DailyPost 2698
A $7 TRILLION DREAM
A seven trillion-dollar dream is the most audacious in the history of mankind. If it were one project or even a series of them , it would go down as the biggest project/s the world has even seen. The dreamer is none other than Sam Altman, a household name by now globally, undoubtedly, the biggest tech mover and shaker of the day. His creation ChatGPT has been a watershed moment in the history of AI and it announced in its own way that AI would never be same again. That promise is being fulfilled on a daily basis, and the world in getting impacted by AI in a manner no one has ever imagined.
OpenAI headed by Sam Altman heralded the GPT revolution from ground zero and currently is going strong for the creation of GPT-5. GPT-3.5 in its conversational avatar delivered ChatGPT. GPT-4 is already being used by LLMs extensively. Now it seems that besides the GPT research and development he is turning his attention to the AI ecosystem to create the push AI revolution required to reach full bloom. For this OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman wants to raise up to $7T for a new chip project. This is 23 times of 2023’s global chip sales or enough to pay for over two years of the universal health care for the US.
The seriousness can be gauged from the fact that he is already in talks with the investors including the government of UAE. But he is not without detractors, who find the scale of idea preposterous. Gary Marcus, a noted AI critic, “cautioned that the potential impact of the project exceeds natural resources to include the labor market, misinformation and cybercrimes.” He says it is being done to raise the public profile of Sam Altman to a cult level. The need for AI chips notwithstanding, its current public proclamation has attracted critics on the scale and more so on the detail modalities which do not add up.
The leading light of the chip industry Nvidia’s CEO questioned Sam Altman’s reported attempt to raise up to $7T to boost GPU-chip supply. He said that the cost would be much lower. Huang said, “You have to also assume that the computers are going to become faster, and therefore the total amount that you need is not as much.” Based on this experience, he suggests that the cost of AI data centers globally would amount to $2 trillion. It is reported that Nvidia has held talks with companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Meta to develop custom chips for data centers. It is already in dominant position in the AI chip market. Reuters has reported that Nvidia plans a new division to design data center chips and AI processors for cloud-computing firms. A full-blown AI war has just begun.
THE WINNER/S OF THE AI WAR WILL BECOME THE UNIVERSAL RULER/S.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.