You have to keep in mind Microsoft is planning on spending almost 100B in datacenter capex this year and they're not alone. This is basically OpenAI matching the major cloud provider's spending.
This could also be (at least partly) a reaction to Microsoft threatening to pull OpenAI's cloud credits last year. OpenAI wants to maintain independence and with compute accounting for 25–50% of their expenses (currently) [2], this strategy may actually be prudent.
Meanwhile, Azure has failed to keep up with the last 2-3 generations of both Intel and AMD server processors. They’re available only in “preview” or in a very limited number of regions.
I wonder if this is a sign of the global economic downturn pausing cloud migrations or AI sucking the oxygen out of the room.
For less than this same price tag, we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of opportunities, like owning a home and/or feeling more comfortable starting a family. It would stimulate the economy in predictable ways.
Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
I am surprised at the negativity from HN. Their clear goal is to build superintelligence. Listen to any of the interviews with Altman, Demis Hassabis, or Dario Amodei (Anthropic) on the purpose of this. They discuss the roadmaps to unlimited energy, curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions, permanent solutions to climate change, and more.
Does no one on HN believe in this anymore? Isn't this tech startup community meant to be the tip of the spear? We'll find out by 2030 either way.
That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days. If you look at Russia/Ukraine or China/Taiwan there's not much scarcity. It's more bullying dictator wants to control the neighbours issues.
Very zero-sum outlook on things which is factually untrue much of the time. When you invest money in something productive that value doesn't get automatically destroyed. The size of the pie isn't fixed.
1) Build fully autonomous cars so there are zero deaths from car accidents. This is ~45K deaths/year (just US!) and millions of injuries. Annual economic cost of crashes is $340 billion. Worldwide the toll is 10 - 100x?
Five-hundred billion dollars is nothing when you consider there's a new government agency that it is said will shave two trillion from government inefficiency.
By "solve problems" you mean "temporarily mitigate problems by throwing money at them", right? Or do you actually have specific examples of problems that can be permanently solved and aren't already being tackled?
That’s like complaining about investments in automated looms at the start of the Industrial Revolution and claiming that the money would be better spent if handed out to the slum dwelling population.
We have the benefit of hindsight now and we understand that technological revolutions improve living standards for everyone and drag whole populations out of grinding labour and poverty.
And it would be foolish to allow China and Russia to out-invest the West in AI and make us mere clients (or worse, victims) of their superior technology.
Industrialists understand that the way to fix the world’s problems is to advance society, as opposed to resting on the laurels of past advancement, and dividing the diminishing spoils of those achievements.
I disagree with you. I think the impact of AI on society in the long term is going to be massive, and such investments are necessary. If we look at the past century, technology has had (in my opinion) and incredibly positive impact on society. You have to invest in the future.
Won't an intelligent agent available to everyone be able to solve problems in the world? Isn't that why they (OpenAI) and others are doing what they do? To bring abundance?
We already tried fixing problems with throwing tax money at them. It didn't work out. You can see the result of socialism in Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and where not. Wars do not start because of scarcities. Wars start because of disbalance of power. And it is very important for the Western world to be ahead in the AI, because otherwise China may cause a real war and then a lot of Western people would die. Do you not care about them?
I'm sorry but unless this $500B was being invested in equipping soldiers and building navies, air capabilities, artillery, etc it could not stop even an urban gang turf war.
I'm confused and a bit disturbed; honestly having a very difficult time internalizing and processing this information. This announcement is making me wonder if I'm poorly calibrated on the current progress of AI development and the potential path forward. Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment. I feel that I lack the proper conceptual framework to make sense of the purchasing power of half a trillion USD in this context.
"There are maybe a few hundred people in the world who viscerally understand what's coming. Most are at DeepMind / OpenAI / Anthropic / X but some are on the outside. You have to be able to forecast the aggregate effect of rapid algorithmic improvement, aggressive investment in building RL environments for iterative self-improvement, and many tens of billions already committed to building data centers. Either we're all wrong, or everything is about to change." - Vedant Misra, Deepmind Researcher.
