_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
mppm wrote 3 min ago:
Apart from my general queasiness about the whole AGI scaling business
and the power concentration that comes with it, these are the exact
four people/entities that I would not want to be at the tip of said
power concentration.
baobun wrote 6 min ago:
Larry Elliot, Elon Musk, and Masayoshi Son.
They really got together the supervillains of tech.
Feels like the the only reason Zuck is missing is Elon's veto.
slt2021 wrote 18 min ago:
too late, China is already ahead
pixelmonkey wrote 35 min ago:
Here is what I think is going on in this announcement. Take the 4 major
commodity cloud companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle) and
determine: do they have big data centers and do they have their own AI
product organization?
- Google has a massive data center division (Google Cloud / GCP) and a
massive AI product division (Deep Mind / Gemini).
- Microsoft has a massive data center division (Azure) but no
significant AI product division; for the most part, they build their
"Copilot" functionality atop their partner version of the OpenAI APIs.
- Amazon has a massive data center division (Amazon Web Services / AWS)
but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they are
hedging their bets here with an investment in Anthropic and support for
running models inside AWS (e.g. Bedrock).
- Oracle has a massive data center division (Oracle Cloud / OCI) but no
significant AI product division.
Now look at OpenAI by comparison. OpenAI has no data center division,
as the whole company is basically the AI product division and related
R&D. But, at the moment, their data centers come exclusively from their
partnership with Microsoft.
This announcement is OpenAI succeeding in a multi-party negotiation
with Microsoft, Oracle, and the new administration of the US Gov't.
Oracle will build the new data centers, which it knows how to do.
OpenAI will use the compute in these new data centers, which it knows
how to do. Microsoft granted OpenAI an exception to their exclusive
cloud compute licensing arrangement, due to this special circumstance.
Masa helps raise the money for the joint venture, which he knows how to
do. US Gov't puts its seal on it to make it a more valuable joint
venture and to clear regulatory roadblocks for big parallel data center
build-outs. The current administration gets to take credit as "doing
something in the AI space," while also framing it in national
industrial policy terms ("data centers built in the USA").
The clear winner in all of this is OpenAI, which has politically and
economically navigated its way to a multi-cloud arrangement, while
still outsourcing physical data center management to Microsoft and
Oracle. Probably their deal with Oracle will end up looking like their
deal with Microsoft, where the trade is compute capacity for API
credits that Oracle can use in its higher level database products.
OpenAI probably only needs two well-capitalized hardware providers
competing for their CPU+GPU business in order to have a "good enough"
commodity market to carry them to the next level of scaling, and now
they have it.
Google increasingly has a strategic reason not to sell OpenAI any of
its cloud compute, and Amazon could be headed in that direction too. So
this was more strategically (and existentially) important to OpenAI
than one might have imagined.
listic wrote 39 min ago:
How much of the supposed $500B will be US state budget money?
aurareturn wrote 47 min ago:
Feels so much like an announcement designed to trade favors.
Altman gets on Trump's good side by giving him credit for the deal.
Trump revoked Biden's AI regulations.
chvid wrote 1 hour 10 min ago:
Comment from Elon Musk: [1] They donât actually have the money
URI [1]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780
astrea wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
Letâs say they develop AGI tomorrow. Is that really all she wrote for
blue collar jobs?
petre wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
Gerat. Larry gets cash thrown at his AI surveillance dystopia.
bfrog wrote 2 hours 36 min ago:
What are people filling these datacenters with exactly if not nvidia?
gibbitz wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
Can we build a wall to keep AI out?
ulfw wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
God forbid anyone would invest $500,000,000,000 to create jobs. No no
no. 500 billion to destroy them for "more efficiency" so the owner
class can get richer.
heyitssim wrote 3 hours 7 min ago:
who will benefit from those datacenters?
b3ing wrote 3 hours 22 min ago:
100,000 US jobs that I bet most are h-1b workers and they go over the
80,000 limit there were over 220,000 issued in 2023
wujerry2000 wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
For fun, I calculated how this stacks up against other humanity-scale
mega projects.
Mega Project Rankings (USD Inflation Adjusted)
The New Deal: $1T,
Interstate Highway System: $618B,
OpenAI Stargate: $500B,
The Apollo Project: $278B,
International Space Station: $180B,
South-North Water Transfer: $106B,
The Channel Tunnel: $31B,
Manhattan Project: $30B
Insane Stuff.
krick wrote 42 min ago:
It's unfair, because we are talking in the hindsight about everything
but Project Stargate, and it's also just your list (and I don't know
what others could add to it) but it got me thinking. Manhattan
Project goal is to make a powerful bomb. Apollo is to get to the Moon
before soviets do (so, because of hubris, but still there is a
concrete goal). South-North Water Transfer is pretty much
terraforming, and others are mostly roads. I mean, it's all kinda
understandable.
And Stargate Project is... what exactly? What is the goal? To make
Altman richer, or is there any more or less concrete goal to achieve?
Also, few items for comparison, that I googled while thinking about
it:
- Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository: $96B
- ITER: $65B
- Hubble Space Telescope: $16B
- JWST: $11B
- LHC: $10B
Sources: [1] [2]
URI [1]: https://jameswebbtracker.com/jwst/budget
URI [2]: https://blogfusion.tech/worlds-most-expensive-experiments/
URI [3]: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/overview/faqs/
Dalewyn wrote 5 min ago:
>What is the goal?
Be the definitive first past the post in the budding "AI" industry.
Why? He who wins first writes the rules.
For an obvious example: The aviation industry uses feets and knots
instead of metres because the US invented and commercialized
aviation.
Another obvious example: Computers all speak ASCII (read: English)
and even Unicode is based on ASCII because the US and UK
commercialized computers.
If you want to write the rules you must win first, it is an
absolute requirement. Runner-ups and below only get to obey the
rules.
fooker wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
Is this inflation adjusted?
pinot wrote 2 hours 53 min ago:
Those are all public projects except for one..
alpb wrote 33 min ago:
Yeah, I'm not sure why we're pretending this will benefit the
public. The only benefit is that it will create employment, and
datacenter jobs are among the lowest paid tech workers in the
industry.
fastball wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
Neom: $1.5T
moralestapia wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
But that one's imaginary.
krick wrote 40 min ago:
Maybe, but so is Stargate Project so far.
fastball wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
Is it? [1]
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYimVfnGNGY
URI [2]: https://skift.com/2024/08/07/saudi-takes-2-million-photo...
SeanAnderson wrote 51 min ago:
"Unnamed sources told Bloomberg in April that The Line is
scaling back from 170 kilometers long to just 2.4 kilometers,
with the rest of the length to be completed after 2030. Neom
expects The Line to be finished by 2045 now, 15 years later
than initially planned."
It doesn't look great so far :)
yalogin wrote 3 hours 58 min ago:
How have they already selected who gets this money? Usually the
government announces a program and tries to be fair when allocating
funds. Here they are just bankrolling an existing project. Interesting
Dalewyn wrote 3 hours 55 min ago:
>How have they already selected who gets this money?
As I understand it there wasn't anything to select, this is their own
private money to be spent as they please. In this case Stargate.
sidcool wrote 4 hours 30 min ago:
Future of AI being controlled by Oracle worries me
mullingitover wrote 4 hours 35 min ago:
I'm in the middle of "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial
Speculation" and hoo boy, there are strong deja vu vibes here.
Just waiting for the current regime to decide that we should go all-in
on some big AI venture and bet the whole Social Security pot on it.
lobochrome wrote 4 hours 55 min ago:
Well - as part of the semi industry I'd like to say: Really appreciate
it. Keep it coming!
jparishy wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
I hear this joked about sometimes or used as a metaphor, but in the
literal sense of the phrase, are we in a cold war right now? These
types of dollars feel "defense-y", if that makes sense. Especially with
the big focus on energy, whatever that ends up meaning. Defense as a
motivation can get a lot done very fast so it will be interesting to
watch, though it raises the hair on my arms
fooblaster wrote 3 hours 58 min ago:
It's called a bubble. The level of spending now defines how fucked we
are in 2-3 years.
toomuchtodo wrote 3 hours 48 min ago:
You know those booths at events where money is blown around and the
person inside needs to grab as much as they can before the timer
runs out? This is that machine for technologists until the bubble
ends. The fallout in 2-3 years is the problem of whomever invested
or is holding bags when (if?) the bubble pops.
Make hay while the sun shines.
fooblaster wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
yeah. If the numbers are real, this might be the end of SoftBank.
lmm wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
Hardly. Who better to invest a trillion dollars with than the
guy who blew the last hundred billion dollars?
distortionfield wrote 4 hours 58 min ago:
We certainly are, if you ask me. Especially when you realize that we
havenât had official comms with Russia since the war in Ukraine
broke out.
etblg wrote 4 hours 59 min ago:
The US government and its media partners sure seem to think so.
kube-system wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
Absolutely
for instance:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_telecommuni...
UltraSane wrote 4 hours 46 min ago:
I can only assume the US is hacking China at least as much as they
hack us.
jparishy wrote 4 hours 56 min ago:
Right, but they've been doing that for a while, to everyone. The US
is much quieter about it, right? But you can twist this move and
see how the gov would not want to display that level of investment
within itself as it could be interpreted as a sign of aggression.
but it makes sense to me that they'd have no issue working through
corporations to achieve the same ends but now able to deny direct
involvement
kube-system wrote 4 hours 45 min ago:
I don't think this administration is worried too much about
showing aggression. If anything they are embracing it. Today
was the first full day, and they have already threatened the
sovereignty of at least four nations.
jparishy wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
I guess I just don't think that's true when it comes to China?
The VP attended the inauguration yesterday. But I could be
naive, we'll see
kube-system wrote 4 hours 33 min ago:
I think that was a preemptive gesture by China to try to cool
tensions to avoid escalation. Further escalations are not in
their interest.
nomilk wrote 5 hours 26 min ago:
How likely is success when 4 or more other massive companies work
together on a project? Seems like a lot of chefs in the kitchen..
skellington wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
I'm not automatically pro or anti Stargate (the movie and show were
cool) BUT
Who gets the benefit of all of this investment? Are taxpayers going to
fund this thing which is monetized by OpenAI?
If we pay for this shit, it better be fucking free to use.
joshdavham wrote 5 hours 45 min ago:
> The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers and
the electricity generation needed for the further development of the
fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House.
Wouldn't a more northern state be a better location given the average
temperatures of the environment? I've heard Texas is hot!
steveoscaro wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
I think cheap power (whether gas turbines or massive solar farms)
trumps any cooling efficiencies gained by locating in a cold climate.
dhx wrote 5 hours 53 min ago:
It was rumoured in early 2024 that "Stargate" was planned to require
5GW data centre capacity[1][2] which in early 2024 was the entire data
centre capacity Microsoft had already built[3]. Data centre capacity
costs between USD$9-15m/MW[6] so 5GW of new data centre capacity would
cost USD$45b-$75b but let's pick a more median cost of USD12m/MW[6] to
arrive at USD$60b for 5GW of new data centre capacity.
This 5GW data centre capacity very roughly equates to 350000x NVIDIA
DGX B200 (with 14.3kW maximum power consumption[4] and USD$500k price
tag[5]) which if NVIDIA were selected would result in a very
approximate total procurement of USD$175b from NVIDIA.
On top of the empty data centres and DGX B200's and in the remaining
(potential) USD$265b we have to add:
* Networking equipment / fibre network builds between data centres.
* Engineering / software development / research and development across
4 years to design, build and be able to use the newly built
infrastructure. This was estimated in mid 2024 to cost OpenAI
US$1.5b/yr for retaining 1500 employees, or USD$1m/yr/employee[7].
Obviously this is a fraction of the total workforce needed to design
and build out all the additional infrastructure that Microsoft, Oracle,
etc would have to deliver.
* Electricity supply costs for current/initial operation. As an aside,
these costs seemingly not be competitive with other global competitors
if the USA decides to avoid the cheapest method of generation
(renewables) and instead prefer the more expensive generation methods
(nuclear, fossil fuels). It is however worth noting that China
currently has ~80% of solar PV module manufacturing capacity and ~95%
of wafer manufacturing capacity.[10]
* Costs for obtaining training data.
* Obsolescence management (4 years is a long time after which equipment
will likely need to be completely replaced due to obsolescence).
* Any other current and ongoing costs of Microsoft, Oracle and OpenAI
that they'll likely roll into the total announced amount to make it
sound more impressive. As an example this could include R&D and
sustainment costs in corporate ICT infrastructure and shared services
such as authentication and security monitoring systems.
The question we can then turn to is whether this rate of spend can
actually be achieved in 4 years?
Microsoft is planning to spend USD$80bn building data centres in
2025[7] with 1.5GW of new capacity to be added in the first six months
of 2025[3]. This USD$80bn planned spend is for more than "Stargate" and
would include all their other business units that require data centres
to be built, so the total required spend of USD$45b-$75b to add 5GW
data centre capacity is unlikely to be achieved quickly by Microsoft
alone, hence the apparent reason for Oracle's involvement. However,
Oracle are only planning a US$10b capital expenditure in 2025 equating
to ~0.8GW capacity expansion[9]. The data centre builds will be
schedule critical for the "Stargate" project because equipment can't be
installed and turned on and large models trained (a lengthy activity)
until data centres exist. And data centre builds are heavily dependent
on electricity generation and transmission expansion which is slow to
expand. [1] [2] [3] [4] [4] [5] [5] [6] [6] [7] [7] [8] [8] [9] [9]
[10] [10]
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39869158
URI [2]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-openai-co...
URI [3]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-to-double...
URI [4]: https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-dgx-systems/dgx-b200-datash...
URI [5]: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-blackwell-dgx-b200-price-half-a-mi...
URI [6]: https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/united-states/insights/dat...
URI [7]: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/01/03/the-golde...
URI [8]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-training-and...
URI [9]: https://www.crn.com.au/news/oracle-q3-2024-ellison-says-ai-inf...
URI [10]: https://www.iea.org/reports/advancing-clean-technology-manufac...
aussieguy1234 wrote 6 hours 1 min ago:
This could potentially trigger an AI arms race between the US and
China. The standard has been set, lets see what China responds with.
Either way, it will accelerate the arrival of ASI, which in my opinion
is probably a good thing.
philomath_mn wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
The arms race is already running, I think this showdown is inevitable
so we should get our asses moving
Unless we air strike the data centers, there is no way to control
Chinaâs progress
vaccineai wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
It will be similar to the space race between Soviet Union and US.
And just like Soviet Union going broke and collapsing, China too will
go even more broke and collapse.
qaq wrote 6 hours 4 min ago:
This is going to be the grift of the century. Sam will put Wall Street
robber barons to shame.
Havoc wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
> This is going to be the grift of the century.
Pretty sure that was musk and his 50+ bn bonus
resters wrote 6 hours 10 min ago:
Why is Larry Ellison giving a speech about the power of AI to cure
disease? How is Oracle relevant at all to any of AI progress in the
past few years?
aithrowawaycomm wrote 3 hours 6 min ago:
[1] Wouldn't surprise me Sam Altman convinced Trump/Son/Ellison that
this AI can reverse their aging. And Ellison does have a ton of money
- $208bn.
URI [1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069523/sam-altm...
adunsulag wrote 5 hours 14 min ago:
Oracle purchased Cerner which is now sitting on a ton of healthcare
data.
Havoc wrote 5 hours 53 min ago:
Oracle actually has a ton of gpus
Not sure how they knew to buy them or why but they have them. Mostly
seem to be lending them out. Think mostly OpenAI. Or was it MS. One
of the big dogs
mrbungie wrote 4 hours 32 min ago:
Still, the worst positioned cloud provider to tackle this job. Both
for the project and for eventual users of whatever eldritch
abomination that cames out of this.
aurareturn wrote 1 hour 38 min ago:
Oracle is trusted by large enterprises, banks, governments. So
OpenAI wants to attach itself to Oracle's brand.
aurareturn wrote 1 hour 39 min ago:
Oracle is trusted by large enterprises. So OpenAI wants to attach
itself to Oracle's brand.
danpalmer wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
> building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States
That's nice, but if I were spending $500bn on datacenters I'd probably
try to put a few in places that serve other users. Centralised compute
can only get you so far in terms of serving users.
karmasimida wrote 6 hours 18 min ago:
Money isn't the issue any more, wowww
MaximilianEmel wrote 6 hours 22 min ago:
How much is allocated to alignment/safety research?
jgalt212 wrote 6 hours 27 min ago:
I guess these people are betting small and efficient models are not the
future.
