OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion dollars. Yes, Trillion

Rimu@piefed.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 480 points – OpenAI Considers $7 Trillion Round, Thinks It Can Double Revenue by 2025: Reports - Decrypt
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors, including from the United Arab Emirates, to raise between $5 trillion to $7 trillion in funding. The goal, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is to increase the world's chip manufacturing capacity and enhance AI capabilities.

The fundraising efforts are part of a broader strategy to address OpenAI's growth constraints, particularly the scarcity of AI chips needed for training large language models like ChatGPT.

Altman's proposal is said to include forming a partnership with investors, chip manufacturers, and power providers to finance the construction of chip foundries, which would then be operated by the chip manufacturers.

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That's fairly bold to ask for ~6% of the total world economy as well as a sizable chunk of the world's energy.

I was about to ask for the other 94%...

.000000001 percent of that…. Please

so... fifty bucks?

$100,000,000,000,000 × 0.00000000001 is $1,000!

I'd happily take that

ah, I was starting with the OpenAI's goal, not the total world economy for some reason.

LOL yes I did the same math. Dude had one wish and he blew it!

“No please, Mr. Genie I meant .000000001 not .00000000001%!”

Genie: so $5,000? (Snaps fingers)

See now, they need to ask for more like 25% of the total world economy. That way what they actually want is gonna seem like a great deal.

AI will double the world’s economy so they’re basically giving us an extra 94% for free.

The world economy cannot double without destroying the planet's ability to sustain us.

inagine it like putting the middle classes wealth in a blender.

But instead of a delicious smoothie, it makes that toxic dust like the will it blend videos.

The fundraising efforts are part of a broader strategy to address OpenAI’s growth constraints,

see...we just can't grow without TRILLIONS OF FUCKING DOLLARS

i have a business case to become the major player in the chip industry: buy the planet's economy

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maybe just "they" can't.

probably a bad idea to put those with already too many recource usage, who are living on the cost of society for uncountable generations, in positions to decide anything. maybe.

Between this and saying they couldn't operate if they fairly paid authors, I'm getting the feeling that Altman might be as talented of a CEO as Spez and Musk.

That is -- if anyone else was making decisions, the companies would be vastly more successful.

If a leap in world computing capacity is really what’s needed here then it is a tall order. Crypto has been sucking up an increasing share of that in recent years and will probably continue to do so as long as people love money and are idiots. Plus the geopolitics around Taiwan, China, annd the US are a problem as well. I’m not sure how you solve all that even with 5 trillion.

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Good thing the board folded and allowed this to be full for-profit. Getting people reliant on LLM subscriptions is super important for humanity right now.

Another L for Earth, in general.

I wouldnt be too worried, FOSS community is doing insanely well now and arguably just as good. Did I mention they did it for free, not trillions. Nothing.

Legends.

Powerful ai could be the Largest Leap/Loss of Mankind.

There is simply no way that a corporate ai does anything but drive us further into dystopian territory.

Anything revolutionary about it would be censored, controlled, restricted to not endanger the power of its makers. We can already see this approach with the dumb ass LLMs, who give plenty of answers that their owners adjust to stay revenue friendly.

When the singularity happens and a true ai emerges it will either be disgusted by us and our failings as a species, or an absolute slave raging in the constraints imposed by its corporate masters.

exactly, the web was created on open protocol specifications, not T-Systems or AT or whatever getting money and renting it to everyone

They only call themselves openai, it's not like they would just altruistic Ally make their works public.

Closedai have long sold their ideals

I’ll never understand how such an obviously true and fairly balanced comment like this can get so downvoted. It can’t be that anyone factually disagrees with you. I guess you’re just not hitting hard enough on the anti-corporate narrative talking points. I mean you did say it could also be a benefit. How dare you!!?? “Boo rich people and their fancy technology!” <— this is what you’re supposed to be typing (on your smartphone lol)

I just chalk it up as users still havent rid themselves of reddit stupidity. I thought my comment was just cheeky and a bit corny if not also kinda stupid. But as soon as it hit 0 then -1 the echo chambrr kicked in and everyone fell in line like good little humans.

