> OpenAI considered building everything in-house and raising capital for an expensive plan to build a network of factories known as "foundries" for chip manufacturing. The company has dropped the ambitious foundry plans for now due to the costs and time needed to build a network
That framing massively undersells how insane Sams ambitions were there, he was floating the idea of somehow raising seven trillion dollars to build thirty six fabs dedicated to making AI silicon. The TSMC execs reported more or less laughed in his face when he brought it up it them.
And 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.
There 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.
Yeah, 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.
So 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.
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.
and fake it before you make it ...im still waiting for GPT's version of H.E.R.... many months later nowhere to be found yet no doubt that juiced their revenue.
The startup playbook lie ur ass off and make sh!t up. Musk still does it to this day with the recent demo of his Optimus robots implying they were all AI driven.
It could have been strategy instead of insanity. By starting conversations at $7T you anchor high and potentially drive a greater outcome than starting an order of magnitude lower.
That strategy only works if the anchor is in the realm of reality. If I'm selling a 20 year old Toyota Corolla and initially ask for $900,000 that's not going to help me get a higher price.
Anchoring bias probably works with numbers outside of the realm of reality as well. But I doubt it's very useful in these cases (or even any stronger than asking for say 300B), otherwise everyone would always start a funding round by asking for a 7T investment, right.
Usually when doing anchoring you want to end up at a result less than what you originally asked for but crucially more than zero, and OpenAI immediately folded on building any fabs whatsoever, so I don't think it worked.
When you do something that stupid - starting at $7 trillion - you end the conversation before it really begins because you lose all credibility with the people that matter (eg TSMC and other investors).
If he had said $250 billion and six fabs, it would have been a lot to ask but people wouldn't think he was ignorant or irrational for saying it. Big tech for example has that kind of money to throw around spread out across a decade if the investment is a truly great opportunity.
I guess he thinks his glorified markov chain will lead to ASI if scaled up sufficiently. Even if we get ASI, the likelihood that anybody will ever make any money from it is so delusional. This isn't going to be your average brainwashed peasant, crushing these capitalist pigs is probably the first thing it's gonna do.
The technical term for this is “zone of possible agreement”. If your opening is outside the counterparty’s ZOPA, then they’re likely to disengage/exit.
> The TSMC execs reported more or less laughed in his face when he brought it up it them.
Reminds me of:
Musk flew there with Cantrell, prepared to purchase three ICBMs for $21 million. But to Musk's disappointment, the Russians now claimed that they wanted $21 million for each rocket, and then taunted the future SpaceX founder. As Cantrell recounted to Esquire: “They said, 'Oh, little boy, you don't have the money?”
You think summoning machine god would not be cost competitive? God as in smarter than all of humanity combined times infinity (or at least a very large number).
Earning back the 7T with god/satan on your side could be trivial and at the same time the least of your worries for other reasons (maybe god doesn't like you and/or doesn't care about you).
This is crazy. How can you look at the current state of technology and think that something even remotely close to “smarter than all of humanity times infinity” is near?
Tech paradigm shifts will definitely happen and improve current AI by a lot, but if creating “god” is the goal, 7T would be better spent creating a mega transmitter and asking aliens to just give us the tech.
Some people (like yourselves) are so delusional that you are capable of considering wasting 7T$ on something that is a glorified autocomplete technology. We kind of a need a reset in the tech industry to get rid of mindsets like yours. AGI is still so far away and when the AI bubble eventually bursts, you will probably still try to convince yourself it still only needs 7T$. The state of people in the tech industry is sad.
> Some people (like yourselves) are so delusional that you are capable of considering wasting 7T$ on something that is a glorified autocomplete technology.
You know that to many, you are the delusional one if you think that some fictional number in a screen is more important than this glorified autocomplete technology that has the potential to revolutionize humanity as much as agriculture, electricity and the internet.
> God as in smarter than all of humanity combined times infinity (or at least a very large number).
This is delusional. Nobody has demonstrated AI that can even match the output that human creativity has accomplished in the past 5 years. It will take an awful long time before it's up there alongside humans, and by the time it surpasses us we'll both be long dead.
If you're not just being performative for a joke here, then I don't even know how I can explain how wrong you are. All of this - the promises of "AGI", the bajillion-dollar meme order sent to TSMC, the cryptic sama tweets in lowercase - it's performance art. It's unsubstantiated, nondilineated, unproven, unstudied nonsense. That's it. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings, the crypto bros had to go through this a few months ago and it was tough for them too. But the dividends have to be paid, and in a few years time your "$7 trillion dollar" intellectual property empire will be sand.
If you don't believe ASI is possible, 7T is way too high. If you believe ASI is possible, 7T is wayyy too low, thus 7T is a compromise if you believe there's a non-certain chance of ASI being possible
So the question is, if you have AGI/ASI how much productive work could you get done with it?