Maybe your calibration isn't poor. Maybe they really are all wrong but there's a tendency here to these these people behind the scenes are all charlatans, fueling hype without equal substance hoping to make a quick buck before it all comes crashing down, but i don't think that's true at all. I think these people really genuinely believe they're going to get there. And if you genuinely think that, them this kind of investment isn't so crazy.
Let me avoid the use of the word AGI here because the term is a little too loaded for me these days.
1) reasoning capabilities in latest models are rapidly approaching superhuman levels and continue to scale with compute.
2) intelligence at a certain level is easier to achieve algorithmically when the hardware improves. There's also a larger path to intelligence and often simpler mechanisms
3) most current generation reasoning AI models leverage test time compute and RL in training--both of which can make use of more compute readily. For example RL on coding against compilers proofs against verifiers.
All of this points to compute now being basically the only bottleneck to massively superhuman AIs in domains like math and coding--rest no comment (idk what superhuman is in a domain with no objective evals)
I see it somewhat differently. It is not that technology has reached a level where we are close to AGI, we just need to throw in a few more coins to close the final gap.
It is probably the other way around. We can see and feel that human intelligence is being eroded by the widespread use of LLMs for tasks that used to be solved by brain work. Thus, General Human Intelligence is declining and is approaching the level of current Artificial Intelligence. If this process can be accelerated by a bit of funding, the point where Big Tech can overtake public opinion making will be reached earlier, which in turn will make many companies and individuals richer faster, also the return on investment will be closer.
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
My sense anecdotally from within the space is yes people are feeling like we most likely have a "straight shot" to AGI now. Progress has been insane over the last few years but there's been this lurking worry around signs that the pre-training scaling paradigm has diminishing returns.
What recent outputs like o1, o3, DeepSeek-R1 are showing is that that's fine, we now have a new paradigm around test-time compute. For various reasons people think this is going to be more scalable and not run into the kind of data issues you'd get with a pre-training paradigm.
You can definitely debate on whether that's true or not but this is the first time I've been really seeing people think we've cracked "it", and the rest is scaling, better training etc.
Largest GPU cluster at the moment is X.ai's 100K H100's which is ~$2.5B worth of GPUs. So, something 10x bigger (1M GPUs) is $25B, and add $10B for 1GW nuclear reactor.
This sort of $100-500B budget doesn't sound like training cluster money, more like anticipating massive industry uptake and multiple datacenters running inference (with all of corporate America's data sitting in the cloud).
>AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
I think what's been going on is compute/$ has been exponentially rising for decades in a steady way and has recently passed the point that you can get human brain level compute for modest money. The tendency has been once the compute is there lots of bright PhDs get hired to figure algorithms to use it so that bit gets sorted in a few years. (as written about by Kurzweil, Wait But Why and similar).
So it's not so much brute forcing AGI so much that exponential growth makes it inevitable at some point and that point is probably quite soon. At least that seems to be what they are betting.
The annual global spend on human labour is ~$100tn so if you either replace that with AGI or just add $100tn AGI and double GDP output, it's quite a lot of money.
> I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment.
The thing about investments, specifically in the world of tech startups and VC money, is that speculation is not something you merely capitalize on as an investor, it's also something you capitalize on as a business. Investors desperately want to speculate (gamble) on AI to scratch that itch, to the tune of $500 billion, apparently.
So this says less about, 'Are we close to AGI?' or, 'Is it worth it?' and more about, 'Are people really willing to gamble this much?'. Collectively, yes, they are.
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
Can't answer that question, but, if the only thing to change in the next four years was that generation got cheaper and cheaper, we haven't even begun to understand the transformative power of what we have available today. I think we've felt like 5-10% of the effects that integrating today's technology can bring, especially if generation costs come down to maybe 1% of what they currently are, and latency of the big models becomes close to instantaneous.
It's a typical Trump-style announcement -- IT'S GONNA BE HUUUGE!! -- without any real substance or solid commitments
Remember Trump's BIG WIN of Foxconn investing $10B to build a factory in Wisconsin, creating 13000 jobs?
That was in 2017. 7 years later, it's employing about 1000 people if that. Not really clear what, if anything, is being made at the partially-built factory. [0]
I think the only way you get to that kind of budget is by assuming that the models are like 5 or 10 times larger than most LLMs, and that you want to be able to do a lot of training runs simultaneously and quickly, AND build the power stations into the facilities at the same time. Maybe they are video or multimodal models that have text and image generation grounded in a ton of video data which eats a lot of VRAM.