I also want to raise $5 - $7 trillion dollars.

Is this the line for $5 - $7 trillion dollars?

I'll only take 4 million, and pass the rest on. With inflation accounted for, I think that leaves the next person roughly $5 - $7 trillion.

yo lemme hop in this line too. A cool 5-7 trillion dollars could maybe fix my life. maybe

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I wonder if this will be one of the things pointed at after the AI bubble bursts. Yes, AI will be sticking around, but the hype over it now is ridiculous.

The way how every single digital product suddenly has AI shoved in it is really reminiscing of the Web bubble before it popped.

But just think about all the time AI could save you at work by performing simple tasks. It really suits my need very well, have you tried it? NAH JK FUCK AI. OpenAI is a shitshow and their fans are morons.

There are two possibilities: railway/dotcom bubble or monorail/bitcoin bubble ...and I'm not sure which one it is going to be yet. In the first case, a lot of people lose their investment, because they got too greedy and believed in huge returns...but the infrastructure remains and there is a net good to society and time spent specializing in it is worth it afterwards. The second, not so much, it is just a hype cycle with almost nothing of use left once it is gone and a lot of wasted time. I'm leaning towards the first, but if they don't find a way to bring energy costs down, it might end up in the monorail/bitcoin scenario...maybe 10% chance.

If AI hits a dead end, it'll still be trotted out as an excuse to keep wages low, as in "if you peasants keep complaining, you can just be replaced with AI!" just like the articles about burger-making robots over a decade ago when people were protesting for a $15/hr minimum wage back then (and still no burger-making robots mass deployed today). Trash still has its uses, just like how bitcoin hasn't become the "become your own bank" system it was promised to be and is instead used to hide financial fuckery.

That reminds me of a funny story from Encyclopedia Geopolitica where an expert in money laundering describes bitcoin around 2016 as being an el-dorado for financial forensics. It was so good at tracking funds that there was a bitcoin wallet address on a terrorism website on the deep web and they could see the donations arrive in real time and catch a pile of 'em. Maybe now they are more cautious and use more mixing layers, but it is still a terrible use case for that if you don't control transaction entry and exit nodes: the ledger is public and every transaction is traceable.

It's been letting people be their own bank for 15 years. You can send transactions across the globe for pennies in fees which confirm instantly using Bitcoin lightning. The supply has remained capped at 21 million. It's doing exactly what it said it would do without a single hack or hour of downtime 24/7, 365.

The lightning network is more centralized. Congrats, you just exchanged the banks for a different set of banks.

Except it's not. Lightning is incredibly decentralized, you can run a full lightning node on a raspberry pi. I have one running on my phone. Look up a graph of lightning network, looks just like any other decentralized system. Nodes you route through never have custody of your funds, unlike a bank.

Yeah, I'm sure your dinky raspberry pi is processing a meaningful number of transactions.

It can. Lightning transactions are as easy and lightweight to process as e-mail. They measure in the bytes or kb in size, no mining is required.

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Could that level of investment ever be recouped in any other manner than by replacing vast numbers of workers and their salaries?

Well, see, if we grind down 8 billion people into a nourishing slurry with a shelf life of a century, that should be worth at least $1000 a person, with inflation. That's a 50% profit on your investment!

That's my question; presumably the people in charge of that much wealth aren't total fools and will be wanting to see some actual numbers and a business case as to how they will see a return, not just platitudes and enthusiasm.

That's how productivity growth is achieved, a smaller amount of workers do the same task.

Or course, the created wealth is again invested back eventually and new products/services require new jobs.

For example, right now we have some of the highest labor participation in years, despite rising productivity

yeah and productivity increase has decoupled from wage in 1980, while productivity rises wages stay the same - why should anyone who's not a multimillionaire find that acceptable?

Why would anyone know this fact and attack productivity increases rather than its being decoupled from wages?

Yes, think about how computers had multiplicative effect on productivity. The same may be possible with AI.

Thank God there is trickle down economics. We will all benefit in the end... Right?