When looking at things like mechanization and the productivity increases from around 1880 to now, you took an economy from around 10 billion a year to 14 trillion. This involved mechanization and digitization. We live in a world that someone from 1880 really couldn't imagine.
What I don't know how to answer (or at least search properly) is how much investment this took over that 150 year period. I'm going to assume it's vastly more than $7 trillion. If $7 trillion in investment and manufacturing allowed us to produce human level+ AI then the economic benefits of this would be in the tend to hundreds of trillions.
Now, this isn't saying it would be good for me and you personally, but the capability to apply intelligence to problems and provide solutions would grow very rapidly and dramatically change the world we live in now.
> If $7 trillion in investment and manufacturing allowed us to produce human level+ AI then the economic benefits of this would be in the tend to hundreds of trillions.
Sure, but right now that "if" is trying to do 7 trillion dollars of unsubstantiated heavy lifting. I might be able to start creating Iron Man-style arc reactors in a cave with a box of scraps and all I ask is 1 trillion, so you all should invest given how much money unlimited free energy is worth.
How do you even define ASI? How do you know it will run on silicon? If it will run on silicon, what kind of silicon? GPU? TPU? Binary? Ternary? Von-Neumann architecture? How can you even start to build chips for something completely imaginary?
Other than GH Copilot (which is amazing) and the like, I am yet to see a social/cultural impact of LLMs. I am ignoring the hype cycle fueled social media posts where influencers show cool stuff or model releases. I am talking about this stuff permeating through the society.. am I immune to it? Or is it hidden in saas/enterprise products layers deep?
I would imagine some productive cultural impact that’s wide spread, sticky, high retention not like ‘oh cool 3d tv or vr’ kinda thing?
Given how much ‘money’ has been burnt through the GPU heatsinks.
"while adding AMD (AMD.O), opens new tab chips alongside Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab chips to meet its surging infrastructure demands"
Jensen has been saying that demand is "insane" and we're hearing rumors of low yields. This equates to supply issues in the coming months/years. No fortune 500 puts all their eggs into one basket. Diversifying away from a single source for all of AI hardware and software, is a smart thing to do.
> Diversifying away from a single source for all of AI hardware and software, is a smart thing to do.
I wonder how this squares with the exclusivity contract with Microsoft. Even the OpenAI/Oracle deal requires Oracle to run Azure stack on their datacenter so MSFT can mediate the relationship. The AMD chips mentioned are also purchased by MSFT.
I wonder if this really means that OpenAI is accepting the risk/capital expense while providing a variety of hardware to Microsoft, or if there are other terms at play.
That is exactly what the execs at my company are telling us when asked about not using Nvidia -- diversifying away. It's funny though because we have no Nvidia for training at all. We use Trainium because we could not get our hands on Nvidia.
AMD hardware is good. The software is getting better daily. Training still sucks (mostly due to unoptimized libraries), but inference is looking pretty decent with recent advances in tuning...
Spending $7 trillion on in-house fabs sounded both ambitious and crazy. Reality finally kicked in. If they’re done dreaming big, let’s hope they keep the quality
I'm not saying that I necessarily agree, but the general consensus on HN seems to be that Broadcom is now less of a tech company and more of a holding company that raids others, for example VMWare, and extracts all value to the detriment of customers and the acquired company.
I don't think that's completely wrong, but it's a big company and I'm sure there are some better areas of the company than others.
I think it's completely wrong in the context of its role as an ASIC partner. There's a very short list of companies with all the IP needed for these cutting-edge ASICs and Broadcom/Avago might be the best of them. And to be clear, they've developed that IP themselves, just as they've always done. Those that think they're just a "holding company" haven't actually worked with them.
this makes sense since the general consensus on HN is that any general consensus on HN is right so if the general consensus on HN that any general consensus on HN is right is wrong then any general consensus on HN could be wrong
Additionally, having worked with some of their network devices at the driver level, they seem to be kludge piled on top of hack poured over a soup of workarounds for hardware bugs. Maybe they've gotten better recently, but just looking at their drivers, it didn't paint a great picture.
That framing massively undersells how insane Sams ambitions were there, he was floating the idea of somehow raising seven trillion dollars to build thirty six fabs dedicated to making AI silicon. The TSMC execs reported more or less laughed in his face when he brought it up it them.
You don't just acquire $7T.
The ENTIRE US domestic Net Investment isn't even $1T: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W790RC1Q027SBEA
Gross Fixed Capital Formation (Net Investment + Deprecation) isn't much more: 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips
And even them it would have to be split during a decade or two. And even then.
What's the military budget of USA?
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_...
And most of that is part of Gross Fixed Capital Formation already...
Somewhere between $900B and $1T this year
I read it on the internet myself with “sources saying” but I think it’s BS.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-execs-allege...