> current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
Or they think the odds are high enough that the gamble makes sense. Even if they think it's a 20% chance, their competitors are investing at this scale, their only real options are keep up or drop out.
This announcement is from the same office as the guy that xeeted:
“My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It's time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.”
Your calibration is probably fine, stargate is not a means to achieve AGI, it’s a means to start construction on a few million square feet of datacenters thereby “reindustrializing America”
To me it looks like a strategic investment in data center capacity, which should drive domestic hardware production, improvements in electrical grid, etc. Putting it all under AI label just makes it look more exciting.
Yes that is exactly what the big Aha! moment was. It has now been shown that doing these $100MM+ model builds is what it takes to have a top-tier model. The big moat is not just the software, the math, or even the training data, it's the budget to do the giant runs. Of course having a team that is iterating on these 4 regularly is where the magic is.
~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country.
If the electric grid — particularly the interconnection queue — is already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something on this scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized policy framework (big if!), I would guess there's some major permitting reform announcement coming soon.
They say this will include hundreds of thousands of jobs. I have little doubt that dedicated power generation and storage is included in their plans.
Also I have no doubt that the timing is deliberate and that this is not happening without government endorsement. If I had to guess the US military also is involved in this and sees this initiative as important for national security.
Gas turbines can be spun up really quickly through either portable systems (like xAI did for their cluster) [1] or actual builds [2] in an emergency. The biggest limitation is permits.
With a state like Texas and a Federal Government thats onboard these permits would be a much smaller issue. The press conference makes this seem more like, "drill baby drill" (drilling natural gas) and directly talking about them spinning up their own power plants.
> It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country
I’ve been advocating for a data centre analogue to the Heavy Press Programme for some years [1].
This isn’t quite it. But when I mapped out costs, $1tn over 10 years was very doable. (A lot of it would go to power generation and data transmission infrastructure.)
It is not the just queue that is the bottleneck. If the new power plants designed specifically for powering these new AI data centers are connected to the existing electric grid, the energy prices for regular customers will also get affected - most likely in an upwardly fashion. That means, the cost of the transmission upgrades required by these new datacenters will be socialized which is a big problem. There does not seem to be a solution in sight for this challenge.
Notably it is significantly more than the revenue of either of AWS or Azure. It is very comparable to the sum of both, but consolidated into the continental US instead distributed globally.
It's unfair, because we are talking in the hindsight about everything but Project Stargate, and it's also just your list (and I don't know what others could add to it) but it got me thinking. Manhattan Project goal is to make a powerful bomb. Apollo is to get to the Moon before soviets do (so, because of hubris, but still there is a concrete goal). South-North Water Transfer is pretty much terraforming, and others are mostly roads. I mean, it's all kinda understandable.
And Stargate Project is... what exactly? What is the goal? To make Altman richer, or is there any more or less concrete goal to achieve?
Also, few items for comparison, that I googled while thinking about it:
Also note compute deprecates much faster than multi decade infra projects with chance of obsolecence. If deepseek keeps pace with releasing near SOTA models, those compute centres are going to have hard time recooping value / return on capital.
Where are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is 84b and their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has $11b cash on hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
Softbank is being granted a block of TRUMP MEMES, the price of which will skyrocket when they are included in the bucket of crypto assets purchased as part of the crypto reserve.
there doesn't appear to be any timeline announced here. the article says the "initial investment" is expected to be $100bn, but even that doesn't mean $100bn this year.
if this is part of softbank's existing plan to invest $100bn in ai over the next four years, then all that's being announced here is that Sama and Larry Ellison wanted to stand on a stage beside trump and remind people about it.
>> Where are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is 84b and their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has $11b cash on hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
1. The outlays can be over many years.
2. They can raise debt. People will happily invest at modest yields.
Apart from my general queasiness about the whole AGI scaling business and the power concentration that comes with it, these are the exact four people/entities that I would not want to be at the tip of said power concentration.