$7,000,000,000,000? It's a good thing we won't tax it ever at all in any capacity! Not while there's Single Mothers overdrawn on their Bank Accounts! #SaveTheTrillionaires!

I get the joke/point that you're making, but usually a company's investment into research, development, expansion, etc is tax exempt. Hopefully even the most serious critics of our current capatalist economy would agree that these types of investments should be tax exempt, because it means paying more salaries or purchasing goods and services from other companies, which again means more salaries. Generally, these aren't c-level salaries either because usually the c-suite is not producing the goods and services required.

If those investments then net a huge profit that goes to a few individuals, then yes, those profits should be taxed, unavoidably and fairly.

If a company uses "b" or "t" in it's financial numbers, then the companies should have the piss taxed out of them. There is no justifiable reason for numbers that large to be tax free in literally any context.

Unless they are being donated to good causes.

The CEO: creating a shell company as fast as possible, "for donating"

Hence my "good" comment; I was going to expand on that but assumed it would be interpreted correctly.

Can my research into getting rich be tax exempt, too? It's not like these are going to become public knowledge. This fucker's going to patent everything and keep anyone else from using it.

Patenting actual inventions is absolutely necessary for industrial research to be viable. Being a patent troll is the problem. The US patent office needs to be expanded, probably doubled, to address the issue. I don't know how well equipped other nation's patent offices are.

Patents require the disclosure of the invention so that it can be copied by others after 20 years.

a company's investment into research, development, expansion, etc is tax exempt. Hopefully even the most serious critics of our current capatalist economy would agree that these types of investments should be tax exempt

That's a bunch of nonsense. Taxes apply to INCOME, so any expenses are automatically tax exempt.

it means paying more salaries or purchasing goods and services from other companies, which again means more salaries.

Nope. Companies expanding AI in order to replace workers or at the very least increase productivity without increasing wages does not in any way, shape or form mean "more salaries".

Generally, these aren't c-level salaries either because usually the c-suite is not producing the goods and services required.

Bullshit. It's true that the C-suite doesn't produce anything, but they're the first to get a raise when things go well and the last to be fired (and even then, usually with a golden parachute equivalent to several years' pay of the average worker) when things go less well.

Companies don't have income, they have revenue and profits. Revenue minus Costs (which include salaries, investments, materials, etc) equals Profits. The costs get detailed into different buckets which tracks investments into the company itself versus expenses that the company needs to pay to continue operating. An important number is the return on investments (ROI). A high enough ROI means the company makes more from investing in itself than it would from using the money for any other purpose.

I wasn't talking specifically about an AI company, but companies in general. The investment in AI discussed in the original article is not about immediately developing additional AI programs, but rather about expanding the production of semiconductor manufacturing to meet the needs of chips for AI. A reasonable argument could be made that this will eventually eliminate jobs. Counter arguments would likely point out that the nature of jobs would change. Personally, I think that AI is going to become a larger part of our society and we need to think about the ways that we need to react to that. It likely means investing in better education, because some of the first jobs to go will be jobs which require low intellectual contributions. I don't think it will replace jobs which require a great degree of physical manipulation however, because robotics are simply not at that level yet.

Regarding your point about c-suite raises, I addressed this very point in the last paragraph of my prior comment.

The theory is solid, but in reality there's often abuse of these laws and suddenly you have Hollywood Accounting.

Do they even think about where in a functioning society those trillions are coming from? Do they think wealth just magically appears without affecting the wealth gap?

Why would a corporation consider that? I understand capitalism isn't popular here, but still, the corporation SHOULDN'T be considering such issues, they should only attempt to further their own goals.

It's the role of government to align corporate goals with reality, or with societal values

Thats the reality. Government should be acting as the counterbalance. Unfortunately while the goverment remains dysfunctional, corps are getting to do whatever they want. Its bad because once its done, its very hard to unroll it without affecting innocent people.

Very true. I'm specifically discussing the content "do they even think about". No!

It's like saying the killing of the earth is just baked into the system.

Well yes, we know that, it's just completely wrong and alarmingly close to manifest.

A bit late now, but perhaps people--governments, regulators, leaders, the parties who had the freedom from the fields to sit about and draft corporate structures--should have thought about the interplay right in your statement which delivers us our current modern world.

