TSMC execs allegedly dismissed Sam Altman as ‘podcasting bro’ — OpenAI CEO made absurd requests for 36 fabs for $7 trillion

Alphane Moon@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 429 points –
TSMC execs allegedly dismissed Sam Altman as ‘podcasting bro’ — OpenAI CEO made absurd requests for 36 fabs for $7 trillion
tomshardware.com
60

What does OpenAI need a CEO for anyway? Just let chatGPT run the company if they are so gung-ho about it.

I've been saying this for almost a year. Not open AI specifically but any company with a board of directors.

They aren't considering the shareholder value of their most expensive liability: the CEO.

He (because let's face it. It's going to be a he in most cases) is paid millions of dollars with a golden parachute. Literally money that could be given back to shareholders through dividends.

The fact that Boards of Directors aren't doing this could be evidence that they aren't looking out for shareholders' interests

Here's why:

Boards of directors are CEOs of other companies that are buddies of the CEO of the company they are directors of. This is like a shitty musical chair of board of directors.

I can't wait for the AI bubble to burst.

We are all waiting. If they don't come up with proven revenue opportunities in the next ~18 months, it's going to be difficult to justify the astronomical capex spend.

This podcasting bro is NOT chasing revenue (yet).

He wants power.

He wants to collect 11-12 figure sums of venture capital and then built things that let him rule the world.

And afterwards, maybe revenue.

Another year of this shit? I don't think we can take it, honestly

Mah, won't happen like this. It was similar with Facebook 10 years ago and look at where it is now.

Which tech titan does it take with it?

My money is on Microsoft as owners of OpenAI, but most have sunk more into it than they should.

I doubt anyone that big will fall, Microsoft have so many fingers in so many pies, they can afford to take a hit like this. Plus, with the Office suite of products, they're probably in the best place to make something back, even if they don't make all their money back.

Microsoft are bullet proof. Their share price will take a big hit, and an exec or two will take a golden parachute, but they'll bounce back very quickly. The bigger problem is that along the way they'll balance the capex with multiple rounds of cutbacks and layoffs in other departments, and that's before they're finally forced to layoff everyone actually connected to this AI nonsense (who isn't a senior manager or c-suite; they'll all be fine).

Nvidea. Their share price would be a fraction of what it is without AI. Just like the last two cryptocurrency bubbles, they went all in and then acted surprised when they popped.

At the same time, they've lost a lot of goodwill with gamers, formerly their core audience. With the AAA industry pulling back, games might not be pushing the limits of GPU tech anymore. Microsoft still has their old core products, but Nvidia may return to it to find a wasteland.

Nvidia isn't going to be holding any bag. They're selling through what they make, and LLMs are just one of many uses for the massively parallel math they're at the forefront of. At most they have to bring pricing down, but they don't own the fab, so if demand did drop (which isn't really all that likely), their costs will go down too. They have contracts in terms of volume and price, but they're not near long term enough to do them more than a blip, and all their investment in developing architecture/tooling has value well outside of LLM nonsense.

Their stock price will tank. They have a $3B market cap because they're selling shovels in a gold rush. Once the gold rush is over, that valuation will go back to where they were three years ago. Probably lower, because the stock market tends to overcorrect on these things.

Companies base their capital on their stock price, and a drop like that can kill companies. Doesn't mean for sure that Nvidia will die, but they could.

Their fundamentals are too strong. They have market dominance with extremely steady technological progress against really bad competition. LLMs aren't going to disappear when the shitty overpromising bubble pops. Generative AI isn't going anywhere. Any of the thousands of other uses for their raw power are still there. They'll just be at the ground floor of whatever the next math heavy hype cycle is, just like they were with crypto and LLMs, because cuda is the best way to get shit done, whether what you're doing is useful or trash.

Like he said though, being fabless means there's no assets to hold the bag on. It's the fabs that stop getting profitable orders that tank. Worst case is they do layoffs.

They'll just transition to the next fad that needs large amounts of parallel compute. It's what they've just done moving from cryptocurrency to machine learning.

I've heard someone call it billionaire brain rot. I think at some point you end up with so much money and not enough people telling you no, that it literally changes your brain.

Seems likely.

Imagine never hearing the word "No." as a complete sentence ever again in your life.

Or when you do just assuming you can override them eventually

We had a guy like that at work, he said basically "how far above you do I have to go to get what I want"

I think it's also likely that it's very hard to amass billions unless you already have some sort of brain rot.

$7trillion is three times the GDP if Brazil. It is bigger then the US federal budget. Seriously it is insane.

This guy is an absolute lunatic.

"Gimme all of the world's money several times over for this fancy T9 that I'm playing with."

