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AI The Almighty Buck Hardware

OpenAI Ceo Sam Altman Is Still Chasing Billions To Build AI Chips 11

According to Bloomberg (paywalled), OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly raising billions to develop a global network of chip fabrication factories, collaborating with leading chip manufacturers to address the high demand for chips required for advanced AI models. The Verge reports: A major cost and limitation for running AI models is having enough chips to handle the computations behind bots like ChatGPT or DALL-E that answer prompts and generate images. Nvidia's value rose above $1 trillion for the first time last year, partly due to a virtual monopoly it has as GPT-4, Gemini, Llama 2, and other models depend heavily on its popular H100 GPUs.

Accordingly, the race to manufacture more high-powered chips to run complex AI systems has only intensified. The limited number of fabs capable of making high-end chips is driving Altman or anyone else to bid for capacity years before you need it in order to produce the new chips. And going against the likes of Apple requires deep-pocketed investors who will front costs that the nonprofit OpenAI still can't afford. SoftBank Group and Abu Dhabi-based AI holding company G42 have reportedly been in talks about raising money for Altman's project.
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OpenAI Ceo Sam Altman Is Still Chasing Billions To Build AI Chips

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  • why? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Friday January 19, 2024 @09:23PM (#64174379)

    Sam Altman's group is a CONSUMER of processors, why would they know how to design or manufacture them? How Silicon Valley works.

  • by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) on Friday January 19, 2024 @09:36PM (#64174395) Journal

    Wanna buy a bridge?

  • by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Friday January 19, 2024 @11:44PM (#64174449)

    Has Sam ever chased anything else? And yeah, I did not remove "to build 'AI' chips" because of the subject limit.

  • by ndykman ( 659315 ) on Friday January 19, 2024 @11:53PM (#64174457)

    Fabs are so incredibly expensive and require so much specific talent that you can't just apply the startup model to making them. You work with the established players who are (looks around) already going at a pretty good pace to make new fabs already.

    This is one thing I find odd that nobody is talking about with LLM based AI. We know it takes some heavy duty silicon, but they are acting as if Moore's law was still in play and we aren't up against some really tough thermal and power limits. There's no "twice the computation" for a small enough bump in watts and heat.

    • This is how the Silicon Valley hype machine works, also known as "thought bubbles". Someone wants to see if the idea has legs, and let it die quietly if it turns out it's (quite likely) a dud.
    • Silicon valley doesn't make tech, they find ways to usurp industries which sometimes involve the application of preexisting tech. Their bread and butter is generally stuff which hits on blue collar workers or otherwise makes shitloads of peasants more marketable while taking all the profits other than the bare minimum for the laborers to scrape by until automated (or hiding and passing along the costs to them until someone tells them to stop,) it is more rare that they go for large industries with heavy up
  • He has a pump-and-dump scam coin in the crypto world right now, anyway with 10 billion in supply. He is dumping in the region of ~6 million US dollars worth on the market every week, so I feel like he might not be strapped for cash.

...though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War"

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