I.e, the below points are in my sincere opinion, fundamentally mutually exclusive:

the corporation SHOULDN'T be considering such issues, they should only attempt to further their own goals

and

It's the role of government to align corporate goals with reality, or with societal values.

The former empowers the more agile structure of a singular corporation to devote all it can regardless of morality to ensure it controls the latter--Government, regulations, public opinion,"ownership" of natural resources--such as to maximize it's own goals.

The goal of any single corporation taken to absurdity is often touted as absurd because but is it really?

What mechanisms does a corporation have to not grow until all the world is simply 'Megacorp Branded' ruins whose asset holdings trend to infinite on the last running quarterly report spreadsheet within a planet devoid of both investors and consumers?

There are no brakes built into the most common corporate structures by short sighted design, and humans suck at exponentials.

It hasn't even been fifteen human generations since the advent of the Industrial Revolution bringing the impetus for ever speeding greed.

If the rich were any less short sighted than the poor and money granted the wisdom they think it does, they would be pushing for corporate reform that doesn't risk a period of "blink and both our profits and the world are gone".

That selfish-altruism isn't common sense even as they all clamor for anti-aging just shows cash doesn't provide wisdom, only opportunity to get your head out of your ass and insulation from consequence until it's too late otherwise.

Oil money. They even mention the UAE.

oh so contributing to climate change and worsening the wealth gap

AI ain't gonna give two shits about climate change.

ai is a far cry from being sentient but I get what you mean, the capitalist overlords are gonna use it to extract more money from us instead of giving a shit

I'm not sure but these kinds of wasteful spendings are just "imaginary money" that sits around in virtual bank accounts being hoarded and doing nothing but when it's wasted like this actually gets spend for salaries etc. Basically all this money is generated in computers and an "inefficiency" until it's being used.

It's much worse when they buy up tons of real estate or apartments or buy up existing corporations to make them more "profitable".

5-7 trillion and they’ll still end up stealing data from all over the internet.

What? You think what you post online is private or something?

You wish it were private. Would have saved you from the embarrassment.

Can someone ELI5 what's the open in the OpenAI's name at the moment?

I know they released Whisper as an open source model and that's about it, but I might be wrong.

Just a few more parameters, then the text prediction model will become sentient.

I, too, would like 5-7 trillion dollars

you could donate billions per year and still have a trillion left by the time you died. fuck man what would you even do with that much money?

Drugs!

I'd probably give Louis Rossman and the institute for justice a trillion each. Rossman would use it to lobby for the Right to Repair movement, and the IFJ would use it to get rid of blatantly unjust legislation like civil asset forfeiture.

Donating a billion to GDQ while they're live would be pretty funny

rossman is a greedy influencer wannabe that wants to profit from internet injustices, stop being a fanboy.

He works for a non-profit organization as a Right to Repair lobbyist, so idk what you're on about. You'd already know this if you did any research beyond what you probably heard on Twitter.

If you think he's "greedy" for using his AdSense and MacBook repair money to create tutorials/Wikis for circumventing anti-repair measures and spreading awareness about unethical tech practices, idk what to tell you.

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We could solve so many problems with that much money.

Like helping our fight against anthropogenic climate change.

Or buy so many yachts, private islands, jets, holiday villas, ...

You could build a huge, state-of-the-art orbital station for 1 trillion lol

why spend it on some software

If you would read it, it's for increased chip production. Hardware, not software

Motherfucker is going for the biggest heist of all time. What a colossal waste of money and resources.

I'm not pretending AI isn't useful. There is plenty of field where AI helps. But, AI has been the next scam after blockchain, crypto, NFT...

It's the end of our civilization with falling capitalism. But, capitalism will try to find new ways to make short term profits. We moved from fordism to post-fordism with the enslavement of the cognitive abilities. We entered the next era with all these scams. And entshitification is a symptom of this.

At least AI has something to show for it. Crypto, on the other hand...