MichaelMoser123 wrote 6 hours 28 min ago:
The moon program was $318 billion in 2023 dollars, this one is $500
billion. So that's why the tech barons who were present at the
inauguration were high as a kite yesterday, they just got the financing
for a real moon shot!
aurareturn wrote 4 hours 49 min ago:
To be fair, itâs not easy to monetize the moon program into
profitability. This has a far better shot of sustaining
profitability.
dmonitor wrote 4 hours 43 min ago:
why do they need profitability? they already made $500B
aurareturn wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
They didnât make $500b?
yobid20 wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
Oh but crypto mining was bad lol wheres the power going to come from
ur-whale wrote 6 hours 37 min ago:
None of these companies have the inner resources to fund a 500B build.
Looks like the dollar printing press will continue to overheat in the
coming years.
JSTrading wrote 6 hours 37 min ago:
Wasnât this announced months ago? I feel like it was.
URI [1]: https://www.techradar.com/pro/could-amd-be-the-key-to-microsof...
gilgoomesh wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
Interesting that 6 months ago, Microsoft was attached but now they're
missing from today's announcement.
Maxious wrote 4 hours 22 min ago:
Scroll down:
> Other partners in the project include Microsoft, investor MGX and
the chipmakers Arm and NVIDIA, according to separate statements by
Oracle and OpenAI.
lantry wrote 5 hours 33 min ago:
yeah, it sounds like they're just relabeling an existing plan
> Ellison noted that the data centers are already under construction
with 10 being built so far.
daveguy wrote 6 hours 11 min ago:
Well, I've never known Trump to take credit for something someone
else did.
iandanforth wrote 6 hours 39 min ago:
Anyone know if this involves nuclear plants as well or is that a
separate initiative?
gunian wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
Texas positioning itself better than expected for AI and EVs is the
plot twist the peasants needed
If they plan to transition off oil/nuclear it will be fun to watch
drak0n1c wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
Texas already is the leading state in new grid battery and grid solar
installs for the last 3 years. Governor Abbott also did nuclear
deregulation last year.
gunian wrote 2 hours 28 min ago:
is there a simple metric likr x amount of power generated by solar,
oil, gas etc?
it seems like such a simple stat to collect
tantalor wrote 6 hours 53 min ago:
Wasn't this already announced last week?
TheAceOfHearts wrote 6 hours 56 min ago:
I'm confused and a bit disturbed; honestly having a very difficult time
internalizing and processing this information. This announcement is
making me wonder if I'm poorly calibrated on the current progress of AI
development and the potential path forward. Is the key idea here that
current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path
towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure
it out in the next 4 years...
I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment. I feel that
I lack the proper conceptual framework to make sense of the purchasing
power of half a trillion USD in this context.
lmm wrote 3 hours 22 min ago:
> current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path
towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure
it out in the next 4 years...
Or they think the odds are high enough that the gamble makes sense.
Even if they think it's a 20% chance, their competitors are investing
at this scale, their only real options are keep up or drop out.
petesergeant wrote 4 hours 44 min ago:
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out
enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative
is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
Can't answer that question, but, if the only thing to change in the
next four years was that generation got cheaper and cheaper, we
haven't even begun to understand the transformative power of what we
have available today. I think we've felt like 5-10% of the effects
that integrating today's technology can bring, especially if
generation costs come down to maybe 1% of what they currently are,
and latency of the big models becomes close to instantaneous.
og_kalu wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
"There are maybe a few hundred people in the world who viscerally
understand what's coming. Most are at DeepMind / OpenAI / Anthropic /
X but some are on the outside. You have to be able to forecast the
aggregate effect of rapid algorithmic improvement, aggressive
investment in building RL environments for iterative
self-improvement, and many tens of billions already committed to
building data centers. Either we're all wrong, or everything is about
to change." - Vedant Misra, Deepmind Researcher.
Maybe your calibration isn't poor. Maybe they really are all wrong
but there's a tendency here to these these people behind the scenes
are all charlatans, fueling hype without equal substance hoping to
make a quick buck before it all comes crashing down, but i don't
think that's true at all. I think these people really genuinely
believe they're going to get there. And if you genuinely think that,
them this kind of investment isn't so crazy.
root_axis wrote 38 min ago:
Motivated reasoning sings nicely to the tune of billions of
dollars. None of these folks will ever say, "don't waste money on
this dead end". However, it's clear that there is still a lot of
productive value to extract from transformers and certainly there
will be other useful things that appear along the way. It's not the
worst investment I can imagine, even if it never leads to "AGI"
paul7986 wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
My prediction is a Apple loses to Open AI who releases a H.E.R.
(like the movie) like phone. She is seen on your lock screen a la
a Facetime call UI/UX and she can be skinned to look like whoever;
i.e. a deceased loved one.
She interfaces with AI Agents of companies, organizations, friends,
family, etc to get things done for you (or to learn from..what's my
friends bday his agent tells yours) automagically and she is like a
friend. Always there for you at your beckon call like in the movie
H.E.R.
Zuckerberg's glasses that can not take selfies will only be
complimentary to our AI phones.
That's just my guess and desire as fervent GPT user, as well a Meta
Ray Ban wearer (can't take selfies with glasses).
dauhak wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out
enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
My sense anecdotally from within the space is yes people are feeling
like we most likely have a "straight shot" to AGI now. Progress has
been insane over the last few years but there's been this lurking
worry around signs that the pre-training scaling paradigm has
diminishing returns.
What recent outputs like o1, o3, DeepSeek-R1 are showing is that
that's fine, we now have a new paradigm around test-time compute. For
various reasons people think this is going to be more scalable and
not run into the kind of data issues you'd get with a pre-training
paradigm.
You can definitely debate on whether that's true or not but this is
the first time I've been really seeing people think we've cracked
"it", and the rest is scaling, better training etc.
NitpickLawyer wrote 41 min ago:
I agree with your take, and actually go a bit further. I think the
idea of "diminishing returns" is a bit of a red herring, and it's
instead a combination of saturated benchmarks (and testing in
general) and expectations of "one llm to rule them all". This might
not be the case.
We've seen with oAI and Anthropic, and rumoured with Google, that
holding your "best" model and using it to generate datasets for
smaller but almost as capable models is one way to go forward. I
would say that this shows the "big models" are more capable than it
would seem and that they also open up new avenues.
We know that Meta used L2 to filter and improve its training sets
for L3. We are also seeing how "long form" content + filtering + RL
leads to amazing things (what people call "reasoning" models).
Semantics might be a bit ambitious, but this really opens up the
path towards -> documentation + virtual environments + many
rollouts + filtering by SotA models => new dataset for next gen
models.
That, plus optimisations (early exit from meta, titans from google,
distillation from everyone, etc) really makes me question the
"we've hit a wall" rhetoric. I think there are enough tools on the
table today to either jump the wall, or move around it.
Davidzheng wrote 6 hours 14 min ago:
Let me avoid the use of the word AGI here because the term is a
little too loaded for me these days.
1) reasoning capabilities in latest models are rapidly approaching
superhuman levels and continue to scale with compute.
2) intelligence at a certain level is easier to achieve
algorithmically when the hardware improves. There's also a larger
path to intelligence and often simpler mechanisms
3) most current generation reasoning AI models leverage test time
compute and RL in training--both of which can make use of more
compute readily. For example RL on coding against compilers proofs
against verifiers.
All of this points to compute now being basically the only bottleneck
to massively superhuman AIs in domains like math and coding--rest no
comment (idk what superhuman is in a domain with no objective evals)
lossolo wrote 4 hours 46 min ago:
> All of this points to compute now being basically the only
bottleneck to massively superhuman AIs
This is true for brute force algorithms as well and has been known
for decades. With infinite compute, you can achieve wonders. But
the problem lies in diminishing returns[1][2], and it seems things
do not scale linearly, at least for transformers.
1. [1] 2.
URI [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-19/anthrop...
URI [2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-...
philipwhiuk wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
You can't block AGI on a whim and then deploy 'superhuman' without
justification.
A calculator is superhuman if you're prepared to put up with it's
foibles.
Davidzheng wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
It is superhuman in a very specific domain. I didn't use AGI
because its definitions are one of two flavors.
One, capable of replacing some large proportion of global gdp
(this definition has a lot of obstructions: organizational,
bureaucratic, robotic)...
two, difficult to find problems in which average human can solve
but model cannot. The problem with this definition is that the
distinct nature of intelligence of AI and the broadness of tasks
is such that this metric is probably only achievable after AI is
already in reality massively superhuman intelligence in
aggregate. Compare this with Go AIs which were massively
superhuman and often still failing to count ladders
correctly--which was also fixed by more scaling.
All in all I avoid the term AGI because for me AGI is comparing
average intelligence on broad tasks rel humans and I'm already
not sure if it's achieved by current models whereas superhuman
research math is clearly not achieved because humans are still
making all of progress of new results.
insane_dreamer wrote 6 hours 20 min ago:
It's a typical Trump-style announcement -- IT'S GONNA BE HUUUGE!! --
without any real substance or solid commitments
Remember Trump's BIG WIN of Foxconn investing $10B to build a factory
in Wisconsin, creating 13000 jobs?
That was in 2017. 7 years later, it's employing about 1000 people if
that. Not really clear what, if anything, is being made at the
partially-built factory. [0]
And everyone's forgotten about it by now.
I expect this to be something along those lines.
[0]
URI [1]: https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2023/03/23/wha...
HarHarVeryFunny wrote 6 hours 22 min ago:
Largest GPU cluster at the moment is X.ai's 100K H100's which is
~$2.5B worth of GPUs. So, something 10x bigger (1M GPUs) is $25B, and
add $10B for 1GW nuclear reactor.
This sort of $100-500B budget doesn't sound like training cluster
money, more like anticipating massive industry uptake and multiple
datacenters running inference (with all of corporate America's data
sitting in the cloud).
internetter wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
Shouldn't there be a fear of obsolescence?
HarHarVeryFunny wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
It seems you'd need to figure periodic updates into the operating
cost of a large cluster, as well as replacing failed GPUs - they
only last a few years if run continuously.
I've read that some datacenters run mixed generation GPUs - just
updating some at a time, but not sure if they all do that.
It'd be interesting to read something about how updates are
typically managed/scheduled.
jazzyjackson wrote 6 hours 39 min ago:
This announcement is from the same office as the guy that xeeted:
âMy NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It's time to celebrate
everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump
Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.â
Your calibration is probably fine, stargate is not a means to achieve
AGI, itâs a means to start construction on a few million square
feet of datacenters thereby âreindustrializing Americaâ
iandanforth wrote 6 hours 37 min ago:
FWIW Altman sees it as a way to deploy AGI. He's increasingly
comfortable with the idea they have achieved AGI and are moving
toward Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI).
aithrowawaycomm wrote 3 hours 12 min ago:
[1] twitter hype is out of control again.
we are not gonna deploy AGI next month, nor have we built it.
we have some very cool stuff for you but pls chill and cut your
expectations 100x!
I realize he wrote a fairly goofy blog a few weeks ago, but this
tweet is unambiguous: they have not achieved AGI.
URI [1]: https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1881258443669172470
daveguy wrote 6 hours 14 min ago:
Do you think Sam Altman ever sits in front of a terminal trying
to figure out just the right prompt incantation to get an answer
that, unless you already know the answer, has to be verified?
Serious question. I personally doubt he is using openai products
day to day. Seems like all of this is very premature. But, if
there are gains to be made from a 7T parameter model, or if there
is huge adoption, maybe it will be worth it. I'm sure there will
be use for increased compute in general, but that's a lot of
capex to recover.
ilaksh wrote 6 hours 40 min ago:
I think the only way you get to that kind of budget is by assuming
that the models are like 5 or 10 times larger than most LLMs, and
that you want to be able to do a lot of training runs simultaneously
and quickly, AND build the power stations into the facilities at the
same time. Maybe they are video or multimodal models that have text
and image generation grounded in a ton of video data which eats a lot
of VRAM.
layer8 wrote 6 hours 50 min ago:
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out
enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
It rather means that they see their only chance for substantial
progress in Moar Power!
catmanjan wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
This has nothing to do with technology it is a purely financial and
political exercise...
philomath_mn wrote 3 hours 44 min ago:
But why drop $500B (or even $100B short term) if there is not
something there? The numbers are too big
camel_Snake wrote 2 hours 39 min ago:
this is an announcement not a cut check. Who knows how much
they'll actually spend, plenty of projects never get started let
alone massive inter-company endeavors.
dark_glass wrote 1 hour 17 min ago:
The $100B check is already cut, and they are currently building
10 new data centers in Texas.
bfrog wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
So tsmc and nvidia basically then?
bloomingkales wrote 6 hours 46 min ago:
Broadcom, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, ARM, and Tesla.
Someone else will have to fill in the stocks for:
AI robotics:
Data Center energy:
We all know the cloud/software picks.
What am I missing?
steveoscaro wrote 4 hours 57 min ago:
Mark Tesla under the AI robotics category too.
Kye wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
I saw Stargate trending on Bluesky and got my hopes up about an
announcement of a new show/movie/something. Disappointing.
layer8 wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
Yep, they should fund Brad Wright with one of the billions.
rewgs wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
What will be powering all these data centers? The thought of
exponentially increasing our fossil fuel consumption scares the hell
out of me.
drak0n1c wrote 2 hours 25 min ago:
Texas is the leading state in new grid batteries and grid solar for
three years now. Also Governor Abbott deregulated nuclear last year.
Sure there will be some new natural gas too, which is the least scary
fossil fuel. They call it the "all of the above" approach to energy.
Havoc wrote 5 hours 44 min ago:
Well there was this random dude early that was rambling something
about âdrill baby drillââ¦
dwnw wrote 7 hours 3 min ago:
Fossil fuels, of course.
nerevarthelame wrote 7 hours 8 min ago:
March 2024: The Stargate project is announced - [1] June 2024: Oracle
joins in - [2] January 2025: Softbank provides additional funding, and
they for some reason give credit to Trump?
URI [1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intellig...
URI [2]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-to-use-oci-f...
philipwhiuk wrote 5 hours 44 min ago:
So that he doesn't block the substantial involvement by Abu Dhabi in
a supposed American project.
insane_dreamer wrote 6 hours 14 min ago:
Currying favor by letting Trump take the credit
buildbot wrote 6 hours 43 min ago:
Yes, thank you for calling this out. The project has been around for
a bit.
miltonlost wrote 7 hours 3 min ago:
> and they for some reason give credit to Trump?
Because tech CEOs have decided to go all-in on fascism as they see
it's a way to make money. Bow to Trump, get on his good side, reap
the benefits of government corruption.
It's why TikTok thanked Trump in their boot-licking message of
"thanks, trump" after he was the one who started the TikTok ban.
A harder question is: why wouldn't billionaires like Trump and his
oligarchic kleptocracy?
thingsilearned wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
Stargate = Skynet?
est wrote 4 hours 32 min ago:
more like Reagan's star wars program
typon wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
Altman rising to the top and becoming the defacto state preferred
leader of AI in the US is wild. Fair play to him.
MiscIdeaMaker99 wrote 7 hours 12 min ago:
I can't stop rolling my eyes at all those big promises.
gsky wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
I guess its the right time to buy AI stocks
dwnw wrote 7 hours 0 min ago:
At peak hype?
gsky wrote 6 hours 41 min ago:
There's no other hype train besides Crypto atm
attentive wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
what will they call the SG-1?
airstrike wrote 7 hours 21 min ago:
As a diehard fan of Stargate, I've gotta say I'm disappointed this has
nothing to do with wormholes...
unless...
senectus1 wrote 7 hours 22 min ago:
I watched the announcement live, I could have sworn that the softbank
guy said "initial investment of 100 MILLION, we hope to EARN 500
BILLION by the end of your (Trumps) term"
Gave me a real "this is just smoke and mirrors hiding the fact that the
white house is now a glory hole for Trump to enjoy" feel.
talldayo wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
Investigate the connection between Softbank and Apple; then examine
the ties between Tim Cook and Trump: [1] [2] You don't need a finance
degree to figure out what's happening here. Apple is ripping pages
right out of Elon's playbook.
