs deepseek) feels like a grift.
> Our vision is simple: we want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week.
The moat will be how efficiently you convert electricity into useful behavior. Whoever industrializes evaluation and feedback loops wins the next decade.
Y2K errors in old COBOL code kick-started Indian IT sector, which then lead to immense economic progress and mass scale reduction in poverty. I hope LLMs pepper every thing they touch with many such errors, so that nations of Africa and poorer parts of Latin America (that can't do cheap manufacturing due to a lack of infrastructure and capital) can also begin their upwards economic journey by providing services to fix these mistakes.
In order to help reduce global poverty (much of which was caused by colonialism), it is the moral and ethical duty of the Global North to adopt LLMs on a mass scale and use them in every field imaginable, and then give jobs to the global poor to fix the resulting mess.
> As AI gets smarter, access to AI will be a fundamental driver of the economy, and maybe eventually something we consider a fundamental human right.
My product is going to be the fundamental driver of the economy. Even a human right!
> Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer.
How?
> We are particularly excited to build a lot of this in the US; right now, other countries are building things like chips fabs and new energy production much faster than we are, and we want to help turn that tide.
There's the appeal to the current administration.
> Over the next couple of months, we’ll be talking about some of our plans and the partners we are working with to make this a reality. Later this year, we’ll talk about how we are financing it
* Nvidia invests 5 billion in Intel
* Nvidia and OpenAI announce partnership to deploy 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems (Investment of upto 100 billion)
* This indirectly benefits TSMC (which implies they'll be investing more in the US)
As a technical user of AI, I think there is certainly value in the capabilities of the current IDE/agentic systems, and as a builder of AI systems professionally I think there is enterprise value as well, although realizing that value in a meaningful way is an ongoing challenge/work in progress. There is also clearly a problem with AI slop, both in codebases and in other professional deliverables. Having said that, what’s more interesting to me is whether we have seen AI produce novel and valuable outputs independently. Altman asserts that 10GW could possibly “cure cancer”, but frankly I’d like to see any discrete examples of AI advancing frontier knowledge areas and moving the needle in small but measurable ways that stand up to peer review. Before we can cure cancer or have world peace through massive consumption of power and spend I’d like to see a meaningful counterpoint to the argument that AI as a derivative technology from all human knowledge is incapable of extending beyond the current limits of human knowledge. Intuitively I think AI should be capable of novel scientific advancement, but I feel like we’re short on examples.
What's the serious counter-argument to the idea that a) AI will become more ubiquitous and inexpensive and b) economic/geopolitical success will be tied in some way to AI ability?
Because I do agree with him on that front. The question is whether the AI industry will end up like airplanes: massively useful technology that somehow isn't a great business to be in. If indeed that is the case, framing OpenAI as a nation-bound "human right" is certainly one way to ensure its organizational existence if the market becomes too competitive.
Apple: Privacy is a fundamental Human right. That is why we must control everything. And stop our user from sharing any form of data other than to Apple.
OpenAI: AI is a fundamental Human right.....
There is something about Silicon Valley that is philosophically very odd for the past 15 to 20 years.
> Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer.
Something I've never understood: why do AGI perverts think that a superintelligence is any more likely to "cure cancer" than "create unstoppable super-cancer"
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 53.9 ms ] threadDid Donald call him ?
I don't buy it at all.
This sounds like complete and total bullshit to me.
At least the statement starts with a conditional, even if it is a silly one.
If you know your growth curve is ultimately going to be a sigmoid, fitting a model with only data points before the inflection point is underdetermined.
> If AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will
Is a statement that no amount of prior evidence can support.
The moat will be how efficiently you convert electricity into useful behavior. Whoever industrializes evaluation and feedback loops wins the next decade.
In order to help reduce global poverty (much of which was caused by colonialism), it is the moral and ethical duty of the Global North to adopt LLMs on a mass scale and use them in every field imaginable, and then give jobs to the global poor to fix the resulting mess.
I am only 10% joking.
Lots of assumptions about the path to get there, though.
And interesting that he's measuring intelligence in energy terms.
My product is going to be the fundamental driver of the economy. Even a human right!
> Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer.
How?
> We are particularly excited to build a lot of this in the US; right now, other countries are building things like chips fabs and new energy production much faster than we are, and we want to help turn that tide.
There's the appeal to the current administration.
> Over the next couple of months, we’ll be talking about some of our plans and the partners we are working with to make this a reality. Later this year, we’ll talk about how we are financing it
Beyond parody.
* Nvidia invests 5 billion in Intel * Nvidia and OpenAI announce partnership to deploy 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems (Investment of upto 100 billion) * This indirectly benefits TSMC (which implies they'll be investing more in the US)
Looks like the US is cooking something...
It could start by figuring out how to keep kids from using AI to write all their essays.
If a tenth of this happens, and we don't build a new power plant every ten weeks... then what?
The growth in energy is because of the increase in the output tokens due to increased demand for them.
Models do not get smarter the more they are used.
So why does he expect them to solve cancer if they haven't already?
And why do we need to solve cancer more than once?
Because I do agree with him on that front. The question is whether the AI industry will end up like airplanes: massively useful technology that somehow isn't a great business to be in. If indeed that is the case, framing OpenAI as a nation-bound "human right" is certainly one way to ensure its organizational existence if the market becomes too competitive.
Apple: Privacy is a fundamental Human right. That is why we must control everything. And stop our user from sharing any form of data other than to Apple.
OpenAI: AI is a fundamental Human right.....
There is something about Silicon Valley that is philosophically very odd for the past 15 to 20 years.
Something I've never understood: why do AGI perverts think that a superintelligence is any more likely to "cure cancer" than "create unstoppable super-cancer"