If someone wrote a cartoon villain using his quotes, it would be dismissed as unbelievable and rubbish.

A-and all that money is basically scammed out of hype over something that won't be the thing people think it will be, because that would be a magic wand for everything.

When they mean artificial intelligence, they mean some kind of self-designing civilization, except it does their bidding. Goethe's Zauberlehrling comes to mind.

And a lot of money does find a way to do things, just like a lot of effort applied does find a way to break something. Except the curves are not linear, and no amount of effort and money has allowed us to settle Mars yet.

He is an empty husk of a man who has completed his transformation into a pure PR machine

His involvement in the infamous WorldCoin provides useful insight into his character.

An oligarch and a degenerate (outside the US many oligarchs have a more or less sober understanding of who they are, although degeneracy among oligarchs is a global issue).

Open AI has a projected revenue of 3 Billion this year.
It is currently projected to burn 8 Billion on training costs this year.
Now it needs 5 Gigawatt data centers worth over 100 Billion.
And new fabs worth 7 Trillion to supply all the chips.

I get that it’s trying to dominate a new market but that’s ludicrous. And even with everything so far they haven’t really pulled far ahead of competing models like Claude and Gemini who are also training like crazy.

There is no market, or not much of one. This whole thing is a huge speculative bubble, a bit like crypto. The core idea of crypto long term make some sense but the speculative value does not. The core idea of LLMs (we are no where near true AI) makes some sense but it is half baked technology. It hadn't even reached maturity and enshittification has set in.

OpenAI doesn't have a realistic business plan. It has a griftet who is riding a wave of nonsense in the tech markets.

No one is making profit because no one has found a truly profitable use with what's available now. Even places which have potential utility (like healthcare) are dominated by focused companies working in limited scenarios.

IMO it's even worse than that. At least from what I gather from the AI/Singularity communities I follow. For them, AGI is the end goal - a creative thinking AI capable of deduction far greater than humanity. The company that owns that suddenly has the capability to solve all manner of problems that are slowing down technological advancement. Obviously owning that would be worth trillions.

However it's really hard to see through the smoke that the Altmans etc. are putting up - how much of it is actual genuine prediction and how much is fairy tales they're telling to get more investment?

And I'd have a hard time believing it isn't mostly the latter because while LLMs have made some pretty impressive advancements, they still can't have specialized discussions about pretty much anything without hallucinating answers. I have a test I use for each new generation of LLMs where I interview them about a book I'm relatively familiar with and even with the newest ChatGPT model, it still makes up a ton of shit, even often contradicting its own answers in that thread, all the while absolutely confident that it's familiar with the source material.

Honestly, I'll believe they're capable of advancing AI when we get an AI that can say 'I actually am not sure about that, let me do a search...' or something like that.

I follow a YouTube channel, AI explained, that has some pretty grounded analysis of the latest models and capabilities. He compared LLMs to the creative writing center of the brain, as in they're really nice to interact with, output things that sound correct, but ultimately are missing the capabilities of reasoning and factuality that are needed for AGI

He's the best for unbiased info when new models drop and news drops. Love that channel.

He's really good. I'm torn on the subject because the current AI hype is most certainly a bubble and a grift, but I find the technology fascinating. I do think there's potential for great things there, but the technology is almost exclusively in the hands of 3 companies and will have a terrible impact on everyone else. I enjoy just focusing on the technical details every once in a while

I feel the same way man, I'm so excited about this tech because of the few use cases that we will discover and will change our lives and cause a paradigm shift...but it will be controlled by someone who is ultra rich (a person or corp) so that's awful. And there is a ton of stuff that is a grift that will die off and gives it a bad name so I temper my excitement of it around most people because it's unpopular to root for the tech.

yeah, i really hate this. i have shares of multiple tech companies, like nvidia, intel, AMD, TSMC, etc. and because of the AI bubble idk how much they are really worth. the market is all warped and one day a company is doing well, the next day it seems to be in peril. i would like to know how much they would be worth after the bubble bursts, but there is no way to know.

2 more...
2 more...

This guy is losing touch of reality

I know musk is bipolar. Is Altman too?

Bipolar can cause this kind of request. It's called a delusion of grandiosity.

Oh wow I didn't actually know he was bipolar (checked to confirm it is the case). I knew he was on the autism spectrum.

I can't imagine those 2 play nice together.

Well the insane amount of random drugs he's taking don't help either.

"But the breakthrough will come just as soon as the chips no one can make are delivered."

Probably.

Middle Eastern money

Something tells me the Saudis don't want AI for the betterment of all humanity.

Could be the human rights abuses, dunno.