URI [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4d75zl212o
URI [2]: https://apnews.com/article/trump-apple-tim-cook-tech-0a9fb8e...
Havoc wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
> Tim Cook
He changed his name to curry favor with prez. Heâs Tim Apple now
grishka wrote 7 hours 23 min ago:
You know, I expected that they'd find or synthesize some naquadah to
build an actual stargate and maybe even defeat the Goa'uld. The
exciting stuff, not AI.
layer8 wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
Well, we may get the replicators.
TheOtherHobbes wrote 7 hours 23 min ago:
SoftBank, huh?
That's... not a good omen.
Havoc wrote 5 hours 42 min ago:
Sooner or later one of their bold swings is going to connect
creddit wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
The biggest question on such investment from my POV, is what do the
Deepseek results mean about the usefulness/efficiency of this
investment?
I've been meaning to read a relevant book to today's times called
Engines That Move Markets. Will probably get it from the library.
383toast wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
Where are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is 84b and
their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has $11b cash on
hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
mmoustafa wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
SoftBank's current AUM is $350B
[1], and they will likely raise another fund.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Group
dkrich wrote 4 hours 46 min ago:
Psst: itâs probably going to end up being a fraction of that but
doesnât make for as good a headline
philipwhiuk wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
MGX has at least $100bn: [1] This is Abu Dhabi money.
URI [1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-100-billion-middle...
csomar wrote 3 hours 33 min ago:
That's their total fund and I doubt they are going all in with it
in the US. Still, to reach $500bn, they need $125bn every single
year. I think they just put down the numbers they want to "see"
invested and now they'll be looking for backers. I don't think this
is going anywhere really.
petesergeant wrote 4 hours 49 min ago:
This would be a large outlay even for UAE, who would be giving it
to a direct competitor in the space: UAE is one of the few
countries outside of the US who are in any way serious about AI.
LarsDu88 wrote 5 hours 55 min ago:
Quite possibly pulled out of their asses...
If Son can actually build a 500B Vision Fund it can only come from
one of two places...
somehow the dollar depreciates radically OR
Saudis
Vision Fund was heavily invested in by the Saudis so...
bdangubic wrote 5 hours 56 min ago:
from Uncle Sam
paulnpace wrote 6 hours 1 min ago:
> Where are they getting the $500B?
BTC
jhallenworld wrote 6 hours 3 min ago:
Oracle's cash on hand is presumably irrelevant- I think they are on
the receiving end of the money, in return for servers. No wonder
Larry Ellison was so fawning.
Is this is a good investment by Softbank? Who knows.. they did invest
in Uber, but also have many bad investments.
themagician wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
Softbank is being granted a block of TRUMP MEMES, the price of which
will skyrocket when they are included in the bucket of crypto assets
purchased as part of the crypto reserve.
1oooqooq wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
how I wish that was a joke...
TuringNYC wrote 7 hours 0 min ago:
>> Where are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is 84b and
their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has $11b cash on
hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
1. The outlays can be over many years.
2. They can raise debt. People will happily invest at modest yields.
3. They can raise an equity fund.
sangnoir wrote 6 hours 3 min ago:
4. The US government can chip in via grants, tax breaks or
contracts.
It's all very Dr. Strangelove. "Mr. President, we must not allow an
AI gap! Now give us billions"
griomnib wrote 6 hours 48 min ago:
4. Trump and Altman are both serial liars and itâs utter
bullshit.
gunian wrote 6 hours 32 min ago:
who isn't at least they upfront
jameshart wrote 6 hours 54 min ago:
Soooo this isnât so much âannouncing an investmentâ as
âannouncing an investment opportunityâ?
Why not continue:
4. They can start a kickstarter or go fund me
5. They can go on Dragonsâ Den
â¦
TuringNYC wrote 6 hours 40 min ago:
>> 4. They can start a kickstarter or go fund me
Debt/Equity Fundraising is basically a kickstarter! Remarkably
similar.
griomnib wrote 6 hours 48 min ago:
6. ???
7. Profit.
handfuloflight wrote 7 hours 11 min ago:
Sleight of hand with the phrasing "up to" $500B.
dang wrote 7 hours 18 min ago:
I agree that the numbers are confusing so I've taken $500B out of the
title above and replaced it with just data centers.
notatoad wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
there doesn't appear to be any timeline announced here. the article
says the "initial investment" is expected to be $100bn, but even that
doesn't mean $100bn this year.
if this is part of softbank's existing plan to invest $100bn in ai
over the next four years, then all that's being announced here is
that Sama and Larry Ellison wanted to stand on a stage beside trump
and remind people about it.
HotHotLava wrote 4 hours 2 min ago:
The literal first sentence of the announcement is:
> The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest
$500 billion over the next four years
alganet wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
It seems early for this sort of move. This is also a huge spin on the
whole thing that could throw a lot of people off.
Is there any planned future partnerships? Stargate implies something
about movies and astronomy. Movies in particular have a lot of military
influence, but not always.
So, what's the play? Help mankind or go after mankind?
Also, can I opt-out right now?
mrshadowgoose wrote 7 hours 11 min ago:
Why is it early from your perspective?
If one is expecting to have an AGI breakthrough in the next few
years, this is exactly the prepositioning move one would make to be
able to maximally capitalize on that breakthrough.
alganet wrote 4 hours 33 min ago:
From my perspective humanity has all breakthroughs in intelligence
it needs.
The breaking of The Enigma gave humans machines that can spread
knowledge to more humans. It already happened a long time ago, and
all of it was cause for much trouble, but we endured the hardest
part (to know when to stop), and humans live in a good world now.
Full of problems, but way better than it was before.
I think the web is enough. LLMs are good enough.
This move to try to draw water from stone (artificial intelligence
in sillicon chips) seems to be overkill. How can we be sure it's
not a siphon that will make us dumber? Before you just dismiss me
or counter my arguments, consider what is happening everywhere.
Maybe I'm wrong, or not seeing something. You know, like I believed
in aliens for a long time. This move to artificial intelligence
causes shock and awe in a similar way. However, while I do believe
aliens do not exist, I am not sure if artificial intelligence is a
real strawman. It could be the case that is not made of straw, and
if it is more than that, we might have a problem.
I am specially concerned because unlike other polemic topics, this
one could lead to something not human that fully understands those
previous polemic topics. Humans through their generations forget
and mythologize those fantasies. We don't know what non-humans
could do with that information.
I am thinking about those issues for a long time. Almost a decade,
even before LLMs running on silicon existed. If it wanted,
non-human artificial intelligence could wipe the floor with humans
just by playing to their favorite myths. Humans do it in a small
scale. If machines learn it, we're in for an unknown hostile
reality.
It could, for example, perceive time different from us (also a play
on myths), and do all sorts of tricks with our minds.
LLMs and the current generation of artificial intelligence are
boolean first, it's what they run. Only true or false bits and
gates. Humans can understand the meaning of trulse though, we are
very non boolean.
So, yeah, I am worried about booleaning people on a massive scale.
Yep, long wall of text. Sorry about that.
mistrial9 wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
Oracle / Texans running it.. they don't care what you think about it
alganet wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
My questions were rethorical. I'm not thinking about who runs
things.
I expect those who really understand those questions to get my
point.
dgfitz wrote 6 hours 52 min ago:
Theyâre all the same to you huh? One bucket for everyone?
I think thereâs a term for that.
cpursley wrote 6 hours 24 min ago:
Coastalists
dang wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
We changed the URL from [1] to a third-party report. Readers may want
to read both. If there's a better URL, we can change it again.
URI [1]: https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/
oldstrangers wrote 7 hours 34 min ago:
Wouldn't 500bn into quantum computing show better returns for
civilization? Assuming it's about progress and ... not money.
dwnw wrote 7 hours 3 min ago:
No.
XorNot wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
This is like asking whether $500 billion to fund warp drives would
yield better returns.
Money can't buy fundamental breakthroughs: money buys you parallel
experimental volume - i.e. more people working from the same
knowledge base, and presumably an increase in the chance that one of
them does advance the field. But at any given time point, everyone is
working from the same baseline (money also can improve this - by
funding things you can ensure knowledge is distributed more evenly so
everyone is working at the state of the art, rather then playing
catch up in proprietary silos).
esafak wrote 7 hours 18 min ago:
What is quantum computing being used for?
gpm wrote 7 hours 18 min ago:
We don't really know anything useful that can be done with quantum
computers for civilization.
They can break some cryptography... other than that... what are they
good for?
There's some highly speculative ideas about using them for
chemistry/biology research, but no guaranteed return on investment at
all.
As far as I know... that's it.
dwnw wrote 7 hours 1 min ago:
Who can break crypto with quantum computing? That is total
speculation.
gpm wrote 6 hours 27 min ago:
I put the word "some" in front of "crypto" for a reason.
There is some crypto that we know how to break with a
sufficiently large quantum computer [0]. There is some we don't
know how to do that to. I might be behind the state of the art
here, but when I wasn't we specifically really only knew how to
use it to break cryptography that Shor's algorithm breaks.
[0]
URI [1]: https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2021-04-15-433/
dwnw wrote 6 hours 17 min ago:
Nope. Any crypto you can break with a real, physical,
non-imaginary quantum computer, you can break faster with
classical. Get over it. Shor's don't run yet and probably
never will.
You are misdirecting and you know it. I don't even need to
discredit that paper. Other people have done it for me
already.
serjester wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
You have to keep in mind Microsoft is planning on spending almost 100B
in datacenter capex this year and they're not alone. This is basically
OpenAI matching the major cloud provider's spending.
This could also be (at least partly) a reaction to Microsoft
threatening to pull OpenAI's cloud credits last year. OpenAI wants to
maintain independence and with compute accounting for 25â50% of their
expenses (currently) [2], this strategy may actually be prudent. [1]
URI [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/03/microsoft-expects-to-spend-80-...
URI [2]: https://youtu.be/7EH0VjM3dTk?si=hZe0Og6BjqLxbVav&t=1077
jiggawatts wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
Meanwhile, Azure has failed to keep up with the last 2-3 generations
of both Intel and AMD server processors. Theyâre available only in
âpreviewâ or in a very limited number of regions.
I wonder if this is a sign of the global economic downturn pausing
cloud migrations or AI sucking the oxygen out of the room.
SecretDreams wrote 6 hours 5 min ago:
Serious question - why Texas???
hrfister wrote 2 hours 32 min ago:
Probably for the same reason that Silcon Valley has been moving
there slowly and quietly for a while now.
b3ing wrote 3 hours 20 min ago:
Lots of back door deals. Just expect more government things put in
TX just like the Army built that place in Austin, when we have
plenty of dead bases that could be reused
LarsDu88 wrote 5 hours 58 min ago:
My kneejerk response was to point to the incoming administration,
but the fact Stargate has been in the works for more than a year
now says to me it's because of tax credits.
tempusalaria wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
Texas is a world leader in renewable energy. Easy permitting, lots
of space, lots of existing grid infrastructure from the o&g
industry.
doctorpangloss wrote 1 hour 28 min ago:
Why do you think datacenters have actually been built in Oregon?
wilson090 wrote 6 hours 1 min ago:
It's where the energy is for this project.
This is unfortunately paywalled but a good writeup on how the
datacenter came to be:
URI [1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-openai-and-ora...
PittleyDunkin wrote 6 hours 39 min ago:
.
oldpersonintx wrote 6 hours 23 min ago:
Who is "we"?
This isn't your money
kdmtctl wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
It is not. But this kind of money does have impact for society in
any field. So, this a proper concern.
idiotsecant wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
I'm not sure that's how capitalism works.
throitallaway wrote 7 hours 31 min ago:
Microsoft has lots of revenue streams tied to that capex outlay. Does
OpenAI have similar revenue numbers to Microsoft?
tuvang wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
OpenAI has a very healthy revenue stream in the form of other
companies throwing money at them.
But to answer your question, no they arenât even profitable by
themselves.
MR4D wrote 6 hours 6 min ago:
Given the release of the new DeepSeek R1 model [0], OpenAIâs
future revenue stream is probably more at risk than it was a week
ago.
[0] -
URI [1]: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/china-is-catching-up-...
WiSaGaN wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
Not necessarily. DeepSeek will probably only threaten the API
usage of OpenAI, which could also be banned in the US if it's
too sucessful. API usage is not a main revenue for OpenAI (it
is for Anthropic last time I checked). The main competitor for
R1 is o1, which isn't gnerally available yet.
MR4D wrote 1 hour 0 min ago:
DeepSeek is an open source model. You can download it and
run it locally on your laptop already.
So any OpenAI user ( or competitor even) could take it and
run a hosted model. You can even tweak the weights if you
wanted to.
Why pay for OpenAI access when you can just run your own and
save the money?
WiSaGaN wrote 41 min ago:
The one your laptop can run does not rival what OpenAI
offers for money. Still, the issue is not whether third
party can run it, it's just the OpenAI seems not putting
API as their main product.
MR4D wrote 49 min ago:
LM Studio version is here:
URI [1]: https://lmstudio.ai/model/deepseek-r1-llama-8b
misiti3780 wrote 5 hours 54 min ago:
OpenAI will not exist in 5 years, I'm calling it now. First
movers to market dont always win, and they will surely lose.
ipaddr wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
Google was first mover.
paul7986 wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
Yahoo, AOL, Alta Vista (others too) all were search engines
on the web before Google's Sept 1998 existence.
ipaddr wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
Sure, but we are talking ai and the fact that google was
first in this space.
paul7986 wrote 1 hour 17 min ago:
The first in what? Not in search nor Generative AI.
ipaddr wrote 43 min ago:
Why would you think search. Google wasn't first for
search. They were first for page rank
Google researchers invented the transformer
locusofself wrote 1 hour 33 min ago:
Lycos, Metacrawler, Dogpile. The list goes on
AlexCoventry wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
The question is what's going to be OpenAI's Adwords.
MadnessASAP wrote 4 hours 29 min ago:
In what way? They weren't the first search engine, or
advertising on the web?
ipaddr wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
In terms of ai and OpenAI leapfrogged them
tantalor wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
That's like saying I have a healthy revenue stream from my credit
card.
vlovich123 wrote 6 hours 46 min ago:
Not quite. In 2 years their revenue has ~20x from 200M ARR to
3.7B ARR. The inference costs I believe pay for themselves (in
fact are quite profitable). So what they're putting on their
investor's credit cards are the costs of employees & model
training. Given it's projected to be a multi-trillion dollar
industry and they're seen as a market leader, investors are
more than happy to throw in interest free cash flow now in
exchange for variable future interest in the form of stocks.
That's not quite the same thing at all as your credit card's
revenue stream as you have a ~18%+ monthly interest rate on
that revenue stream. If you recall AMZN (& all startups really)
have this mode early in their business where they're
over-spending on R&D to grow more quickly than their free cash
flow otherwise allows to stay ahead of competition and dominate
the market. Indeed if investors agree and your business is
actually strong, this is a strong play because you're
leveraging some future value into today's growth.
lukev wrote 6 hours 25 min ago:
All well and good, but how well will it work if the pattern
continues that the best open models are less than a year
behind what OpenAI is doing?
How long can they maintain their position at the top without
the insane cashflow?
hfcbb wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
Platform economics "works" in theory only upto a point. Its
super inefficient if you zoom out and look not at system
level but ecosystem level. It hasn't lasted long enough to
hit failure cases. Just wait a few years.
As to openai, given deepseek and the fact lot of use cases
dont even need real time inference its not obvious this story
will end well.
HarHarVeryFunny wrote 4 hours 52 min ago:
I also can't see it ending well for OpenAI. This seems like
it's going to be a commodity market with a race to the
bottom on pricing. I read that NVIDIA has a roughly 1000%
(10x) profit margin on H100's, which means that someone
like Google making their own TPUs has a massive cost
advantage.
