Abundant Intelligence

> We are particularly excited to build a lot of this in the US; right now, other countries are building things like chips fabs and new energy production much faster than we are, and we want to help turn that tide.

Did Donald call him ?

"As AI gets smarter, access to AI will be a fundamental driver of the economy, and maybe eventually something we consider a fundamental human right. Almost everyone will want more AI working on their behalf."

I don't buy it at all.

This sounds like complete and total bullshit to me.

> If AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will, then amazing things will be possible. Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer.

At least the statement starts with a conditional, even if it is a silly one.

If you know your growth curve is ultimately going to be a sigmoid, fitting a model with only data points before the inflection point is underdetermined.

> If AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will

Is a statement that no amount of prior evidence can support.

My intelligence dropped a few points by reading anything from this charlatan.

Y2K errors in old COBOL code kick-started Indian IT sector, which then lead to immense economic progress and mass scale reduction in poverty. I hope LLMs pepper every thing they touch with many such errors, so that nations of Africa and poorer parts of Latin America (that can't do cheap manufacturing due to a lack of infrastructure and capital) can also begin their upwards economic journey by providing services to fix these mistakes.

In order to help reduce global poverty (much of which was caused by colonialism), it is the moral and ethical duty of the Global North to adopt LLMs on a mass scale and use them in every field imaginable, and then give jobs to the global poor to fix the resulting mess.

I am only 10% joking.

AI will become "something we consider a fundamental human right", according to the guy that wants to sell you access to it

> As AI gets smarter, access to AI will be a fundamental driver of the economy, and maybe eventually something we consider a fundamental human right.

My product is going to be the fundamental driver of the economy. Even a human right!

> Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer.

How?

> We are particularly excited to build a lot of this in the US; right now, other countries are building things like chips fabs and new energy production much faster than we are, and we want to help turn that tide.

There's the appeal to the current administration.

> Over the next couple of months, we’ll be talking about some of our plans and the partners we are working with to make this a reality. Later this year, we’ll talk about how we are financing it

Beyond parody.

> Our vision is simple: we want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week.

If a tenth of this happens, and we don't build a new power plant every ten weeks... then what?

What's the serious counter-argument to the idea that a) AI will become more ubiquitous and inexpensive and b) economic/geopolitical success will be tied in some way to AI ability?

Because I do agree with him on that front. The question is whether the AI industry will end up like airplanes: massively useful technology that somehow isn't a great business to be in. If indeed that is the case, framing OpenAI as a nation-bound "human right" is certainly one way to ensure its organizational existence if the market becomes too competitive.

A company is building technology more powerful than nuclear weaponry, and this comment section is thinking they're "overselling" it. Fun.

Google: Do no Evil.

Apple: Privacy is a fundamental Human right. That is why we must control everything. And stop our user from sharing any form of data other than to Apple.

OpenAI: AI is a fundamental Human right.....

There is something about Silicon Valley that is philosophically very odd for the past 15 to 20 years.

> Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer.

Something I've never understood: why do AGI perverts think that a superintelligence is any more likely to "cure cancer" than "create unstoppable super-cancer"

I have stopped reading all the sam altman posts. Not because I am a hater or anything. Maybe AI is a bubble, maybe it is not but one thing is clear. Your ability to do something is enforced in neural pathways that you exercise on a regular basis. If you let LLMs and AI do your architecture, database, coding, testing and just about all the things you are dreaming, then gradually but surely, your brain will lose these pathways and you won't be able to process and IDEATE code anymore like the way you do currently. This is one reason I don't intend to use AI for anything outside file format conversions and maybe image generations.

Can someone help me make some sense of the 10 gigawatts of compute?

Colossus data has 230K GPUs (150,000 H100 GPUs, 50,000 H200 GPUs and 30,000 GB200 GPUs) [source https://x.ai/colossus]

Energy usage: up to 150 megawatts of electricity per day [source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)]

So, when SamA talks about 10 gigawatts of compute does he mean per day or GWH (Gigawatts-hour)?

Altman fatigue anyone?

Dorks with forks

> Our vision is simple: we want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week.

The moat will be how efficiently you convert electricity into useful behavior. Whoever industrializes evaluation and feedback loops wins the next decade.

Sam Altman gives me dark triad vibes.