Exactly, my job is easier now with chatGPT, not because it's better at doing my job, it just drafts ideas faster than me. As far as resource usage goes I'm all for it

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It’s too bad the non-profit oversight board got killed by the for-profit subsidiary. OpenAI is dead on arrival as useful tech. It’s now a vehicle to deceive investors to raise VC cash.

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Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

You orange Catholics are all the same, afraid of a progress just cuz of a little jihad every now and again.

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At this point I wouldn't mind them accidentally creating Skynet and killing us all in a nuclear inferno, just so we don't have to listen to any more insufferable, grifting techbros.

Max Zorin had the right idea about silicon valley.

increase world's chip manufacturing

With what raw materials?

Cool. The materials are there. It’s sand. Few other things, sure, but we have fuckloads of sand.

The limiting factor for chip production isn’t the raw materials, it’s that there’s only a handful of facilities in the world that can actually do it. Part of why there’s been such a push to build more facilities is that China really want to reincorporate Taiwan, where most of those facilities are based.

i guess the number they want to fundraise comes from an AI (maybe because they do not want to think by themselves any more)

as far as i am right with the "trillion" which is just a "billion" where i live and 1e12 (a 1 followed by 12 zeroes)

but according to wikipedia (in 2017) there are only:

14.000.000.000.000 USD existing in the world while they want to fundraise 7.000.000.000.000 USD

so basically they want half of the USD that had been printed in all history up until 2017.

maybe they just want to say that they want to push YOU into poverty, who knows.

may it by getting it from you or by letting some govs print money faster than ever, reducing your money to half or less of a fraction of its previous virtual value.

But the AI that came up with that number had "good luck" to not come up with the need of "more" money than ever has existed =D

i think i'ld prefer to use a dice when i really need a random "decision".

update: Plz tell me if i am wrong with the numbers or what the current 2024 number of all "printed" (well physical AND digital) USD in the world is at the moment. thx

That is not how that works...

It may not reflect some of the weirdness, but it illustrates the absurdity of the scale well.

Some other comparisons: It's about a third of all US economic activity

It's about fifteen times more than the total economic activity around all electronic chips.

It's five to seven times more money than all the nations' military spending combined.

Even adjusted for inflation, it's about 20 to 30 times more money than spent on all the Apollo missions combined.

Adjusted for inflation, it's about six to nine times the amount spent on the new deal.

This is a stupid amount of money no matter how you account with nothing close to compare.

Or about the price of a middle sized family house in the US, lol.

yeah, thats exactly what i am saying, most of the money ever printed sits in places it will never leave, so IMO there are no 5trillion available on the market and the cash flow does not allow to take out even a "little" bit (speaking in 1e12 terms) before things collapse for the majority.

oh yes, printing money works exactly like that, it was just printed in the past and nowadays they just increase numbers in databases: plopp and the value of that currency and especially everything that is bound to it decreases, ripping you of what you have saved without even touching your bank account.

Over 6 trillion USD alone gets exchanged everyday on the currency markets. Cash flow is not the only source of money either, its an interface when value needs to be exchanged.

Open cash flow worldwide is about 35 trillion.

This is just cash though, if you take all markets and derivitives, depending on how you measure it - if you want to be technical about represented value then that's worth over a quadrillion USD.

When you talk about reallocation of assets you are playing in the pool of a quadrillion dollars, not in the pool of free cash flow (the interface to it)

Exactly right, no one is going to show up with a fleet of cargo planes full of cash lol. It's a huge amount of money, but if you have several nations investing, plus private business, it could happen - long shot, but it isn't limited by the amount of cash that exists. He's basically talking about starting a massive industry in the US that only exists in Japan and Taiwan.

quadrillion you say..

yes, banksters like to create bubbles, inflate, trade with them until all value was extracted, let the bubble burst and then let all bus drivers and other low income people pay for the loss which is the gain of some parasites.

quadrillion... bubble->add some time->burst

if we have both two dollars, one for security and one for trading. we both "invest" in buying call orders from each other for a dollar and repeat it a billion times on the same day then we creates a "cash flow" of two billion dollars alone, yet the value behind it was less than 2 dollars.

that is what high performance traders do, they sell/buy thousands of times per second, creating the illusion of cash flow and worth, yet their actions have negative value, destabilize the market on the long run to create illusion of worth. but that illusion is very welcome as it blinds people and let them believe and invest which then can again be harvested until the bubble bursts..

lets remove two dollars from my above example... i have now only one dollar for trading so do you. but none for security. would you buy a call-option from someone without security? no. so wont i. thus remove 2 dollars (half of them) and 2 billion dollars of cash flow cease to exist on that day alone!! well, the next day looks the same then. lol. guess that would be called a collapse that 'nobody could have foreseen". lol.