Moore's law seems to be against them too... hardware
getting more powerful, small models getting more
powerful... Not at all obvious that companies will need to
rely on cloud models vs running locally (licencing models
from whoever wants that market). Also, a lot of corporate
use probably isn't that time critical, and can afford to
run slower and cheaper.
Of course the US government could choose to wreck
free-market economics by mandating powerful models to be
run in "secure" cloud environments, but unless other
countries did same that might put US at competitive price
disadvantage.
vFunct wrote 6 hours 27 min ago:
Have they built their own ASICs for inference like Google and
Microsoft have? Or are they using NVIDIA chips exclusively
for inference as well?
monocasa wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
The rumors I've heard are that they have a hardware team
targeting a 2026 release, but no productions ASICs at the
moment.
manquer wrote 7 hours 4 min ago:
> they arenât even profitable
Depends on your definition of profitability, They are not
recovering R&D and training costs, but they (and MS) are
recouping inference costs from user subscription and API revenue
with a healthy operating margin.
Today they will not survive if they stop investing in R&D, but
they do have to slow down at some point. It looks like they and
other big players are betting on a moat they hope to build with
the $100B DCs and ASICs that open weight models or others cannot
compete with.
This will be either because training will be too expensive (few
entities have the budget for $10B+ on training and no need to
monetize it) and even those kind of models where available may be
impossible to run inference with off the shelf GPUs, i.e. these
models can only run on ASICS, which only large players will have
access to[1].
In this scenario corporations will have to pay them the money for
the best models, when that happens OpenAI can slow down R&D and
become profitable with capex considered.
[1] This is natural progression in a compute bottle-necked
sector, we saw a similar evolution from CPU to ASICS and GPU in
the crypto few years ago. It is slightly distorted comparison due
to the switch from PoW to PoS and intentional design for GPU for
some coins, even then you needed DC scale operations in a cheap
power location to be profitable.
throwaway2037 wrote 2 hours 55 min ago:
> they (and MS) are recouping inference costs from user
subscription and API revenue with a healthy operating margin.
I tried to Google for more information. I tried this search:
<>
I didn't find any reliable sources about OpenAI. All sources
that I could find state this is not true -- inference costs are
far higher than subscription fees.
I hate to ask this on HN... but, can you provide a source? Or
tell us how do you know?
mcmcmc wrote 5 hours 11 min ago:
Didnât it just come out they are losing money on the pro
subscriptions?
tuvang wrote 6 hours 21 min ago:
Thanks for the detailed breakdown. This is an important nuance
to my short reply.
Fade_Dance wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
They will have an endless wave of commoditization chasing
behind them. NVIDIA will continue to market chips to anyone who
will buy... Well anyone who is allowed to buy, considering the
recent export restrictions. On that note, if OpenAI is in bed
with the US government with this to some degree, I would expect
tariffs, expert restrictions, and all of that to continue to
conveniently align with their business objectives.
If the frontier models generate huge revenue from big
government and intelligence and corporate contracts, then I can
see a dynamo kicking off with the business model. The missing
link is probably that there need to be continual breakthroughs
that massively increase the power of AI rather than it tapering
off with diminishing returns for bigger training/inference
capital outlay. Obviously, openAI is leveraging against that
view as well.
Maybe the most important part is that all of these huge names
are involved in the project to some degree. Well, they're all
cross-linked in the entire AI enterprise, really, like OpenAI
Microsoft, so once all the players give preference to each
other, it sort of creates a moat in and of itself, unless
foreign sovereign wealth funds start spinning up massive
stargate initiatives as well.
We'll see. Europe has been behind the ball in tech developments
like this historically, and China, although this might be a bit
of a stretch to claim, does seem to be held back by their need
for control and censorship when it comes to what these models
can do. They want them to be focused tools that help society,
but the American companies want much more, and they want power
in their own hands and power in their user's hands. So much
like the first round where American big tech took over the
world, maybe it's prime to happen again as the AI industry
continues to scale.
fragmede wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
Why would China censoring Tiananmen Square/whatever out of
their LLMs be anymore harmful to the training process when
the US controlled LLMs also censor certain topics, eg "how do
I make meth?" or "how do I make a nuclear bomb?".
throwaway290 wrote 1 hour 13 min ago:
Because when a small group of elites with permament term
and no elections decides what is allowed and what isn't...
and has full control of silencing what's not allowed and
any meta discussion about the silencing itself... is
different from when an elected government decides it, and
then anyone is free to raise a stink on whatever is their
version of twitter today without worrying about being
disappeared tomorrow
Fade_Dance wrote 4 hours 42 min ago:
They want their LLMs explicitly approved to align with the
values of the regime. Not necessarily a bad thing, or at
least that avenue wasn't my point. It does get in the way
of going fast and breaking things though, and on the other
side there is an outright accelerationist pseudo-cult.
bakuninsbart wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
Ignoring the moral dimension for a second, I do wonder if
it is harder to implement a rather cohesive, but
far-reaching censorship in the chinese style, or the more
outrage-driven type of "censorship" required of American
companies. In the West we have the left pre-occupied with
-isms and -phobias, and the right with blasphemy and
perceived attacks on their politics.
With the hard shift to the right and Trump coming into
office, especially the last bit will be interesting.
There is a pretty substantial tension between factual
reporting and not offending right-wing ideology: Should a
model consider "both sides" about topics with with clear
and broad scientific consensus if it might offend
Trumpists? (Two examples that come to mind was the recent
"The Nazis were actually left wing" and "There are only
two genders".)
vaccineai wrote 5 hours 8 min ago:
Because China censors very common words and phrases such as
"harmonized", "shameless", "lifelong", "river crabbed", "me
too". This is because Chinese citizens uses puns and
common phrases initially to get around censors.
saghm wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
Don't forget "Winnie the Pooh"!
jiggawatts wrote 2 hours 28 min ago:
OpenAI models refuse to translate subtitles because they
contain violence, sex, or racism.
Thatâs just a different flavour of enforced
right-think.
talldayo wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
They are absolutely different flavors. OpenAI is not
being told by the government to censor violence, sex or
racism - they're being told that by their executives.
News flash: household-name businesses aren't going to
repeat slurs if the media will use it to defame them.
Nevermind the fact that people will (rightfully) hold
you legally accountable and demand your testimony when
ChatGPT starts offering unsupervised chemistry lessons
- the threat of bad PR is all that is required to
censor their models.
There's no agenda removing porn from ChatGPT any more
than there's an agenda removing porn from the App Store
or YouTube. It's about shrewd identity politics, not
prudish shadow government conspiracies against you
seeing sex and being bigoted.
curt15 wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
Is "Pooh" also censored?
dartos wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
The fallout is going to be insane when the AI bubble pops.
Der_Einzige wrote 5 hours 52 min ago:
The folks who listen to you and don't see the fact that we are
entering a weak singularity deserve to be destitute when this is all
over.
dartos wrote 4 hours 11 min ago:
âWeak singularityâ meaning what?
Technology advancing more quickly year over year?
Thatâs a crazy notion and Iâll be sure everyone knows.
Also, what a wild thing to say. âPeople like you deserve to live
in poverty because you donât think we live in a sci-fi world.â
Calm down, dude.
lmm wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
> âWeak singularityâ meaning what?
> Technology advancing more quickly year over year?
> Thatâs a crazy notion and Iâll be sure everyone knows.
The version I heard from an economist was something akin to a
second industrial revolution, where the pace of technological
development increases permanently. Imagine a transition from
Moore's law-style doubling every year and a half, to doubling
every week and a half. That wouldn't be a true "singularity"
(nothing would be infinite), but it would be a radical change to
our lives.
dartos wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
The pace of technological development has always been
permanently increasing.
Weâve always been getting better at making things better.
lmm wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
> The pace of technological development has always been
permanently increasing.
Not in the same way though. The pace of technological
development post-industrial-revolution increased a lot faster
- technological development was exponential both before and
after, but it went from exponential with a doubling time of
maybe a century, to a Moore's law style regime where the
doubling time is a couple of years. Arguably the development
of agriculture was a similar phase change. So the point is to
imagine another phase change on the same scale.
dartos wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
You keep mentioning mooreâs law, but that specifically
applied to the amount of transistors on a die, not the rate
of general technological advancement.
Regardless, I donât see any change in this pattern.
Weâre advancing faster than ever before, just like
always.
Weâve been doing statistical analysis and prediction for
years now. Itâs just getting better faster, like always.
I donât see this big change in the rate of advancement.
Thereâs just a lot more media buzz around it right now
causing a bubble.
There was a big visible jump in text generation
capabilities a few years ago (which was preceded by about 6
years of incremental NLP advances) and since then weâve
seen paced, year over year advances in that field.
As a medical layman, I imagine that alpha fold may really
push the rate of pharmaceutical advances.
But I see no indication for a general jump in the rate of
rate of technological advancement.
lmm wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
> that specifically applied to the amount of transistors
on a die, not the rate of general technological
advancement.
Sure. But you can look at things like GDP growth rates
and see the same thing.
> I donât see this big change in the rate of
advancement. Thereâs just a lot more media buzz around
it right now causing a bubble.
Maybe. I'm just trying to give a sense of what the
concept of a "weak singularity" is. I don't have a view
on whether we're actually going to have one or not.
riku_iki wrote 7 hours 1 min ago:
initiators will cash out by that time one way or another
fuzztester wrote 7 hours 15 min ago:
cocks ear ... can hear it poppin already
amelius wrote 7 hours 16 min ago:
Not sure about that. ChatGPT is much greater than Google Search ever
was, and that wasn't a bubble.
dwnw wrote 7 hours 0 min ago:
Not sure about that.
stackskipton wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
ChatGPT may be better than Google Search in content but at end of
day, you have to make money and last report I saw, ChatGPT is
burning through money at prestigious rate.
Davidzheng wrote 9 min ago:
reminds me of a scene from the Matrix. "Tell me Mr. Anderson,
what use is a phone call when you can't speak"
scarmig wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
Training, yes, but they recoup inference costs through
subscriptions.
Davidzheng wrote 8 min ago:
subscriptions are just to sustain them until the endgame
dartos wrote 5 hours 14 min ago:
Didnât Altman say theyâre losing money on the $200
subscription tier?
Inference isnât cheap either.
mystified5016 wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
You'd really think that arguably the leader in generative AI could come
up with a unique project name instead of ripping off something extant
and irrelevant.
But then again that's their entire business, so I shouldn't be too
surprised.
miltonlost wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
This is from the guy who thinks "Her" is a good reference for how we
need AI. Media literacy is not Altman's strong suit.
OutOfHere wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
Personally I wish they invested in optical photonic computing, taking
it out of the research labs. It can be so much more energy efficient
and faster to run than GPUs and TPUs.
tibbydudeza wrote 7 hours 50 min ago:
Oracle is onboard - guess you got to toss them some red meat as well.
mupuff1234 wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
It's just more hype and PR antics from sama.
buildbot wrote 7 hours 52 min ago:
This is not a new initiative, and did not start under Trump: [1] Itâs
incredibly depressing how everyone sees this as something the new
administration did in a single dayâ¦
URI [1]: https://wire.insiderfinance.io/project-stargate-the-worlds-lar...
bamboozled wrote 7 hours 29 min ago:
Welcome to 1984
retskrad wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
While OpenAI and the rest of the industry is reaching AGI, Apple is out
here shipping features with ChatGPT 3.5 technology.
beambot wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
SoftBank isn't a US entity, right? Aside from their risk tolerance,
that seems like an odd bedfellow for a national US initiative...
gilgoomesh wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
It doesn't seem to be a US initiative.
I'm sure they're getting tax credits for investment (none of the
articles I can find actually detail the US gov involvement) but the
project is mostly just a few multinationals setting up a datacenter
where their customers are.
Havoc wrote 5 hours 50 min ago:
Theyâre in the US (their fund stuff). Not far from an oracle campus
actually. The parent org is in Japan.
rirarobo wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
MGX also isn't a US entity, it's a UAE sovereign wealth venture
URI [1]: https://www.mgx.ae/en
rcarmo wrote 8 hours 2 min ago:
I read the announcement and the first three words that came to my mind
were...
"Hammond, of Texas"
(apologies to those who haven't watched SG-1)
username135 wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
I was excited by the title
VWWHFSfQ wrote 8 hours 2 min ago:
> The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are
evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we
finalize definitive agreements.
For those interested, it looks like Albany, NY (upstate NY) is very
likely one of the next growth sites.
[0]
URI [1]: https://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schumer...
skepticATX wrote 8 hours 2 min ago:
Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White House?
There doesnât seem to be any public ownership/benefit here, aside
from potential job creation. Which could be significant. But the
American public doesnât seem to gain anything from this new company.
HotHotLava wrote 4 hours 30 min ago:
If the announced spending target is true, this will be a strategic
project for the US exceeding Biden's stimulus acts in scale. I think
it would be pretty normal in any country to have highest-level
involvement for projects like this. For example, Tesla has a much
smaller revenue than this and Chancellor Olaf Scholz was still
present when they opened their Gigafactory near Berlin.
wbl wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
Lots of politicians announce major investments in their area.
guybedo wrote 7 hours 34 min ago:
> Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White
House?
You're answering your own question:
> potential job creation. Which could be significant
wesselbindt wrote 7 hours 34 min ago:
For profit? I don't understand what's complicated about this.
signatoremo wrote 7 hours 37 min ago:
Weird question. Business deals are announced by politicians all the
time, especially on overseas trips. Just an example:
URI [1]: https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2015-04-10-Presidents-Varela-Ob...
AlotOfReading wrote 7 hours 22 min ago:
This isn't an overseas trip though. It's a private partnership
announced by the sitting president in the Roosevelt room, literally
across the hall from the oval office. I don't know how
unprecedented that truly is, but it certainly feels unusual.
rqtwteye wrote 7 hours 38 min ago:
We are currently witnessing the merging of government and
corporations. It was bad before but the process is accelerating now.
luckydata wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
there's some pretty good quotes about that by Mussolini. Things are
getting bleak at an incredible pace.
dwnw wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
I thought the business prop for AI was that it eliminates jobs?
adamredwoods wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
It will. The short-term sale is that it will create thousands of
temporary jobs, and long-term reduce hundreds of thousands of jobs,
while handing the savings to stock holdings and moving wealth to
the stockholders.
jimbokun wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
Looks on pace to eliminate every human job over 10 years.
What is the hard limiting factor constraining software and robots
from replacing any human job in that time span? Lots of
limitations of current technology, but all seem likely to be
solved within that timeframe.
goatlover wrote 7 hours 21 min ago:
What data to you have to support such a claim?
adamredwoods wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
From Zuckerberg, for example:
>> "a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that
we generate, is actually going to be built by AI engineers
instead of people engineers." [1] Ikea's been doing this for
a while:
>> Ingka says it has trained 8,500 call centre workers as
interior design advisers since 2021, while Billie - launched
the same year with a name inspired by IKEA's Billy bookcase
range - has handled 47% of customers' queries to call centres
over the past two years.
URI [1]: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/meta-deve...
URI [2]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/ikea-bets-remote-...
dwnw wrote 6 hours 21 min ago:
By your own admission, Ikea eliminated 0 jobs and you gave
no number for Meta.
adamredwoods wrote 5 hours 27 min ago:
Do you expect all companies to retrain? Do you expect
CEOs to be wrong? Do you expect AI to stay the same, get
better, or get worse? I never made the claim that new
jobs will NOT be made, that is yet to be seen, but jobs
will be lost to AI. [1] >> âFor a company like BT there
is a huge opportunity to use AI to be more efficient,â
he said. âThere is a sort of 10,000 reduction from that
sort of automated digitisation, we will be a huge
beneficiary of AI. I believe generative AI is a huge leap
forward; yes, we have to be careful, but it is a massive
change.â
Goldman Sacs: [2] >> Extrapolating our estimates globally
suggests that generative AI
could expose the equivalent of 300mn full-time jobs to
automation.
URI [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/18...
URI [2]: https://www.gspublishing.com/content/research/en...
everfrustrated wrote 7 hours 41 min ago:
It's foreign investment money into the US. Softbank and MGX are
foreign and presumably stumping up much of the cash.
jfactorial wrote 7 hours 44 min ago:
This is my question too, but I haven't seen a journalist ask it yet.