As a technical user of AI, I think there is certainly value in the capabilities of the current IDE/agentic systems, and as a builder of AI systems professionally I think there is enterprise value as well, although realizing that value in a meaningful way is an ongoing challenge/work in progress. There is also clearly a problem with AI slop, both in codebases and in other professional deliverables. Having said that, what’s more interesting to me is whether we have seen AI produce novel and valuable outputs independently. Altman asserts that 10GW could possibly “cure cancer”, but frankly I’d like to see any discrete examples of AI advancing frontier knowledge areas and moving the needle in small but measurable ways that stand up to peer review. Before we can cure cancer or have world peace through massive consumption of power and spend I’d like to see a meaningful counterpoint to the argument that AI as a derivative technology from all human knowledge is incapable of extending beyond the current limits of human knowledge. Intuitively I think AI should be capable of novel scientific advancement, but I feel like we’re short on examples.

Those guys are so stupid. AI is just going to get weaponized by companies and governments to enslave more people and accumulate riches for the few

"Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer. Or with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to provide customized tutoring to every student on earth."

what's in between this line and the next:

"or it might not. Now give me moar money!!!!!"

The fundamental driver of the economy will be people, as always, because only people define "value".

Word generating machine will not "figure out how to cure cancer" but it could help, obviously. AI is extremely valuable tool but it does not work on my behalf, except in same sense a coin sorter does. It's a tool. I still see this thing confuse left and right (no exaggeration), which would be fine - tools aren't perfect - except for all bullshit from VCs. That is where the danger lies, not with the tool but idolatry.

I am concerned the system encourages suicide, delusional thinking etc. They need to work that out immediately. Must be held to at least the standard of a lawn mower or couch with regard to safety. Probably should make it safe before hooking it up to 10GW power plant. Does not help perception that author of this blog saying how awesome future will be is also building a hideaway bunker for himself.

This is all on you at OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Twitter etc. Whatever happens.

"The factory must grow"

> Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer.

The growth in energy is because of the increase in the output tokens due to increased demand for them.

Models do not get smarter the more they are used.

So why does he expect them to solve cancer if they haven't already?

And why do we need to solve cancer more than once?

> provide customized tutoring to every student on earth

It could start by figuring out how to keep kids from using AI to write all their essays.

let me put some more in nvidia now

fix'd: Abundant Money

He might be right about intelligence becoming the new currency in a world where intelligence becomes fungible.

Lots of assumptions about the path to get there, though.

And interesting that he's measuring intelligence in energy terms.

So...

* Nvidia invests 5 billion in Intel * Nvidia and OpenAI announce partnership to deploy 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems (Investment of upto 100 billion) * This indirectly benefits TSMC (which implies they'll be investing more in the US)

Looks like the US is cooking something...

Putting aside the questions of (as some comments here have) whether

  * AI is a “fucking dud” (you have to be either highly ignorant or trolling to say this)
  * Altman is a “charlatan” (definitely no but it does look like he has some unsavory personal traits, quite common BTW for people at that level) 
  * the ridiculousness of touting a cancer cure (I guess the post is targeted to the technical hoi polloi, with whom such terminology resonates, but also see protein 3D structure discovery advances)

I found the following to be interesting in this post:

1. Altman clearly signaling affinity for the Abundance bandwagon with a clear reference right in the title. Post is shorter but has the flavor of Marc Andreessen's "It's Time to Build" post from 2020: https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/

2. He advances the vision of "creat[ing] a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week". This may be called frighteningly ambitious at a minimum: U.S. annual additions have been ~10-20 GW/year for solar builds (https://www.climatecentral.org/report/solar-and-wind-power-2...)

Well, i see the case that those with great power want factories building ai factories, much like a factorio simulation, to solve cancer. Sure sama, you have to name the most noble goal imaginable everyone agrees on, though we know that's not what drives you. AI to become a fundamental right, that won't work as some kind of subscription service, we also agree on this?

"What do you mean you won't give us trillions of dollars? Don't you want to cure cancer??" The models are getting more efficient - there's something very weird going on here - like the AI bubble is trying to merge with an energy/datacenter bubble to create a mega bubble.

I think AI compute is one of the biggest grifts of century. A capital that is being redistributed from talented people to this compute when we can clearly see it is not making a huge difference (oai vs deepseek) feels like a grift.

using abundance discourse to market ai slop is the most innovative thing openai has done yet

I think reasonable people will agree that Bitcoin's energy consumption had huge impacts on costs of power with very little to show for, at least for the average user.

What are ways in which we can incentivize investments and place societal guardrails so that something similar doesn't happen with AI data centers.

Do governments need to invest in nuclear power?

Scale up energy generation in other ways through renewables?

Insulate or subsidize the average non-corporate electricity consumer through something like rent control?

We is everything so negative remember all the people joking about OpenAI when it started well ... this thread will also be remembered and I am posting here for future purposes once AI has revolutionized our lives do not underestimate