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?
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.
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.
Edit: looked it up. 10k+ times more for training compute. Sheesh. Get the Dyson sphere ready lol.
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.
I've never met an executive I respect. They're all absolute experts at appearing competent.
Idk, seems like we’re in a pretty shit situation politically right now because many delusional men were given an open microphone access.
As much as it would be nice to believe we lived in a world where people can discern truth from illusion, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
And, given that, it seems like the wisest course of action would be to come up with some means of forcing mass media to adhere to fact and remove from public discourse anyone who refuses to acknowledge or espouse it, lest they bend reality in their interest, but instead we decided to invent machines for manufacturing the most sophisticated lies ever seen and disseminate them to everyone.
It’s not going to end well.
> And, given that, it seems like the wisest course of action would be to come up with some means of forcing mass media to adhere to fact and remove from public discourse anyone who refuses to acknowledge or espouse it...
How is it a wise course of action for people to force people to adhere to fact if we don't live in a world where people can discern truth? Don't you see the contradiction?
Some of them (almost) never turn it off. It’s unfortunate because it makes them seem completely disingenuous.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My pet theory: Sam makes more money when OpenAI spends than when OpenAI earns.
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
I think it's part vanity, part a misunderstanding about the economic benefits of a datacenter (which are nearly nil, as they employ very few people and produce nothing for the local market), and part just a desire to score brownie points with wealthy corporations, which might mean donations, campaign support, or other perks for the politician who makes it happen.
Neither of those things turn out to be a good fit for the new economy. The only thing left for people who derided nuclear for the last 40 years is to hope this is a bubble that sends us back to the 17th century when it pops. Anything else means we have to invest trillions in nuclear right now.
Moore's law is dead. The only way to increase compute is to increase the power we feed to computers. AI is just the shiniest example. Everything else will follow suit until electricity costs increase enough that it doesn't make sense to throw any more computation at it.
Any country that doesn't have energy to spare will be in the position of countries which didn't have food to support armies before the industrial revolution.
If we needed, for example, 1000 TWH to power AI for a huge drone swarm but could not do it while China could, this would be problematic.
It requires a future where MAD with nuclear weapons is obsolete though, with some futuristic new missile defense tech. I don't see that happening until some currently unknown physics makes it possible.
I worked as a quant in the electric market. There wasn't a single dataset I saw where more renewables resulted in lower total costs for consumers.
Instead of panicking about data center electricity usage we need to be worrying about getting back to a state where we regularly bring new (clean) generation capacity online.
We could easily build ..say.. 10 nuclear reactors and halve the utility bills with amortization.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
All for creating worthless TikTok videos with Sora 2, while we don't get graphics cards and DRAM and our electricity prices rise.
Trump will get another "win" for "his" Stargate project. The meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung was NOT arranged by Altman, he is the messenger boy:
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/samsung-sk-hy...
AI will fix it though?
All of that without leaving your home ofc.
How much more compute would they need to allow all of their paying users unlimited access to their best model? And to enable that setup in such a way that it's actually very fast.
The answer: they need resources far beyond what they have now. That's just to solve an existing problem.
Then throw in Sora 4 and whatever else will exist in a few years, and the need to feed that monster. They couldn't come close to allowing Sora 2 unlimited for all of their paying customers - I'd hate to see what that would require.
Then let the AI begin world building for every user (which is where this is going). It'll be decades before the resource demands actually flatten globally (at least 20-30 years, to get to global population saturation on usage; assuming the global population will begin to rapidly slow and then shrink).
Hint: the solution to Fermi's Paradox is that we go into the box and we never come back out, because it's a lot more interesting for 99.9%+ of humanity than a bunch of repeating rocks in space that take a zillion years to reach. The core purpose of AI will be to world build for us, mentally (relaxation, stimulation, entertainment, social) in we go: the end. The same thing happens to any advanced beings that get to our level, there's little to nothing out there that we can reach of interest (and no, it doesn't matter if the HN crowd disagrees, what matters for this outcome are the masses), we'll definitely figure that out, and there's infinite stimulation/experience in the machine world by contrast.
Ultimately there appears to be no purpose of life apart from child rearing for the majority. There's subconscious hope that kids might eventually figure it out for the rest of us. The only thing constant is the increase in entropy. At least that is what bound to happen. Should the purpose be accelerating that process or joining the resistance?
That said, Alibaba not releasing the weights for Qwen3-Max and announcing $53 billion in AI infrastructure spending https://www.reuters.com/world/china/alibaba-launches-qwen3-m... suggests that they think they're now at a point where it makes sense to scale up. (The Reuters article mentions data centers in several countries, which I assume also helps work around high GPU prices in China.)
Circling back to OpenAI: I don't think they're spending so much on infrastructure just because they want to train bigger models on more data, but moreso because they want to serve those bigger models to more customers using their services more intensively.
And if you're building anything serious with AI, you're basically dependent on a handful of cloud providers who control the GPU supply.
neonate•4mo ago