The moon program was $318 billion in 2023 dollars, this one is $500 billion. So that's why the tech barons who were present at the inauguration were high as a kite yesterday, they just got the financing for a real moon shot!
It appears this basically locks out Google, Amazon and Meta. Why are we declaring OpenAI as the winner? This is like declaring Netscape the winner before the dust settled. Having the govt involved in this manner can’t be a good thing.
I miss n gate so much. I asked AI to generate one for this thread.
"In a stunning display of fiscal restraint, Sam Altman only asks for $500 billion instead of his previous $7 trillion moonshot. Hackernews rejoices that the money will be spent in Texas, where the power grid is as stable as a cryptocurrency exchange. Oracle's involvement prompts lengthy discussions about whether Larry Ellison's surveillance dystopia will run on Java or if they'll need to purchase an enterprise license for consciousness itself. Meanwhile, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son continues his streak of funding increasingly expensive ways to turn electricity into promises, this time with added patriotism. The comments section devolves into a heated debate about whether this is technically fascism or just regular old corporatocracy, with several users helpfully pointing out that actually, the real problem is systemd."
I hear this joked about sometimes or used as a metaphor, but in the literal sense of the phrase, are we in a cold war right now? These types of dollars feel "defense-y", if that makes sense. Especially with the big focus on energy, whatever that ends up meaning. Defense as a motivation can get a lot done very fast so it will be interesting to watch, though it raises the hair on my arms
The US appears to be fully in the grips of centralized economic autarky. A tiny coterie of industrialists who have the President's ear decide how to allocate a gigantic amount of capital for their pet projects while the state raises tariffs and implements bans to protect them from competition.
Didn't go well for South America in the 60s and 70s but perhaps, as economists are prone to saying, "this time will be different".
I used to wonder how the hundreds of thousands of employees that work in Big Oil or Big Pharma could tolerate all the terrible things their company does... e.g. the opioid epidemic. The naive optimist in me never thought that the tech industry would ever be that bad.
Now, as someone thats been in the industry for 10+ years and working adjacent to LLMs, this is all so depressing. The hype has gotten out of control. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on things that simply are not making life better for the majority of people.
"create hundreds of thousands of American jobs"... Given the current educational system in the US, this should be fun to watch. Oh yeah, Musk and his H-1B Visa thing. Now it's making sense.
After they build the Multivac or Deep Thought, or whatever it is they’re trying to do, then what happens? It makes all the stockholders a lot of money?
I really don't understand the national security argument. If you really do fear some fundamental breakthrough in AI from China, what's cheaper, $500 billion to rush to get there first, or spending a few billion (and likely much less) in basic research in physics, materials science, and electronics, mixed with a little bit of espionage, mixed with improving the electric grid and eliminating (or greatly reducing) fossil fuels?
Ultimately, the breakthrough in AI is going to either come from eliminating bottlenecks in computing such that we can simulate many more neurons much more cheaply (in other words, 2025-level technology scaled up is not going to really be necessary or sufficient), or some fundamental research discovery such as a new transformer paradigm. In any case, it feels like these are theoretical discoveries that, whoever makes them first, the other "side" can trivially steal or absorb the information.
There's a good amount of irony in the results that AI have achieved, particularly if we reach AGI - they have improved individual worker efficiency by removing other workers from the system. Naming it Stargate implies a reckoning with the actual series itself - an accomplishment by humanity. Instead, what this pushes, is accomplishing the removal of humans from humanity. I like cool shiny tech, but I like useful tech that really helps humans more. Work on 3D-printing sustainable food, or something actually useful like that. Jenson doesn't need another 1B gallons of water under his belt.
It seems early for this sort of move. This is also a huge spin on the whole thing that could throw a lot of people off.
Is there any planned future partnerships? Stargate implies something about movies and astronomy. Movies in particular have a lot of military influence, but not always.
So, what's the play? Help mankind or go after mankind?
If I understand correctly - if you are training a model to perform a particular task - in the end what matters is the training data - and by and large different models will largely converge on the best representation of that data for the given task, given enough compute.
So that means the models themselves aren't really IP - they are inevitable outputs from optimising using the input data for a certain task.
I think this means pretty much everyone, apart from the AI companies - will see these models as pre-competitive.
Why spend huge amounts training the same model multiple times, when you can collaborate?