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.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
Especially not one whose business plan is “let’s invent fairytale technology then ask it how to make money”.
https://x.com/geepytee/status/1778859803735113950
If all of that sounds good to you, I know of a bridge you may be interested in purchasing.
The startup playbook lie ur ass off and make sh!t up. Musk still does it to this day with the recent demo of his Optimus robots implying they were all AI driven.
If he had said $250 billion and six fabs, it would have been a lot to ask but people wouldn't think he was ignorant or irrational for saying it. Big tech for example has that kind of money to throw around spread out across a decade if the investment is a truly great opportunity.
Reminds me of:
Musk flew there with Cantrell, prepared to purchase three ICBMs for $21 million. But to Musk's disappointment, the Russians now claimed that they wanted $21 million for each rocket, and then taunted the future SpaceX founder. As Cantrell recounted to Esquire: “They said, 'Oh, little boy, you don't have the money?”
Could it be possible that OpenAI's new autocomplete will be as transformative to the global economy as WeWork's short term office rentals?
Yeah, that's um, wild.
Earning back the 7T with god/satan on your side could be trivial and at the same time the least of your worries for other reasons (maybe god doesn't like you and/or doesn't care about you).
You know that to many, you are the delusional one if you think that some fictional number in a screen is more important than this glorified autocomplete technology that has the potential to revolutionize humanity as much as agriculture, electricity and the internet.
This is delusional. Nobody has demonstrated AI that can even match the output that human creativity has accomplished in the past 5 years. It will take an awful long time before it's up there alongside humans, and by the time it surpasses us we'll both be long dead.
If you're not just being performative for a joke here, then I don't even know how I can explain how wrong you are. All of this - the promises of "AGI", the bajillion-dollar meme order sent to TSMC, the cryptic sama tweets in lowercase - it's performance art. It's unsubstantiated, nondilineated, unproven, unstudied nonsense. That's it. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings, the crypto bros had to go through this a few months ago and it was tough for them too. But the dividends have to be paid, and in a few years time your "$7 trillion dollar" intellectual property empire will be sand.
When looking at things like mechanization and the productivity increases from around 1880 to now, you took an economy from around 10 billion a year to 14 trillion. This involved mechanization and digitization. We live in a world that someone from 1880 really couldn't imagine.
What I don't know how to answer (or at least search properly) is how much investment this took over that 150 year period. I'm going to assume it's vastly more than $7 trillion. If $7 trillion in investment and manufacturing allowed us to produce human level+ AI then the economic benefits of this would be in the tend to hundreds of trillions.
Now, this isn't saying it would be good for me and you personally, but the capability to apply intelligence to problems and provide solutions would grow very rapidly and dramatically change the world we live in now.
Sure, but right now that "if" is trying to do 7 trillion dollars of unsubstantiated heavy lifting. I might be able to start creating Iron Man-style arc reactors in a cave with a box of scraps and all I ask is 1 trillion, so you all should invest given how much money unlimited free energy is worth.
1 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364725/quotes/
I would imagine some productive cultural impact that’s wide spread, sticky, high retention not like ‘oh cool 3d tv or vr’ kinda thing?
Given how much ‘money’ has been burnt through the GPU heatsinks.
I wonder how this squares with the exclusivity contract with Microsoft. Even the OpenAI/Oracle deal requires Oracle to run Azure stack on their datacenter so MSFT can mediate the relationship. The AMD chips mentioned are also purchased by MSFT.
I wonder if this really means that OpenAI is accepting the risk/capital expense while providing a variety of hardware to Microsoft, or if there are other terms at play.
https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-5-21-amd...
Not sure of the pricing, but the performance of their chip is pretty outdated at this point. MI300x is way faster and more memory.
You can throw more money at it to make it go faster, but it also might fuck it up and take longer.
https://shisa.ai/blog/posts/tuning-vllm-mi300x/
https://blog.vllm.ai/2024/10/23/vllm-serving-amd.html
I don't think that's completely wrong, but it's a big company and I'm sure there are some better areas of the company than others.
It's a sign that we're moving on to greener pastures.
Sucks for the new generation that think everything needs an app to work.
The internet was better at feeling less corporate a decade ago.
So both are correct. Broadcom is a legit important hw company, and it is a PE holding company that buys and loots tech companies (like VMware)
Avago Technologies (owned by corporate raiders) bought Broadcom, then took its name for itself
its ticker is still AVAG
General consensus on HN is generally wrong.
I think everyone here would agree with that.
;)
Having been on both sides, I’m continually shocked that stuff even works.
Splunk+Datadog and AWS+Nutanix+Cohesity respectively ate much of CA and VMWare's marketshare.
>TSMC execs allegedly dismissed Sam Altman as ‘podcasting bro’ — OpenAI CEO made absurd requests for 36 fabs for $7 trillion