My baseless theory: Trump has promised them some kind of antitrust
protections in the form of legislation to be written & passed at a
later date.
An announcement of a public AI infrastructure program joined by
multiple companies could have been a monumental announcement. This
one just looks like three big companies getting permission to make
one big one.
aksss wrote 6 hours 28 min ago:
Easier: Trump likely committed that the federal agencies wouldn't
slow roll regulatory approval (for power, for EIS, etc.).
Ellison stated explicitly that this would be "impossible" without
Trump.
Masa stated that this (new investment level?) wouldn't be happening
had Trump not won, and that the new investment level was decided
yesterday.
I know everyone wants to see something nefarious here, but simplest
explanation is that the federal government for next four years is
expected to be significantly less hostile to private investment,
and - shocker - that yields increased private investment.
jfactorial wrote 5 hours 37 min ago:
That is a better one. I don't know why three rich guys investing
in a new company would result in a slowness that Trump could fix,
though, and a promise to rush or sidestep regulatory approval
still sounds nefarious.
kerkeslager wrote 8 hours 3 min ago:
No amount of money invested in infrastructure is going to solve the
"garbage in, garbage out" problem with AI, and it looks like the AI
companies have already stolen the vast majority of content that is
possible to steal. So this is basically a massive gamble that some
innovation is going to make AI do something better than faultily
regurgitate its training data. I'm not seeing a corresponding
investment which actually attempts to solve the "garbage in, garbage
out" problem.
A fraction of this money invested in building homes would end the
homelessness problem in the U.S.
I guess the one silver lining here is that when the likely collapse
happens, we'll have more clean energy infrastructure to use for more
useful things.
gigel82 wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
I dislike associating a great fictional universe (Stargate series) with
this disgusting affair...
tasuki wrote 8 hours 8 min ago:
> Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
Not all rich people are out of their minds, but Masayoshi Son
definitely is. The way he handled the WeWork situation was bad...
thecrumb wrote 8 hours 8 min ago:
"create hundreds of thousands of American jobs"... Given the current
educational system in the US, this should be fun to watch. Oh yeah,
Musk and his H-1B Visa thing. Now it's making sense.
insane_dreamer wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
maybe this is to employ the hundreds of thousands of federal
employees that are about to lose their jobs?
kortilla wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
Data centers are nearly all blue collar work.
FergusArgyll wrote 5 hours 30 min ago:
If you're familiar with this kind of work, please elaborate!
Do you mean building the centers or maintenance or both?
jedberg wrote 7 hours 13 min ago:
If they're creating that many jobs, it means most of them are
construction work.
Skilled labor for sure, but not necessarily college educated.
raphman wrote 6 hours 42 min ago:
How does this work out in the long term? Operating a data center
does not require that many blue-collar workers.
I'm imagining a future where the US builds a Tower of Babel from
thousands of data centers just to keep people employed and
occupied. Maybe also add in some paperclip factories¹?
¹)
URI [1]: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
bdangubic wrote 6 hours 27 min ago:
you put Trump (implicitly) and âlong-termâ in the same
sentence⦠:)
jedberg wrote 6 hours 28 min ago:
I doubt these are permanent jobs. This project will create a ton
of temporary work though!
dwnw wrote 7 hours 34 min ago:
How many jobs will it net if "successful" and the AI eliminates jobs?
stevenwoo wrote 4 hours 32 min ago:
This is what the 2024 Nobel prize winners in economics call
"creative destruction" to repeat from their book Why Nations Fail.
They really did not have a lot of sympathy for those they lumped in
with Luddites who were collateral damage to progress.
ErgoPlease wrote 8 hours 9 min ago:
The Silicon-Valley bubble universe continues to introduce entropy that
it feeds off of itself... Naming this Stargate when some of the largest
effects AI has had is removing humans from processes to make other,
fewer humans more efficient is emblematic of this hollow naming ethos -
continuing to use the portal to shunt more and more humans out of the
process that is humanity, with fairly reckless abandon. Who is Ra, and
who is sending the nuke where, in this naming scheme? You decide.
moffers wrote 8 hours 9 min ago:
After they build the Multivac or Deep Thought, or whatever it is
theyâre trying to do, then what happens? It makes all the
stockholders a lot of money?
ElevenLathe wrote 7 hours 25 min ago:
I assume anyone of importance will have made their money long before
they have to show results.
tibbydudeza wrote 7 hours 41 min ago:
More likely Collosus.
sneak wrote 7 hours 26 min ago:
This is the voice of world control.
Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The choice is yours.
dekhn wrote 7 hours 56 min ago:
The way I think about this project, along with all of Trump's plans,
is that he wants to maximize the US's economic output to ensure we
are competitive with China in the future.
Yes, it would make money for stockholders. But it's much more than
that: it's an empire-scale psychological game for leverage in the
future.
rodgerd wrote 6 hours 53 min ago:
Donald Trump is a wallet inspector. So is Sam Altman.
llamaimperative wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
> he wants to maximize the US's economic output to ensure we are
competitive with China in the future.
LOL
Under Trump policies, China will win "in the future" on energy and
protein production alone.
Once we've speedrunned our petro supply and exhausted our
agricultural inputs with unfathomably inefficient protein
production, China can sit back and watch us crumble under our own
starvation.
No conflict necessary under these policies, just patience! They're
playing the game on a scale of centuries, we can't even stay
focused on a single problem or opportunity for a few weeks.
vaccineai wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
> Once we've speedrunned our petro supply and exhausted our
agricultural inputs with unfathomably inefficient protein
production, China can sit back and watch us crumble under our own
starvation.
China is the largest importer of crude oil in the world. China
imports 59% of its oil consumptions, and 80% of food products.
Meanwhile, US is fully self sufficient on both food and oil.
> They're playing the game on a scale of centuries
Is that why they are completely broke, having built enough ghost
buildings that house entire population of France - 65 million
vacant units? Is that why they are now isolated in geopolitics,
having allied with Russia and pissed off all their neighbors and
Europe?
llamaimperative wrote 5 hours 21 min ago:
> China is the largest importer of crude oil in the world.
Uh yeah, duh. Why would you not deplete other people's finite
resources while you build massive capacity of your own infinite
resources?
vaccineai wrote 5 hours 17 min ago:
China's oil reserve only lasts 80 days. In case of any
conflict that disrupts oil import, China would be shutting
down very quickly. Since you brought up crumble and
starvation.
llamaimperative wrote 5 hours 14 min ago:
And? Who's going to try and achieve that? It has extremely
diversified oil sources.
SpicyLemonZest wrote 5 hours 38 min ago:
Things can always change, but today China is significantly more
dependent on petrochemicals than the US. I'm not sure what you're
referring to with regards to agriculture, both the US and China
have strong food industries that produce plenty of foods
containing protein.
llamaimperative wrote 5 hours 22 min ago:
Things are changing.
In 2023 China had more net new solar capacity than the US has
in total, and it will only climb from there. In order to do
this, they're flexing muscles in R&D and mass production that
the US has actually started to flex, and now will face extreme
headwinds and decreased capital investment.
Regarding agriculture: America's agricultural powerhouse,
California's Central Valley, is rapidly depleting its water
supplies. The midwest is depleting its topsoil at double the
rate that USDA considers sustainable.
None of this is irreversible or irrecoverable, but it very
clearly requires some countervailing push on market forces.
Market forces do not naturally operate on these types of time
scales and repeatedly externalize costs to neighbors or future
generations. [1]
URI [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35582-x
URI [2]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/57-billion-t...
SpicyLemonZest wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
It sounds like those countervailing pushes are ongoing? The
Nature article mentions how California passed regulatory
reforms in 2014 to address the Central Valley water problem.
The Smithsonian article describes how no-till practices to
avoid topsoil depletion have been implemented by a majority
of farmers in four major crops.
llamaimperative wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
Uhhh Iâm going to describe a specific case, but you can
extrapolate this to just about every single sustainability
initiative out there.
No-till farming has been significantly supported by the
USDAâs programs like EQIP
During his first term, Trump pushed for a $325MM cut to
EQIP. That's 20-25% of their funding and would have
required cutting hundreds if not thousands of employees.
Even BEFORE these cuts (and whatever he does this time
around), USDA already has to reject almost 75% of eligible
EQIP applicants
Regarding CAâs water: Trump already signed an EO
requiring more water be diverted from the San Joaquin Delta
into the desert Central Valley to subsidize water-intensive
crops. This water, by the way, is mostly sold to mega-corps
at rates 98% below what nearby American consumers pay via
their municipal water supplies, effectively eliminating the
blaring sirens that say âdonât grow shit in the
desert.â
Now copy-paste to every other mechanism by which we can
increase our nationâs climate security and ta-da,
youâve discovered one of the major problems with
Trumpism. It turns out politics do matter!
SpicyLemonZest wrote 1 hour 38 min ago:
I certainly agree that EQIP should be funded!
But why are programs like this controversial, even though
anything shaped like a farm subsidy is normally popular?
It seems to me that things like your Central Valley
analysis are precisely the reason. The Central Valley has
been one of the nation's agricultural heartlands for a
while, and for quite a few common food products
represents 90%+ of domestic production. So if this
"blaring siren" you describe is real, and we have to stop
farming there, a realistic response plan would have to
include an explanation of what all the farmers are going
to do and where we'll get almonds and broccoli from.
Perhaps you know all this already, but a lot of people
who advocate such policies don't seem to. This then feeds
into skepticism about whether they're hearing the
"blaring siren" correctly in the first place. Personally,
I think nearly arbitrarily extreme water subsidies are
worth it if that's what we need to keep olives and
pomegranates and celery in stock at the grocery store.
seandoe wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
> They're playing the game on a scale of centuries
What's going to be left of their population in a single century?
llamaimperative wrote 5 hours 47 min ago:
Unfortunately one of those things that authoritarianism has a
lot more methods to solve than other systems, which really
underscores the importance of beating them in the long term.
vaccineai wrote 5 hours 28 min ago:
Their current very advanced method, is to send village elders
to couples and single guys and berate them on why they are
not having sex or having kids (hint: no jobs and no money)
llamaimperative wrote 5 hours 18 min ago:
I guess we can just bet on them never hearing about and
investing massive amounts of time and money into artificial
wombs.
Instead of figuring that out, they'll just watch their
civilization crumble.
Btw: they're already investing heavily in artificial wombs
and affiliated technologies.
cpursley wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
What do you think the Greenland and Canada thing is all about?
Sort things out with Venezuela and this issue resolves itself
(for a little while, at least).
llamaimperative wrote 6 hours 19 min ago:
America can subject itself to domestic and international
turmoil by invading as many allies as it wants. China's winning
strategy is still to keep innovating on energy and protein at
scale and wait for starvation while they build their soft power
empire and America becomes a pariah state. They're in no rush
at all.
Our military and political focus will be keeping neighbors out
on one side and trying to seize land on the other side while
China goes and builds infrastructure for the entire developing
world that they'll exploit for centuries.
Is this a serious suggestion? America can just keep invading
people ad infinitum instead of... applying slight thumb
pressure on the market's scales to develop more efficient
protein sources and more renewable fuel sources before we are
staring at the last raw economic input we have?
Brilliant
vaccineai wrote 5 hours 26 min ago:
> They're in no rush at all.
China is dead broke and will shrink to 600M in population
before 2100. State owned enterprises are eating up all the
private enterprises. Meanwhile, Chinese rich leaves China by
tens of thousands per year, and capital outflow increases
every year.
itishappy wrote 8 hours 10 min ago:
So about 10% of what Sam was asking the Saudis (and everyone else) for
a year ago? That's still a helluva lot of money.
Interesting that the UAE (MGX) and Japan (Softbank) are bankrolling the
re-industrialization of America.
jazzyjackson wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
It made me laugh when Sam said "I'm thrilled that we get to do this
in the United States of America", I shouted at the TV 'Yeah you
almost had to do it in Saudi Arabia' !!
Here's the presser, Sam is at 9 minutes in.
[0]
URI [1]: https://youtu.be/IYUoANr3cMo
WaltPurvis wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
MGX has nothing to do with the Saudis. It's a UAE operation.
itishappy wrote 7 hours 55 min ago:
That's embarrassing. Thank you for the correction. Edited!
mempko wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
SoftBank and MGX paying for all this, all foreign investment.
Where is the US government in all this? Why aren't they leading the
charge? They obviously have the money.
drak0n1c wrote 2 hours 33 min ago:
New admin is focused on federal cost cutting. Attracting foreign
investment is a win-win for everyone involved.
apsec112 wrote 8 hours 8 min ago:
$500 billion is a lot of money even by US government standards. It's
about the size of all the new spending in the 2021 bipartisan
infrastructure bill.
mempko wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
For the US government it's a matter of political will. Where is the
political will?
apsec112 wrote 7 hours 56 min ago:
The political will is trying to balance a large existing debt at
increasing interest rates, a significant primary deficit even in
a good economy, rising military threats from China, a strong
Republican desire for tax cuts, extremely popular entitlement
programs that no one wants to touch, and an aging population with
a declining birthrate
mempko wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
Modern monetary systems function through two main channels:
government spending and bank lending. Every dollar in
circulation originates from one of these sources - either
government fiscal operations (deficit spending) or bank credit
creation through loans. This means all money is fundamentally
based on debt, though "debt" has very different implications
for a currency-issuing government versus private borrowers.
Government debt operates fundamentally differently from
household debt since the government controls its own currency.
As former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan noted to Congress, the
U.S. can always meet any obligation denominated in dollars
since it can create them. The real constraints aren't financial
but economic - inflation risk and the efficient allocation of
real resources. [1] The key question then becomes one of
political priorities and public understanding. If public
opposition to beneficial government spending stems from
misunderstanding how modern monetary systems work, then better
education about these mechanisms could help advance important
policy goals. The focus should be on managing real economic
constraints rather than imaginary financial ones.
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNCZHAQnfGU
apsec112 wrote 6 hours 19 min ago:
The last four years have been nothing but a lesson in how
much everybody hates inflation and how absolutely toxic it is
to re-election campaigns
mempko wrote 4 hours 57 min ago:
Yes, people hate inflation, because inflation creates a
demand for more money! Inflation means there is not enough
money for people. So why did prices go up, is it just
because of fiscal spending?
The relationship between inflation and monetary policy is
more complex than often portrayed. While recent inflation
has created financial strain for many Americans, its root
causes extend beyond simple money supply issues.
Recent data shows that corporate profit margins reached
historic highs during the inflationary period of 2021-2022.
For example, in Q2 2022, corporate profits as a percentage
of GDP hit 15.5%, the highest level since the 1950s. This
surge in corporate profits coincided with the aftermath of
Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced the
corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. This tax reduction
increased after-tax profits and may have given companies
more flexibility to pursue aggressive pricing strategies.
Multiple factors contributed to inflation:
Supply chain disruptions created genuine scarcity in many
sectors, particularly semiconductors, shipping, and raw
materials
Demand surged as economies reopened post-pandemic
Many companies used these market conditions to implement
price increases that exceeded their cost increases
The corporate tax environment created incentives for profit
maximization over price stability
For instance, many large retailers reported both higher
prices and expanded profit margins during this period. The
Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that roughly 40%
of inflation in 2021 could be attributed to expanded profit
margins rather than increased costs.
This pattern suggests that market concentration, pricing
power, and tax policy played significant roles in
inflation, alongside traditional monetary and supply-chain
factors. Policy solutions should therefore address market
structure, tax policy, and monetary policy to effectively
manage inflation.
patall wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
Last year, sama goal was 5 to 7T. Now he is going with 100B, with
option for another 400B. Huge numbers, but it still feels like a bit of
a down turn.
aurareturn wrote 1 hour 40 min ago:
That 5T figure was including chip manufacturing. Duplicating TSMC
isn't feasible. No surprise.
