Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/business/openai-plan-elec...

Wait, he wants his open product to be like a utility with low profits for maximized reach?

Or he wants his suppliers to be a regulated utility while he sells 100% margin products on top of it?

Or he wants all the greater fools now wherever they are so he can get out before the collapse?

It feels like this is a case of following the money to understand the real goals, since it's unclear to me that AGI is that goal.

> Mr. Altman has since scaled his ambition down to hundreds of billions of dollars, the nine people said, and hatched a new strategy: Court U.S. government officials by first helping to build data centers in the United States.

When all else fails, pitch your idea to the right officials in the USG and you'll make bank. And if you do it right, you won't even be doing anything at all. There are companies getting 8-10 figures a year to fail at upgrading systems from DOS to literally anything not DOS. It's a very low bar, but a profitable one if you can pull it off.

> The OpenAI chief told White House officials that A.I. data centers would be a catalyst for the re-industrialization of America, creating as many as half a million jobs

Would love to hear OpenAI's explanation behind this line of thinking.

This is a twisted and ironic example of VC thinking taken to the extreme: we just need it to growth it more for it to really show its potential.

What happens if giving to everyone and their mothers ends up in low usage? Are they going to blame scale again and ask for a Dyson Sphere?

In a sense I kind of respect it but the way OpenAI are 100x-ing all their statements ("Universal basic compute"!) like every small startup has to pretend to be the next XYZ (only on a much bigger scale) is hilarious. Are they even in the lead at the moment?

> In private conversations, Mr. Altman has compared the world’s data centers to electricity, according to three people close to the discussions. As the availability of electricity became more widespread, people found better ways of using it. Mr. Altman hoped to do the same with data centers and eventually make A.I. technologies flow like electricity.

Reminds me of a quote I saved from Kevin Kelly's book The Inevitable, which was published in 2016. I saved it because it sounded so absurd at the time. To be clear, it sort of still does sound absurd to me, who remain moderately skeptical about AI (though admittedly less so than in 2016, largely because of the following sentence). What's very serious is how much money and old-fashioned brainpower is going into making this future real. I don't know whether the metaphor was arrived at independently, derives from the same source, or is just an obvious way of thinking about the world when you've drunk the right flavor of Kool-Aid.

> Amid all this activity, of a picture of our AI future is coming into view, and it is not the HAL 9000—a discrete machine animated by a charismatic (yet potentially homicidal) humanlike consciousness—or a Singularitan rapture of superintelligence. The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off. This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need. You’ll simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity. It will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century past. Three generations ago, many a tinkerer struck it rich by taking a tool and making an electric version. Take a manual pump; electrify it. Find a hand-wringer washer; electrify it. The entrepreneurs didn’t need to generate the electricity; they brought it from the grid and used it to automate the previously manual. Now everything that we formerly electrified we will cognify. There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or more valuable by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it.

It has to be easier to pitch sovereign wealth funds on something that isn't even nominally nonprofit.

Who is buying this absolute nonsense?! Sam Altman is the biggest conman of the last century.

> TSMC’s executives found the idea so absurd that they took to calling Mr. Altman a “podcasting bro,” one of these people said.

This is very heartwarming.

Sam's flailing. He's desperate for more money, because OAI is running out. And Sam will say anything and everything to get more money. He's making whatever noise makes the audience feel good, truth be damned.

And it's kind of funny to see how well MS has played that particular instrument. A partnership with Sam got them 49% ownership and got rid of the doomer faction. The 75% profit share makes any future investors look long and hard at investing into what looks to be a capital-intensive low-revenue business right now.

Which makes it likely that OAI will run out of money, and oops, let's see if there aren't suddenly more than 49% ownership. And MS has a technology where they were long behind. (My bet is that the majority ownership will happen this funding round, because Sam is desperate)

The only way that doesn't happen is if Sam manages a massive investment round and finds a path to profit before the money's burned up. And the beauty of it is that the early 49% ownership means they only need to make a comparatively tiny investment this round to still be a majority owner in the company, with a 75% revenue share until their money is fully recouped. And the other investors get to bear the majority of the risk for the much larger funding round.

This are all utterly logical plays if you are willing to accept Sam is somebody who can make things move, loves gambling, and is a narcissist.

I really do think he's being played by a virtuoso, and it gives me great joy to watch that unfold.

Honestly the more AI I use the more issues I find with it. Copilot chat is especially useless outside of anything basic.

Downright harmful in some cases.

All these Libertarians asking for government handouts…

Sam Altman will champion Direct Intelligence, while Elon Musk will take credit for Alternating Intelligence. Then, to prove how dangerous Alternating Intelligence really is, Sam will use it to execute dogs, fry elephants, and even immolate a few Teslas, before finally inventing the deadly Artificially Intelligent Chair to execute prisoners.

call me narrow-minded but just like general public read books on a daily, write essays regularly like daily journals, or make public speeches, you'd have to drink a special kind of kool-aid to assume we all need AI like public utilities.

the "muh job" angle is well and good, but if this really convinces you, i got a bridge to sell. maybe sam thinks we all are into making podcasts now.

so tired of all this AI hype and CEO stuff. just do your thing and let peopel buy it or not, no need to try to be the next henry ford or something

Eyes rolling so hard right now

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For 7 trillion dollars we could solve aging, making humans immortal and genetically engineer them to be super intelligent. Instead we’re going to create super-inefficient AIs? At least use the money to fix climate change and other existential threats, rather than creating a new one.

There's really no way back. AI is today helping design chips (check Google's report on how they use it for their own designs), drugs etc. And having a LLM connected to a simplistic enterprise app is a money printing machine. Really is a new ind revolution. And it's held back by not enough infra and power.