A report this week that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seeks to lift as much as $7 trillion had many tech-industry observers scratching their heads. The quantity simply exceeds the market cap of any firm—together with Microsoft, which lately hit $3.1 trillion and surged past Apple as America’s most beneficial firm.
In fact, Microsoft has been propelled by the growth in synthetic intelligence kicked off by ChatGPT maker OpenAI, wherein it’s the largest investor. However as AI weaves its means into how we work and play within the years forward, Altman foresees an issue: an insufficient variety of AI chips and chipmaking amenities.
With that in thoughts, he’s in search of to lift giant sums from rich traders all over the world for a challenge that may increase manufacturing of AI chips. The Wall Road Journal, talking to unnamed sources, reported this week that Altman desires $5 trillion to $7 trillion for the challenge, wherein OpenAI, traders, chipmakers, and energy suppliers would crew as much as construct chip foundries.
The quantity dwarfs, because the Journal notes, the scale of in the present day’s world semiconductor {industry}.
Sam Lessin, a Silicon Valley investor and early Facebook government—he’s operating for a slot on the Harvard Board of Overseers, an effort backed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a former classmate—mused in regards to the fundraising in an X post on Friday entitled “The Era of Absurdist Capitalism.”
When trillions are being sought in a fundraise, Lessin wrote, “you have to question what has happened to society/our system.”
He introduced up Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, writing: “I don’t grudge Sam’s showmanship in and of itself—he is just extending the game Elon has played with ‘self-driving cars around the corner’ or ‘Mars by 2024.’”
In 2020, Musk said that SpaceX’s first crewed Mars mission might launch as early as 2024. Two years later he pushed that again to 2029.
“Sam is just playing a game of one-upmanship,” Lessin wrote. “Starting with fear-mongering AGI, and when that runs out…let’s come up with the biggest number we can think of.”
AGI stands for synthetic common intelligence, a hypothetical kind of AI that may do any job a human can. Altman spent a lot of final yr warning world leaders and others in regards to the risks of AGI, an train that additionally helped turbocharge curiosity in OpenAI’s merchandise. The Monetary Instances reported this week that OpenAI’s revenues have surpassed $2 billion on an annualized foundation.
The hazard, Lessin instructed, is that capitalism, slightly than being the invisible hand that guides us, “becomes a game of ‘absurdities’ vs. discipline.”