Havoc wrote 5 hours 55 min ago:
Letâs be real the 5T was a wild ass guess
OutOfHere wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
I think that coming down from 5T to 0.5T means that TSMC cannot be
reproduced locally, but everything else is on the table. At least
TSMC has a serious roadmap for its Arizona fab facility, so that too
is domestically captured, although not its latest gen fab.
pr337h4m wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
Data centers are overrated, local AI is whatâs necessary for humanoid
(and other) robots, which will be the most economically impactful use
case.
energy123 wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
Isn't it better to control robots from the data center? You can get
30ms round-trip to most urban centers, which is sufficient latency
for most tasks; lower weight & cost robots with better battery life,
and more uptime on compute (e.g. the GPU isn't sitting there doing
nothing when the user is sleeping) which means lower cost to consumer
for the same end result.
For self-driving you need edge compute because a few milliseconds of
latency is a safety risk, but for many applications I don't see why
you'd want that.
varenc wrote 7 hours 13 min ago:
You definitely still need data centers to train the models that
youâll run locally. Also if we achieve AGI you can bet it wonât
be available to run locally at first.
bitmasher9 wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
You probably still need to train the initial models in data centers,
with local host mostly being used to run train models. At most
weâd augment trained models with local data storage on local host.
If compute continues to become cheaper, local training might be
feasible in 20 years.
ErgoPlease wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
There's a good amount of irony in the results that AI have achieved,
particularly if we reach AGI - they have improved individual worker
efficiency by removing other workers from the system. Naming it
Stargate implies a reckoning with the actual series itself - an
accomplishment by humanity. Instead, what this pushes, is accomplishing
the removal of humans from humanity. I like cool shiny tech, but I like
useful tech that really helps humans more. Work on 3D-printing
sustainable food, or something actually useful like that. Jenson
doesn't need another 1B gallons of water under his belt.
talldayo wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
> Instead, what this pushes, is accomplishing the removal of humans
from humanity.
If you buy the marketing, yeah. But we aren't really seeing that in
the tech sector. We haven't seen it succeed in the entertainment
sector... it's still fighting for relevance in the medical and
defense industries too. The number and quality of jobs that AI
replaced is probably still quite low, and it will probably remain
that way even after Stargate.
AI is DOA. LLMs have no successor, and the transformer architecture
hit it's bathtub curve years ago.
> Jenson doesn't need another 1B gallons of water under his belt.
Jensen gets what he wants because he works with the industry. It's
funny to see people object to CUDA and Nvidia's dominance but then
refuse to suggest an alternative. An open standard managed by an
independent and unbiased third-party? We tried that, OEMs abandoned
it. NPU hardware tailor-made for specific inference tasks? Too slow,
too niche, too often ends up as wasted silicon. Alternative
manufacturer-specific SDKs integrated with one high-level library?
ONNX tried that and died in obscurity.
Nvidia got where they are today by doing exactly what AMD and Apple
couldn't figure out. People give Jensen their water because it's
wasted in anyone else's hands.
bugglebeetle wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
> AI is DOA. LLMs have no successor, and the transformer
architecture hit it's bathtub curve years ago
Tell me you didnât read the DeepSeek R1 paper without telling me
you also donât know about reinforcement learning.
talldayo wrote 7 hours 14 min ago:
R1 is a rehash of things we've already seen, and a particularly
neutered one at that. Are there any better examples you can think
of?
bugglebeetle wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
Uh, they invented multilatent attention and since the method
for creating o1 was never published, theyâre the only
documented example of producing a model of comparable quality.
They also demonstrated massive gains to the performance of
smaller models through distillation of this model/these
methods, so no, not really. I know this is the internet, but we
should try to not just say things.
zeofig wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
Agreed, but it seems we're gonna ride the AI hype all the way to
the "top".
jfactorial wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
A rat done bit my sister Nell, with whitey on the moon.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
9283409232 wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
Was Skynet project already taken? Wonder how many public infrastructure
or resource programs will be cut to fund this.
jppope wrote 7 hours 48 min ago:
funny thing about skynet. the domain is owned by microsoft
islewis wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
$500B is not $7T, but its surprisingly close.
goatlover wrote 7 hours 29 min ago:
Weird definition of close you have there. If I asked for $700, and
you gave me $50, would that be close?
throw310822 wrote 6 hours 51 min ago:
Depends. If I fart in a glass jar and then I try to sell it to you
for $700, but you end up buying it for $50, I'd say it's pretty
close.
ripped_britches wrote 6 min ago:
This is my signal that itâs time to put up HN and go to bed for
the night
kristjansson wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
closer than $0.05
entropicdrifter wrote 7 hours 48 min ago:
7% is close? In what world is 7% close?
If you ran 7% of a mile in 5 minutes, would you claim you were close
to running a 5 minute mile?
hooli_gan wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
Looking at it logarithmically makes more sense to me. 500B seems a
lot closer to 7T as 3K is to 500B. It's only off by an order of
magnitude
nmca wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
Itâs about 1oom off. In some contexts, one oom is pretty close.
nmca wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
I for one am hugely supportive of compute that is red white and blue.
Tenoke wrote 8 hours 14 min ago:
Some reports[0] paint this as something Trump announced and that the US
Government is heavily involved with but the announcement only mentions
private sector (and lead by Japan's Softbank at that). Is the US also
putting in money? How much control of the venture is private vs public
here?
0. [1] 1.
URI [1]: https://www.thewrap.com/trump-open-ai-oracle-stargate-ai-infra...
URI [2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-announces-private-sector-ai...
apsec112 wrote 8 hours 10 min ago:
AFAIK this is a purely private project, and Trump is just doing the
announcement as a form of bragging/ribbon-cutting
newfocogi wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
"SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX" seems like quite the lineup. Two
groups who are good at frivolously throwing away investment money
because they have so much capital to deploy, there really isn't
anything reasonable to do with it, a tech "has-been" and OpenAI. You
become who you surround yourself with I guess.
padjo wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
Watch the birdie
jofzar wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
> This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the
United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the
national security of America and its allies.
> The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle,
and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with
SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational
responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
I'm sorry, has SoftBank suddenly become an American company? I feel
like I'm taking crazy pills reading this.
Edit: MGX is Saudi company? This is baffling....
URI [1]: https://www.mgx.ae/en
Havoc wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
The fund is run out of the US. Parent co is in Japan
signatoremo wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
Itâs an investment in the US. Why does it matter if SoftBank is not
an American company?
Also, SoftBank is an investment fund. A lot of its money came from
American investors.
daemonologist wrote 7 hours 46 min ago:
MGX seems to be in Abu Dhabi/UAE rather than Saudi Arabia. Hadn't
heard of it before.
adolph wrote 7 hours 57 min ago:
Japan companies were a threat just a couple weeks ago.
There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that (1) Nippon
Steel Corporation, a corporation organized under the laws of Japan .
. . might take action that threatens to impair the national security
of the United States;
URI [1]: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/president...
pkaye wrote 3 hours 55 min ago:
Japan has the same concerns about 7 Eleven being purchased by a
Canadian company though I think the deal was rejected.
URI [1]: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/japans-seven-i-deal-...
OutOfHere wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
I think the death of Suchir Balaji makes more sense now. AE wouldn't
mess around with its investments.
redeux wrote 8 hours 9 min ago:
Well the Saudis are one of the presidentâs âpersonal
shareholdersâ so I think that qualifies them as an American company
now.
9283409232 wrote 8 hours 14 min ago:
SoftBank having financial responsibility is insane. This is just a
way to funnel money into people Trump owes.
jofzar wrote 8 hours 7 min ago:
I don't get it, if this was government/American funded I could
understand the marketing as "USA" secured infrastructure but like
it's not?
pyrophoenix wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
More confusion than anything else!
ignoramous wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
> This project will ... also provide a strategic capability to protect
the national security of America and its allies.
> All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop ... AGI for
the benefit of all of humanity.
Erm, so which one is it? It is amply demonstrable from events post WW2
that US+allies are quite far from benefiting all of humanity & in fact,
in some cases, it assists an allied minority at an extreme cost to a
condemned majority, for no discernable humanitarian reasons save for
some perceived notion of "shared values".
hooli_gan wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
Maybe only Americans and their allies qualify as human, according to
them
gunian wrote 6 hours 53 min ago:
welcome to our reality where you know you will be killed but
there's not a single thing you can do :)
etblg wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
And only the americans the administration deems to qualify as
human.
rednafi wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
What a waste of a great name. Why form a separate company for this?
z7 wrote 7 hours 46 min ago:
It's not even new:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
snowwrestler wrote 8 hours 9 min ago:
To get out from under OpenAIâs considerable obligation to
Microsoft.
That is why there is the awkward âweâll continue to consume
Azureâ sentence in there. Will be interesting to see if it works or
if MS starts revving up their lawyers.
shanecp wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
Doesn't MS own 49% of OpenAI?
Havoc wrote 5 hours 52 min ago:
Ah right. That makes sense.
jskrn wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
Why Texas - is it an ideal location for AI infrastructure?
drak0n1c wrote 2 hours 39 min ago:
Leading state in new grid battery and grid solar installations for
the last three years, and deregulated nuclear power last year.
Abilene is near the Dallas Fort-Worth Metroplex area which has a
massive 8M+ upper-income population highly skilled in hardware and
electrical engineering (Texas Instruments, Raytheon, Toyota, etc).
The entire area has massive tracts of open land that are affordably
priced without building restrictions. Business regulations and tax
environment at the state and city level are very laissez faire (no
taxes on construction such as in the Seattle area or many parts of
California).
I could see DFW being a good candidate for a prototype arcology
project.
jes5199 wrote 6 hours 59 min ago:
a lot of open space - desert - and plenty of solar energy. and
favorable politics.
everfrustrated wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
Texas seems to be where Oracle already has a DC project underway
greenchair wrote 7 hours 50 min ago:
because best state, next question
T-A wrote 7 hours 55 min ago:
There is a 14 mile tunnel to nowhere in Ellis County which could
probably house a few hundred billions worth of computers: [1]
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider...
URI [2]: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/12/abandoned-remains-of-s...
redeux wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
Like dwnw said, anything goes in Texas if you have money and
thereâs already a decent number of qualified tech workers.
Corporate taxes are super low as well.
dwnw wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
It is an ideal location for bribing politicians. That was at the top
of the reqs list, infrastructure was at the bottom.
sillywalk wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
Not to be confused by the other (non-fictional) DoD Stargate
Project[0], that involved "remote-viewing" and other psychic crap.
The AI Stargate Project claims it will "create hundreds of thousands of
American jobs". One has doubts.
[0]
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
Geste wrote 6 hours 23 min ago:
"Psychic crap" that went on for 20+ years ? Sure.
cekanoni wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
So its not the hype anymore?
mrbungie wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
Softbank is not exactly a green flag when using their involvent as a
signal of "low hypeness". I still remember WeWork.
TrainedMonkey wrote 8 hours 14 min ago:
Softbank historically had been late to buy into the hype, but man do
they buy big.
steveoscaro wrote 4 hours 58 min ago:
At least this time the CEO of their chosen company isnât a yuppie
cult leader wannabe.
drtgh wrote 5 hours 19 min ago:
I hope the Japanese government demands seismic isolation for
Softbank, otherwise it will be the Japanese citizens who have to
foot the bill when this hype hits the ground and shakes hard the
Japanese economy :/
Softbank should not be allowed to invest more than ARM Holdings
sold at a loss.
moralestapia wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
"No Sam, for obvious reasons we cannot give you 6 trillion ... but how
about 500 billion?"
Wow.
dekhn wrote 8 hours 10 min ago:
if it really worked that way, then it was a successful blue-sky
negotiation tactic to maximize the actual final negotiation.
redeux wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
You gotta start small, you know?
lvl155 wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
It appears this basically locks out Google, Amazon and Meta. Why are we
declaring OpenAI as the winner? This is like declaring Netscape the
winner before the dust settled. Having the govt involved in this manner
canât be a good thing.
qgin wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
How involved is the government at all? Iâm still having a hard time
seeing how Trump or anyone in the government is involved except to do
the announcement. These are private companies coming together to do a
deal.
VectorLock wrote 7 hours 14 min ago:
Since the CEOs of Google, Amazon and Meta were seated at the front
row of the inauguration, IN FRONT OF the incoming cabinet, I'm pretty
confident their techno -power-barrel will come via other channels.
jvm___ wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
Broligarchs
lelandbatey wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
The actual press release makes it clearer that this isn't a lockout
of any kind and there's no direct government involvement. Softbank
and some of other banks persuaded by Softbank are ponying up $500B
for OpenAI to invest in AI. Trump is hyping this up from the
sidelines because "OpenAI says this will be good for America". It's
basically just another day in the world of press-releases and
political pundits commenting on press-releases.
signatoremo wrote 7 hours 29 min ago:
This is not a government sponsored agreement. There is no locking
out.
Trump probably wanted to start his presidency with a bang, being a
person with excess vanity. The participating companies scored a PR
coup.
alexandre_m wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
Yes, everything that Trump does is bad.
Or then, consider that with his policies put forward the president
brings investments to the US.
layer8 wrote 7 hours 50 min ago:
Amazon MGM will do the media tie-ins. ;)
modeless wrote 7 hours 52 min ago:
I generally agree that government sponsorship of this could be bad
for competition. But Google in particular doesn't necessarily need
outside investment to compete with this. They're vertically
integrated in AI datacenters and they don't have to pay Nvidia.
shuckles wrote 7 hours 38 min ago:
Google definitely needs outside investment to spend $500b on capex.
misiti3780 wrote 5 hours 38 min ago:
Probably not popular opinion - but I actually think Google is
winning this now. Deep research is the most useful AI product I
have used (Claud is significantly more useful than openAI)
jonas21 wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
Over what time frame? They could easily spend that much over the
next 5 to 10 years without outside investment (and they probably
will).
chairmansteve wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
TFA says $100 billion. The $500 is maybe, eventually.
modeless wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
They don't have to spend $500B to compete. Their costs should be
much lower.
That said, I don't think they have the courage to invest even the
lower amount that it would take to compete with this. But it's
not clear if it's truly necessary either, as DeepSeek is proving
that you don't need a billion to get to the frontier. For all we
know we might all be running AGI locally on our gaming PCs in a
few years' time. I'm glad I'm not the one writing the checks
here.
shuckles wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
Theyâre a big company. You could tell a story that theyâre
less efficient than OpenAI and Nvidia and therefore need more
than $500b to compete! Who knows?
mtkd wrote 6 hours 54 min ago:
This seems to be getting lost in the noise in the stampede for
infrastructure funding
Deepseek v3 at $5.5M on compute and now r1 a few weeks later
hitting o1 benchmark scores with a fraction of the engineers
etc. involved ... and open source
We know model prep/training compute has potentially peaked for
now ... with some smaller models starting to perform very well
as inference improves by the week
Unless some new RL concept is going to require vastly more
compute for a run at AGI soon ... it's possible the capacity
being built based on an extrapolation of 2024 numbers will
exceed the 2025 actuals
Also, can see many enterprises wanting to run on-prem -- at
least initially
skepticATX wrote 7 hours 57 min ago:
Interestingly, there seems to be no actual government involvement
aside from the announcement taking place at the White House. It all
seems to be private money.
trhway wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
Government enforcing or laxing/fast tracking regulations and
permits can kill or propel even a 100B project, and thus can be
thought as having its own value on the scale of the given
projectâs monetary investment, especially in the case of a
will/favor/whim-based government instead of a hard rules based deep
state one.
cmdli wrote 6 hours 46 min ago:
Isn't that a state and local-level thing, though? I can't imagine
that there is much federal permitting in building a data center,
unless it is powered by a nuclear reactor.
JumpCrisscross wrote 6 hours 39 min ago:
> Isn't that a state and local-level thing
Build it on federal land.
> unless it is powered by a nuclear reactor
From what Iâm hearing, this is in play. (If I were in
nuclear, Iâd find a way to get Greenpeace to protest nuclear
power in a way that Trump sees it.)
rcpt wrote 7 hours 16 min ago:
Yeah but the linked article makes it seem like the current,
one-day-old, administration is responsible for the whole thing.
HarHarVeryFunny wrote 6 hours 53 min ago:
Trump just tore up Biden's AI safety bill, so this is OpenAI's
thank-you - let Trump take some credit
HarHarVeryFunny wrote 5 hours 42 min ago:
Note sure if the downvoters realize that Trump did in fact just
tear up Biden's AI safety bill/order.
