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.
There are two possibilities: railway/dotcom bubble or monorail/bitcoin bubble …and I’m not sure which one it is going to be yet. In the first case, a lot of people lose their investment, because they got too greedy and believed in huge returns…but the infrastructure remains and there is a net good to society and time spent specializing in it is worth it afterwards. The second, not so much, it is just a hype cycle with almost nothing of use left once it is gone and a lot of wasted time. I’m leaning towards the first, but if they don’t find a way to bring energy costs down, it might end up in the monorail/bitcoin scenario…maybe 10% chance.
If AI hits a dead end, it’ll still be trotted out as an excuse to keep wages low, as in “if you peasants keep complaining, you can just be replaced with AI!” just like the articles about burger-making robots over a decade ago when people were protesting for a $15/hr minimum wage back then (and still no burger-making robots mass deployed today). Trash still has its uses, just like how bitcoin hasn’t become the “become your own bank” system it was promised to be and is instead used to hide financial fuckery.
That reminds me of a funny story from Encyclopedia Geopolitica where an expert in money laundering describes bitcoin around 2016 as being an el-dorado for financial forensics. It was so good at tracking funds that there was a bitcoin wallet address on a terrorism website on the deep web and they could see the donations arrive in real time and catch a pile of 'em. Maybe now they are more cautious and use more mixing layers, but it is still a terrible use case for that if you don’t control transaction entry and exit nodes: the ledger is public and every transaction is traceable.