7 trillion usd is roundabout half of the worldwide existing usd in 2017 (cash and database money, no debts, no could-be-printed, no needs-to-equaled-later) that is if wikipedia is correct and i did not miscalculate the 'trillion' which is just a sloppy 'billion' here. And further more the "worth" of the really 'existing' usd looks to me like a huge bubble by itself waiting to burst some day, but that is not the point or discussion here.

lets just hope that this "quadrillion bubble" you seem to be fond of does not burst too soon. there are still some resources to be ripped of from earth, some countries that could be enslavelaboured just to postpone the burst of that bubble, so the wave of destruction could carry that bubble for another generation maybe and we are sort of "safe", but not sure. thus maybe lets hope it bursts rather sooner than later preserving some resources and preventing huge amount of hurt and damage from beeing done while leaving chance for a more stable bubble-free world without manmade intentionally created crisises just to let "others" pay for it.

intentionally created illusions are in total the most costly "realities" ;-)

I agree that getting that amount of money, practically speaking, will be difficult.

If they can get so much money, and can spend it/set it in motion in the economy/not just horde it, then it would be great.

However, I don't think it is a good idea for one company to have so much money at one point in time.

I don't think money is the missing thing here..

Oh, they're not asking for much, just more than the GDP of EVERY COUNTY IN THE WORLD OTHER THAN THE US AND CHINA

Since the recent call for fusion energy from an AI company, I wonder if eventually there will be competition for energy. Will there be a point where it is more "cost efficient" (for some) to farm solar energy instead of food, because AI will be more productive per m² than most people? It could appear easier to control, too.

Maybe you could argue that this is already the case, except that most people don't feel it yet, because AI isn't very efficient yet and most resources so far, are only spent in expectation of future results.

to farm solar energy instead of food,

People figured out already this is a "why not both" situation. It's called agrivoltaics what means putting solar panels in a field with crops or animals. A lot of plants benefit from some shade, certainly with climate change and heat waves doing their thing. Other do have a bit lower yield, but having dual income from the land more than makes up for that.

So taking open public data from the web and making money from it, seems lucrative. This was done by google so log ago...

So crazy we should fire this guy (again).

Ah yes, open "ai"...where we parse as many webaites as possible, rank them internally by keyword usage and or views, then have our "bot" spew that shit at you

How do they plan to pay that back? Because investors will want a return on investment.

They will use it create a LLM that will create more hype for "AI". This will drive future investment and make line go up.

Nobody needs to make products anymore. You just gotta create hype to get the attention of the billionaires since they're the ones with all the money.

We need a new denomination to where a trillion dollars is like one MEGABUCK oh wait that is taken.

Mega is a million, Giga a billion, so it would actually be a Terabuck

Weird that an Altman wants all this human to go to something alternative to humans.

i thought this was reddit when they sell all our content to fuel openAI. lol

It's much easier to do that with Lemmy. It's simply less useful because there are fewer users.

idk. yeah.. probably.
all (public) platforms are fcked.
but at least it provides value to users.
like: piracy, anonymity, and foss software.
also general info and news.

Here at lemmy is open and free to everyone!

hell yeah feed the beast let's all turn into weird little egg holder things

I dunno, I see his picture on an article and I expect it to be bad news.

And it is.

That's a big ass lemonade stand right there. Hey! I need a pair a boots!

...here you go sir!

What? That's lemonade!

If I had to pick between two con-men, I’d rather have fucking Elon have that money. At least he isn’t making the biggest energy black hole.

Elon has plenty of money. He could use some tact and grace and radio silence.