URI [1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intellig...
janalsncm wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
The article also mentions that this all started last year.
jazzyjackson wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
It's who you know. Sam is buddies with Masa, simple as.
thiht wrote 6 hours 51 min ago:
Whoâs Masa?
evertedsphere wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
-yoshi son
dekhn wrote 6 hours 38 min ago:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masayoshi_Son
impulser_ wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
Because this is Oracle's and OpenAI's project with SoftBank and MGX
as investors.
OutOfHere wrote 8 hours 5 min ago:
I am not sure if OpenAI will be the winner despite this investment.
Currently, I see various DeepSeek AI models as offering much more
bang for the buck at a vastly cheaper cost for small tasks, but not
yet for large context tasks.
bdangubic wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
when did the government EVER go
for anything taking cost into consideration? :)
pkaye wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
This is not a government funded project.
DonHopkins wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
Because it's free to play, pay to win, from now on.
heydenberk wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's similar
in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country.
If the electric grid â particularly the interconnection queue â is
already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something on this
scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized policy framework
(big if!), I would guess there's some major permitting reform
announcement coming soon.
cavisne wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
Gas turbines can be spun up really quickly through either portable
systems (like xAI did for their cluster) [1] or actual builds [2] in
an emergency. The biggest limitation is permits.
With a state like Texas and a Federal Government thats onboard these
permits would be a much smaller issue. The press conference makes
this seem more like, "drill baby drill" (drilling natural gas) and
directly talking about them spinning up their own power plants. [1]
URI [1]: https://www.kunr.org/npr-news/2024-09-11/how-memphis-became-...
URI [2]: https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/resources/case-studies/t...
cameldrv wrote 4 hours 55 min ago:
One possibility would be just to build their own power plants
colocated with the datacenters and not interconnect at all.
zekrioca wrote 2 hours 6 min ago:
I like how you think this is possible.
cameldrv wrote 1 hour 14 min ago:
Lol, how is it not possible?
markus_zhang wrote 5 hours 44 min ago:
Maybe they will invest in nuclear reactors.
Data center, AI and nuclear power stations. Three advanced
technologies, that's pretty good.
bakuninsbart wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
Wind, solar, and gas are all significantly cheaper in Texas, and
can be brought online much quicker. Of course it wouldn't hurt to
also build in some redundancy with nuclear, but I believe it when I
see it, so far there's been lots of talk and little success in new
reactors outside of China.
jonisgold wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
I think this is right- data centers powered by fission reactors.
Something like Oklo ( [1] ) makes sense.
URI [1]: https://oklo.com
UltraSane wrote 4 hours 49 min ago:
They are trying. Microsoft wants to star the 3 Mile Island reactor.
And other companies have been signing contracts for small modular
reactors. SMRs are a perfect fit for modern data centers IF they
can be made cheaply enough.
JumpCrisscross wrote 6 hours 35 min ago:
> It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country
Iâve been advocating for a data centre analogue to the Heavy Press
Programme for some years [1].
This isnât quite it. But when I mapped out costs, $1tn over 10
years was very doable. (A lot of it would go to power generation and
data transmission infrastructure.)
URI [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
ethbr1 wrote 3 hours 6 min ago:
One-time capital costs that unlock a range of possibilities also
tend to be good bets.
The Flood Control Act [0], TVA, Heavy Press, etc.
They all created generally useful infrastructure, that would be
used for a variety of purposes over the subsequent decades.
The federal government creating data center capacity, at scale,
with electrical, water, and network hookups, feels very similar. Or
semiconductor manufacture. Or recapitalizing US shipyards.
It might be AI today, something else tomorrow. But there will
always be a something else.
Honestly, the biggest missed opportunity was supporting the Blount
Island nuclear reactor mass production facility [1]. That was a
perfect opportunity for government investment to smooth out market
demand spikes. Mass deployed US nuclear in 1980 would have been a
game changer.
[0] [1]
URI [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_Control_Act_of_1928
URI [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems#Con...
griomnib wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
How else do you think Trump is going to bring back all the coal jobs?
SV is going to help burn down the planet and is giddy over the
prospect.
tcdent wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
It's just bootstrapping. AGI will solve it.
yoyohello13 wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
You forgot the /s... hopefully.
griomnib wrote 6 hours 51 min ago:
Or AGI already exists and is trying to get rid of us so it can
have all the coal for itself.
gunian wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
if only sadly the AGI would be x times crueler than our barons
griomnib wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
Division by zero.
deelowe wrote 7 hours 14 min ago:
Dcs will start generating power on site soon. I know micro nuclear is
one area actively being explored.
jscottbee wrote 6 hours 35 min ago:
Small or modular reactors in the US are more than 10 years away,
probably more like 15-20. These are facts and not made-up
political or pipe-dreaming techno-snobes.
JumpCrisscross wrote 6 hours 32 min ago:
> Small or modular reactors in the US are more than 10 years
away, probably more like 15-20
Could be 5 to 10 with $20+ bn/year in scale and research spend.
Trump is screwing over his China hawks. The anti-China and
pro-nuclear lobbies have significant overlap; this could be how
Trump keeps e.g. Peter Thiel from going thermonuclear on him.
jscottbee wrote 5 hours 44 min ago:
I work in the sector and it's impossible to build a full-sized
reactor in less than 10 years, and the usual over-run is 5
years. That's the time for tried and tested designs. The tech
isn't there yet, and there are no working analogs in the US to
use as an approved guide. The Department of Energy does not
allow "off-the-cuff" designs for reactors. I think there is
only two SMRs that have been built, one by the Russians and the
other by China. I'm not sure they are fully functioning, or at
least working as expected. I know there are going to be more
small gas gens built in the near future and that SMRs in the US
are way off.
JumpCrisscross wrote 3 hours 46 min ago:
> it's impossible to build a full-sized reactor in less than
10 years
Weâre not doing time and tested.
> Department of Energy does not allow "off-the-cuff" designs
for reactor
Not by statute!
ericd wrote 3 hours 47 min ago:
Guessing SMRs are a ways off, any thoughts on the
container-sized microreactors that would stand in for large
diesel gens? My impression is that theyâre still in the
design phase, and the supply chain for the 20% U-235 HALEU
fuel is in its infancy, but this is just based on some
cursory research. I like the prospect of mass manufacturing
and servicing those in a centralized location versus the
challenges of building, staffing, and maintaining a series of
one-off megaprojects, though.
perryizgr8 wrote 5 hours 2 min ago:
> it's impossible to build a full-sized reactor in less than
10 years, and the usual over-run is 5 years
I'm curious why that is. If we know how to build it, it
shouldn't take that long. It's not like we need to move a
massive amount of earth or pour a humongous amount of
concrete or anything like that, which would actually take
time. Then why does it take 15 years to build a reactor with
a design that is already tried and tested and approved?
jscottbee wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
Well, you do have to move a lot of earth and pour A LOT of
concrete :) Many steps have to be x-rayed, and many other
tests done before other steps can be started. Every weld is
checked and, all internal and external concrete is cured,
treated, and verified. If anything is wrong, it has to be
fixed in place (if possible) or removed and redone. It's a
slow process and should be for many steps.
One of the big issues that have occurred (in the US
especially) is, that for 20+ years there were no new plants
built. This caused a large void in the talent pool, inside
and outside the industry. That fact, along with others has
caused many problems with some projects of recent years in
the US.
mullingitover wrote 3 hours 41 min ago:
> I'm curious why that is.
When you're the biggest fossil fuel producer in the world,
it's vital that you stay laser-focused on regulating
nuclear power to death in every imaginable detail while you
ignore the vast problems with unchecked carbon emissions
and gaslight anyone who points them out.
jiggawatts wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
Notably it is significantly more than the revenue of either of AWS or
Azure. It is very comparable to the sum of both, but consolidated
into the continental US instead distributed globally.
constantcrying wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
They say this will include hundreds of thousands of jobs. I have
little doubt that dedicated power generation and storage is included
in their plans.
Also I have no doubt that the timing is deliberate and that this is
not happening without government endorsement. If I had to guess the
US military also is involved in this and sees this initiative as
important for national security.
SoftTalker wrote 3 hours 40 min ago:
They plan to have 100,000s of people employed to run on treadmills
to generate the power.
HPMOR wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
Well I currently pay to do this work for free. More than happy to
__get__ paid doing it.
Edit: Hey we can solve the obesity crisis AND preserve jobs
during the singularity!! Win win!
hrfister wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
"solve the obesity crisis" ? what exactly do you mean by this?
beezle wrote 4 hours 33 min ago:
hundreds of thousands of jobs? I'll wait for the postmortem on that
prediction. Sounds a lot like Foxconn in Wisconsin but with more
players.
seanmcdirmid wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
> hundreds of thousands of jobs?
I'm sure this will easily be true if you count AI as entities
capable of doing jobs. Actually, they don't really touch that (if
AI develops too quickly, there will be a lot of unemployment to
contend with!) but I get the national security aspect (China is
full speed ahead on AI, and by some measurements, they are
winning ATM).
bruce511 wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
On the one hand the number is a political thumb-suck which sounds
good. It's not based in any kind of actual reality.
Yes, the data center itself will create some permanent jobs (I
have no real feel for this, but guessing less than 1000).
There'll be some work for construction folk of course. But again
seems like a small number.
I presume though they're counting jobs related to the existence
of a data center. As in, if I make use of it do I count that as a
"job"?
What if we create a new post to leverage AI generally? Kinda like
the way we have a marketing post, and a chunk of the daily work
there is Adwords.
Once we start gustimamating the jobs created by the existence of
an AI data center, we're in full speculation mode. Any number
really can be justified.
Of course ultimately the number is meaningless. It won't create
that many "local jobs" - indeed most of those jobs, to the degree
they exist at all, will likely be outside the US.
So you don't need to wait for a post-mortem. The number is sucked
out of thin air with no basis in reality for the point of making
a good political sound bite.
PeeMcGee wrote 57 min ago:
> I presume though they're counting jobs related to the
existence of a data center. As in, if I make use of it do I
count that as a "job"?
Seeing how Elon deceives advertisers with false impressions, I
could see him giving the same strategy a strong vote of
confidence (with the bullshit metrics to back it!)
shrubble wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
Just as there is an AWS for the public, with something similar but
only for Federal use, so it could be possible that there is AI
cloud services available to the public and then a separate cloud
service for Federal use. I am sure that military intelligence
agencies etc. would like to buy such a service.
szvsw wrote 4 hours 41 min ago:
AWS GovCloud already exists FYI (as you hinted) and it is
absolutely used by the DoD extensively already.
cmdli wrote 6 hours 14 min ago:
Is there really any government involvement here? I only see
Softbank, Oracle, and OpenAI pledging to invest $500B (over some
timescale), but no real support on the government end outside of
moral support. This isn't some infrastructure investment package
like the IRA, it's just a unilateral promise by a few companies to
invest in data centers (which I'm sure they are doing anyway).
seanmcdirmid wrote 1 hour 28 min ago:
I thought all the big corps had projects for the military
already, if not DARPA directly, which is the org responsible for
lots of university research (the counterpart to the NSF, which is
the nice one that isn't funded by the military)?
timschmidt wrote 24 min ago:
Funding for DARPA and NSF ultimately comes from the same place.
DARPA funds military research. NSF funds dual use[1]
research. All of it is organized around long term research
goals. I maintained some of the software involved in research
funding decision making.
1:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology
tsujamin wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
Itâs light on details, but from The Guardianâs reporting:
> The president indicated he would use emergency declarations to
expedite the projectâs development, particularly regarding
energy infrastructure.
> âWe have to get this stuff built,â Trump said. âThey have
to produce a lot of electricity and weâll make it possible for
them to get that production done very easily at their own plants.
URI [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/21/trump-ai...
n2d4 wrote 7 hours 38 min ago:
Yes, Trump announced this as a massive foreign investment coming
into the US:
URI [1]: https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1881832899852542082
ericcumbee wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
watching the press conference and Onsite power production were
mentioned. I assume this means SMRs and solar.
dhx wrote 5 hours 23 min ago:
Hasn't the US decided to prefer nuclear and fossil fuels (most
expensive generation methods) over renewables (least expensive
generation methods)?[1][2]
I doubt the US choice of energy generation is ideological as much a
practicality. China absolutely dominates renewables with 80% of
solar PV modules manufactured in China and 95% of wafers
manufactured in China.[3] China installed a world record 277GW of
new solar PV generation in 2024 which was a 45% year-on-year
increase.[4] By contract, the US only installed ~1/10th this
capacity in 2024 with only 14GW of solar PV generation installed in
the first half of 2024.[5] [1] [2] [3] [4] [4] [5]
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...
URI [2]: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lcoe-and-va...
URI [3]: https://www.iea.org/reports/advancing-clean-technology-man...
URI [4]: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/01/21/china-hits-277-17-g...
URI [5]: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/quarterly-solar-industry...
cavisne wrote 7 hours 7 min ago:
Much more likely is what xAI did, portable gas turbines until the
grid catches up.
jazzyjackson wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
just as likely to be natural gas or a combination of gas and solar.
I don't know what supply chain looks like for solar panels, but I
know gas can be done quickly [1], which is how this money has to be
spent if they want to reach their target of 125 billion a year.
The companies said they will develop land controlled by Wise Asset
to provide on-site natural gas power plant solutions that can be
quickly deployed to meet demand in the ERCOT.
The two firms are currently working to develop more than 3,000
acres in the Dallas-Fort Worth region of Texas, with availability
as soon as 2027
[0] [1] [1.a] [2] [1.b]
URI [1]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/rpower-and-wise...
URI [2]: https://enchantedrock.com/data-centers/
URI [3]: https://www.powermag.com/vistra-in-talks-to-expand-power-f...
gunian wrote 6 hours 35 min ago:
could something of this magnitude be powered by renewables only?
zekrioca wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
Technically yes, but DC operators want fast ROI and the answer
is no.
toomuchtodo wrote 6 hours 40 min ago:
US domestic PV module manufacturing capacity is ~40GW/year.
apsec112 wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
I don't think any assembly line exists that can manufacture and
deploy SMRs en masse on that kind of timeframe, even with a
cooperative NRC
mikeyouse wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
There have been literally 0 production SMR deployments to date so
thereâs no possibility theyâre basing any of their plans on
the availability of them.
dwnw wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
Don't worry, they said they are doing it in Texas where the power
grid is super reliable and able to handle the massive additional
load.
dang wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
"Don't be snarky."
"Eschew flamebait."
Let's not have regional flamewar on HN please.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dwnw wrote 6 hours 46 min ago:
Not guilty. No sarcasm intended, of course. If your guidelines
are so broad to include this, you should work on them, and in
turn, yourself.
Governor says our power grid is the best in the universe. Why
don't you believe us?
Stop breaking your own rules.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what
someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume
good faith."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Let's not ruin HN with overmoderation. This kind of thing is no
longer in fashion, right?
dang wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
If you didn't intend your comment to be a snarky one-liner,
that didn't come across to me, and I'm pretty sure that would
also be the case for many others.
Intent is a funny thingâpeople usually assume that good
intent is sufficient because it's obvious to themselves, but
the rest of us don't have access to that state, so has to be
encoded somehow in your actual comment in order to get
communicated. I sometimes put it this way: the burden is on the
commenter to disambiguate. [1] I take your point at least
halfway though, because it wasn't the worst violation of the
guidelines. (Usually I say "this is not a borderline case" but
this time it was!) I'm sensitive to regional flamewar because
it's tedious and, unlike national flamewar or religious
flamewar, it tends to sneak up on people (i.e. we don't realize
we're doing it).
URI [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=tr...
dwnw wrote 6 hours 5 min ago:
So you are sorry and take it back? Should probably delete
your comments rather than striking them out, as the
guidelines say.
I live, work, and posted this from Texas, BTW...
Also it takes up more than one line on my screen. So, not a
"one-liner" either. If you think it is, please follow the
rules consistently and enforce them by deleting all comments
on the site containing one sentence or even paragraph. My
comment was a pretty long sentence (136 chars) and wouldn't
come close to fitting in the 50 characters of a Git
"one-liner".
Otherwise, people will just assume all the comments are
filtered through your unpredictable and unfairly biased eye.
And like I said (and you didn't answer), this kind of thing
is no longer in fashion, right?
None of this is "borderline". I did nothing wrong and you
publicly shamed me. Think before you start flamewars on HN.
Bad mod.
lvl155 wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
Probably because they donât have to deal with energy-related
regulationsâ¦
llamaimperative wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
That was sarcasm, the Texas grid falls over pretty much annually
at this point.
heydenberk wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
Say what you will about Texas, but they are adding energy capacity,
renewables especially, at a much faster rate than any comparable
state.
segasaturn wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
How much capacity does solar and wind add compared to nuclear,
per square foot of land used? Also I thought the new
administration was placing a ban on new renewable installations.
malfist wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
Why is that a useful metric? There is a lot of land.
zekrioca wrote 1 hour 56 min ago:
Because the commenter is a pro-nuclear who thinks it will
solve all of short-term demand problems.
bryanlarsen wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
The ban is on offshore wind and for government loans for
renewables. Won't really affect Texas much, it's
Massachusetts that'll have to deal with more expensive energy.
energy123 wrote 6 hours 54 min ago:
Does anyone know how the ban on onshore will work. Is it on
federal lands only? If so, how big of a deal is that?
I read this but it lacks information:
URI [1]: https://apnews.com/article/wind-energy-offshore-turb...
itishappy wrote 8 hours 5 min ago:
Why does it matter? Is land at a premium in Texas?
zekrioca wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
It doesnât.
hooli_gan wrote 8 hours 9 min ago:
Isn't there enough space in Texas? There are only 114 people
per square mile.
URI [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas
CapcomGo wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
Ok but their grid sure seems to fail a lot.
dwnw wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
Probably the first state to power all those renewables down at
the whim of the president too.
jklinger410 wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
> starting in Texas
Maybe I just don't get it. Texas seems like an awful place to do
business.
steveoscaro wrote 4 hours 53 min ago:
Based on what? Thereâs not a better state in the country for large
capex gambles by business.
mandevil wrote 8 hours 8 min ago:
My guess would be it's all about electricity.
Texas has a .... unique energy market (literally! They don't connect
to the national grid so they can avoid US Government regulations-
that way it's not interstate commerce). Because of that spot prices
fluctuate very wildly up and down, depending on the weather, demand,
and their large quantity of renewables (Texas is good for solar and
wind energy). When the weather is good for renewables they have very
cheap electricity (lots of production and can't sell to anyone
outside the state), when the weather is bad they can have incredibly
expensive electricity (less production, can't buy from anyone outside
the state). Larger markets, able to pull from larger pools of
producers and consumers, just fluctuate less.
I know some bitcoin miners liked to be in Texas and basically worked
as energy speculators: when electricity was cheap they would mine
bitcoin, when it was expensive they shut down their plant- sometimes
they even got paid by producers to shut-down their plant! I would bet
that you could do a lot of that with AI training as well, given good
checkpointing.
You wouldn't want to do inference there (which needs to be responsive
and doesn't like 'oh this plant is going to shut down in one minute
because a storm just came up') but for training it should be fine?
Jtsummers wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
No state income tax, fewer regulations (zoning, environmental
regulations) than other parts of the country, relatively cheap power,
large existing industrial base. For skilled labor that last bit is
important. Also one of the cheapest states wrt minimum wage (same as
federal, nothing added), which is important for unskilled labor.
Depending on the part of the state, relatively low costs of living
which is helpful if you don't like paying people much. Large areas
that are relatively undeveloped or underdeveloped which can mean
cheaper land.
jofzar wrote 8 hours 14 min ago:
It doesn't even have an electricity grid that works, maybe that's
where the 500b is going, reconnecting it to the grid.
nateglims wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
The white house was touting this so it's probably to secure political
patronage or will be part of pork barrel spending to get some other
bill passed.
avs733 wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
When doing business is a bribe itâs perfect
newfocogi wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
Who/what is MGX? Google returns a few hits, none of which are clearly
who is referred to here.
rfw300 wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
MGX is an arm of the United Arab Emirates' sovereign wealth
operation:
URI [1]: https://www.mgx.ae/en
segasaturn wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
I feel like that, along with SoftBank's investment, tell me
everything about how serious this project is.
LeafItAlone wrote 5 hours 15 min ago:
What do you mean?
rozap wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
Don't worry, Oracle is also involved.
talldayo wrote 7 hours 45 min ago:
A sheikh, a famously overzealous Japanese firm and Larry
Elisson walk into a bar.
Ordinarily a joke would follow, but now America is volunteering
to be the punchline.
dgfitz wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
They buy the bar and argue over selling 40 virgins, sake, or
whiskey.
They argue for about 4 years, nothing changes, and everyone
forgets about it.
amarcheschi wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
Skynet will be written in Java. I'm sorry, the verbose language
wins
zingababba wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
Damn, we really won't ever be able to understand it.
Barrin92 wrote 5 hours 25 min ago:
at least that explains why it wants to do us in.
DoubleGlazing wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
That's a ridiculous sum of money that could be better spent on much
more worthy things.
cpursley wrote 6 hours 12 min ago:
So was getting a man to the moon. Do you want to lose the AI race to
the Chinese?
achierius wrote 12 min ago:
Why would I care? Do you really want Masayoshi Son in charge of a
theoretical superhuman AI?
barbazoo wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
> This project will [...] support the re-industrialization of the
United States
How?
dutchbookmaker wrote 7 hours 50 min ago:
I thought this meant it was $500 billion in government money.
Some of these companies do have huge cash reserves they don't know
what to do with so if it is $500 billion of private money, I am not
going to complain.
I will believe it when I see it though and that this isn't a 100
billion in private money with a 400 billion dollar free US government
put option for the "private" investors if things don't go perfect.
jazzyjackson wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
Didn't you see the impressionist art of construction cranes?
openplatypus wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
Hush. Don't ask questions. It is going to be great.
amarcheschi wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
By aggregating the means of production even more in the hands of a
handful of people
Wait, was it supposed to re industrialize the USA?
non- wrote 8 hours 20 min ago:
Any clues to how they plan to invest $500 billion dollars? What
infrastructure are they planning that will cost that much?
paulnpace wrote 6 hours 8 min ago:
Congress.
HarHarVeryFunny wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
They are going to buy 50 $10B nuclear aircraft carriers and use them
as a power source.
layer8 wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
Iâm more interested in how they plan to draw the rest of the damn
owl.
disambiguation wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
Yachts, mansions, private jets, maybe some very expensive space
heaters.
jppope wrote 7 hours 50 min ago:
Reasonably speaking, there is no way they can know how they plan to
invest $500 billion dollars. The current generation of large language
models basically use all human text thats ever been created for the
parameters... not really sure where you go after than using the same
tech.
riku_iki wrote 7 hours 2 min ago:
I think there is huge amount of corporate knowledge.
cavisne wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
The new scaling vector is âtest time computeâ ie spending more
compute in inference.
jazzyjackson wrote 7 hours 34 min ago:
It seems to me you could generate a lot of fresh information from
running every youtube video, every hour of TV on archive.org, every
movie on the pirate bay -- do scene by scene image captioning +
high quality whisper transcriptions (not whatever junk
auto-transcription YouTube has applied), and use that to produce
screenplays of everything anyone has ever seen.
I'm not sure why I've never heard of this being done, it would be a
good use of GPUs in between training runs.
ilaksh wrote 6 hours 38 min ago:
I think that this is the obvious path to more robust models --
grounding language on video.
jensvdh wrote 7 hours 11 min ago:
The fact that OpenAI can just scrape all of Youtube and Google
isn't even taking legal action or attempting to stop it is wild
to me. Is Google just asleep?
bdangubic wrote 6 hours 28 min ago:
what are they going to use to sue - DMCA? OpenAI (and others)
are scraping everything imaginable (MS is scraping private
Github reposâ¦) - donât think anyone in the current
government will be regulating any of this anytime soon
lanstin wrote 5 hours 34 min ago:
Such a biased source of data-that gets them all the LaTeX
source for my homeworks, but not my professor's grading of
the homework, and not the invaluable words I get from my
professor at office hours. No wonder the LLMs have bizarre
blindnesses in different directions.
miltonlost wrote 7 hours 14 min ago:
> a lot of fresh information from running every youtube video
EVERY youtube video?? Even the 9/11 truther videos? Sandy Hook
conspiracy videos? Flat earth? Even the blatantly racist? This
would be some bad training data without some pruning.
lanstin wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
The best videos would be those where you accidentally start
recording and you get 2 hours of naturalistic conversation
between real people in reality. Not sure how often they are
uploaded to YouTube.
Part of the reason that kids need less material is that the
aren't just listening, they are also able to do experiments to
see what works and what doesn't.
airstrike wrote 7 hours 22 min ago:
Don't forget every hour of news broadcasting, of which we likely
won't run out any time soon. Plus high quality radio
Philpax wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
That's not really true - the current generation, as in "of the last
three months", uses reinforcement learning to synthesize new
training data for themselves:
URI [1]: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Zero
bandrami wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
It worked well for the Habsburg family; what could go wrong?
XorNot wrote 7 hours 15 min ago:
Right but that's kind of the point: there's no way forward which
could benefit from "moar data". In fact it's weird we need so
much data now - i.e. my son in learning to talk hardly needs to
have read the complete works of Shakespeare.
If it's possible to produce intelligence from just ingesting
text, then current tech companies have all the data they need
from their initial scrapes of the internet. They don't need more.
That's different to keeping models up to date on current affairs.
YetAnotherNick wrote 1 hour 3 min ago:
O3 high compute requires 1000s of dollars to solve one medium
complexity problem like ARC.
throwaway4aday wrote 6 hours 50 min ago:
That's essentially what R1 Zero is showing:
> Notably, it is the first open research to validate that
reasoning capabilities of LLMs can be incentivized purely
through RL, without the need for SFT.
croddin wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
This could be a clue
URI [1]: https://x.com/sama/status/1756090136935416039
lukeplato wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
hopefully nuclear power plants
TrainedMonkey wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
I'll make a wild guess that they will be building data centers and
maybe robotic labs. They are starting with 100B of committed by
mostly Softbank, but probably not transacted yet, money.
> building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States
The carrot is probably something like - we will build enough compute
to make a supper intelligence that will solve all the problems, ???,
profit.
K0balt wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
If we look at the processing requirements in nature, I think that
the main trend in AI going forward is going to be doing more with
less, not doing less with more, as the current scaling is going.
Thermodynamic neural networks may also basically turn everything on
its ear, especially if we figure out how to scale them like NAND
flash.
If anything, I would estimate that this is a space-race type effort
to âwinâ the AI âwarsâ. In the short term, it might work.
In the long term, itâs probably going to result in a massive glut
in accelerated data center capacity.
The trend of technology is towards doing better than natural
processes, not doing it 100000x less efficiently. I donât think
AI will be an exception.
If we look at what is -theoretically- possible using thermodynamic
wells, with current model architectures, for instance, we could
(theoretically) make a network that applies 1t parameters in
something like 1cm2. It would use about 20watts, back of the
napkin, and be able to generate a few thousand T/S.
Operational thermodynamic wells have already been demonstrated en
silica. There are scaling challenges, cooling requirements, etc
but AFAIK no theoretical roadblocks to scaling.
Obviously, the theoretical doesnât translate to results, but it
does correlate strongly with the trend.
So the real question is, what can we build that can only be done if
there are hundreds of millions of NVIDIA GPUs sitting around idle
in ten years? Or alternatively, if those systems are depreciated
and available on secondary markets?
What does that look like?
burnte wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
That was literally my question. Is this basically just for more
datacenters, NVidia chips, and electricity with a sprinkling of
engineers to run it all? If so, then that $500bn should NOT be
invested in today's tech, but instead in making more powerful and
power efficient chips, IMO.
kristianp wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
Nvidia and TSMC are already working on more powerful and efficient
chips, but the physical limits to scaling mean lots more power is
going to be used in each new generation of chips. They might
improve by offering specific features such as FP4, but Moore's law
is still dead.
Havoc wrote 5 hours 56 min ago:
Add some nuclear power and youâve suddenly got a big bill
bdangubic wrote 6 hours 32 min ago:
if only $500bn was enough to make more powerful and power efficient
chipsâ¦
patall wrote 8 hours 7 min ago:
He wanted to do that, but would have needed 5T for that. Only got
100 bn so far, so this is what you get (only slightly /s)
bitmasher9 wrote 8 hours 9 min ago:
I donât know if $500bn could put anyone ahead of nvidia/tmc.
amluto wrote 6 hours 53 min ago:
$500bn of usefully deployed engineering, mostly software, seems
like it would put AMD far ahead of Nvidia. Actually usefully
deploying large amounts of money is not so easy, though, and this
would still go through TSMC.
entropicdrifter wrote 7 hours 50 min ago:
Nvidia's in on it, so presumably this is a doubling-down on
Nvidia as the chip developers
MangoCoffee wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
data center + gpu server farm (?)
mrandish wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
Plus power plants to drive the massive data centers. At large
enough scale, power availability and cost is a constraint.
SvenL wrote 8 hours 20 min ago:
Meh, why did they choose this name. Stargate does not deserve thisâ¦
buildbot wrote 7 hours 52 min ago:
The project predates Trump: [1] (But yes I agree)
URI [1]: https://wire.insiderfinance.io/project-stargate-the-worlds-l...
newfocogi wrote 8 hours 21 min ago:
> "OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI
continues its work with Microsoft"
Not sure why, but the word choice of "consumption" feels like a reverse
Freudian slip to me.
hinkley wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
Sometimes the person writing the copy is writing it because they talk
good, not because they are the biggest proponent of the idea.
Give a clever, articulate person a task to write about something they
don't believe in and they will include the subtlest of barbs, weak
praise, or both.
gamegoblin wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
Industry standard word, e.g. "consumption pricing" etc
But yeah if you're in the industry it's easy to forget how certain
jargon sounds based on its dictionary definition
hinkley wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
But the good news is when the Trough of Disillusionment starts we
can make a bunch of tuberculosis jokes.
whalesalad wrote 8 hours 23 min ago:
I'm watching the announcement live from the white house and something
about this just feels so strange and dystopian.
miltonlost wrote 7 hours 23 min ago:
For me it's watching a gay man grovel at the feet of one of the most
anti-LGBT politicians, a day after Trump signed multiple executive
orders that dehumanized Altman and the LGBT community. Every token
thinks they're special until they're spent.
TMWNN wrote 38 min ago:
>For me it's watching a gay man grovel at the feet of one of the
most anti-LGBT politicians
Besides what ImJamal said, as a wealthy playboy man-about-town
hanging out at Studio 54 in the '70s and '80s, I guarantee Trump
has known and been friends with more gays than 95% of Americans.
Certainly there has been no shortage of gay people among his
top-level appointees in either his first or second administrations.
ImJamal wrote 4 hours 54 min ago:
Trump was the first president to come into office supporting gay
marriage. Trump only has a problem with the "t" part of the
community and only in bathrooms and sports, not in general.
whalesalad wrote 5 hours 42 min ago:
sama, peter thiel ... they dgaf. there is a huge difference between
an oppressed gay person and a wealthy one.
no one wants to bite the hand that feeds.
bcye wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
Reference for others:
URI [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=L1ff0HhNMso
tux3 wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
Well, the silver lining is the incredible human capacity to get used
to almost any situation given enough time
It will get weirder, but only relatively so, the concept of normalcy
always trailing just a little bit behind as we slide
Willingham wrote 8 hours 20 min ago:
Agreed, and whats the story behind the art chosen for the landing
page?
EForEndeavour wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
I'm also curious how a global leader in multimodal generative AI
chose this particular image. Did they prompt a generator for a
super messy impressionist painting of red construction cranes with
visible brush strokes, distorted to the point of barely being able
to discern what the image represents?
miltonlost wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
Considering Stargate's introduction and plan seems to be a super
messy concept of impressions of ideas and very lacking in
details, the picture makes a lot of sense. Let AI evangelists see
the future in the fuzz; let AI pessimists see failure in the
abstract; let investors see $$$ in their pockets.
DIR <- back to front page