Note it only takes one person/company/country to release an open source model for a particular task to nuke the business model of those companies that have a business model of hoarding them.
> The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
For those interested, it looks like Albany, NY (upstate NY) is very likely one of the next growth sites.
"SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX" seems like quite the lineup. Two groups who are good at frivolously throwing away investment money because they have so much capital to deploy, there really isn't anything reasonable to do with it, a tech "has-been" and OpenAI. You become who you surround yourself with I guess.
How much exaFLOPS can we expect from a 100 Billions dollars datacenter today? A rough estimate from a quick Perplexity search gives us 24 exaFLOPS for all smartphones in the world and 12 exaFLOPS for personal computers. Could a competitor to such a Datacenter be a collective effort with some sort of crypto to split the benefits?
> The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers and the electricity generation needed for the further development of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House.
Wouldn't a more northern state be a better location given the average temperatures of the environment? I've heard Texas is hot!
No amount of money invested in infrastructure is going to solve the "garbage in, garbage out" problem with AI, and it looks like the AI companies have already stolen the vast majority of content that is possible to steal. So this is basically a massive gamble that some innovation is going to make AI do something better than faultily regurgitate its training data. I'm not seeing a corresponding investment which actually attempts to solve the "garbage in, garbage out" problem.
A fraction of this money invested in building homes would end the homelessness problem in the U.S.
I guess the one silver lining here is that when the likely collapse happens, we'll have more clean energy infrastructure to use for more useful things.
> All three credited Trump for helping to make the project possible, even though building has already started and the project goes back to 2024.
It’s sad to see the president of US being ass kissed so much by these guys. I always assumed there’s a little of that but this is another extreme. If this is true, I fear America has become like a third world country with a dictator like head of state where everyone just praises him and get favors in return.
> This project will ... also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
> All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop ... AGI for the benefit of all of humanity.
Erm, so which one is it? It is amply demonstrable from events post WW2 that US+allies are quite far from benefiting all of humanity & in fact, in some cases, it assists an allied minority at an extreme cost to a condemned majority, for no discernable humanitarian reasons save for some perceived notion of "shared values".
Is there any government investment or involvement in this company? It seems like it’s all private investment so I’m confused why this is being announce by the President.
Some reports[0] paint this as something Trump announced and that the US Government is heavily involved with but the announcement only mentions private sector (and lead by Japan's Softbank at that). Is the US also putting in money? How much control of the venture is private vs public here?
Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White House? There doesn’t seem to be any public ownership/benefit here, aside from potential job creation. Which could be significant. But the American public doesn’t seem to gain anything from this new company.
Here is what I think is going on in this announcement. Take the 4 major commodity cloud companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle) and determine: do they have big data centers and do they have their own AI product organization?
- Google has a massive data center division (Google Cloud / GCP) and a massive AI product division (Deep Mind / Gemini).
- Microsoft has a massive data center division (Azure) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they build their "Copilot" functionality atop their partner version of the OpenAI APIs.
- Amazon has a massive data center division (Amazon Web Services / AWS) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they are hedging their bets here with an investment in Anthropic and support for running models inside AWS (e.g. Bedrock).
- Oracle has a massive data center division (Oracle Cloud / OCI) but no significant AI product division.
Now look at OpenAI by comparison. OpenAI has no data center division, as the whole company is basically the AI product division and related R&D. But, at the moment, their data centers come exclusively from their partnership with Microsoft.
This announcement is OpenAI succeeding in a multi-party negotiation with Microsoft, Oracle, and the new administration of the US Gov't. Oracle will build the new data centers, which it knows how to do. OpenAI will use the compute in these new data centers, which it knows how to do. Microsoft granted OpenAI an exception to their exclusive cloud compute licensing arrangement, due to this special circumstance. Masa helps raise the money for the joint venture, which he knows how to do. US Gov't puts its seal on it to make it a more valuable joint venture and to clear regulatory roadblocks for big parallel data center build-outs. The current administration gets to take credit as "doing something in the AI space," while also framing it in national industrial policy terms ("data centers built in the USA").
The clear winner in all of this is OpenAI, which has politically and economically navigated its way to a multi-cloud arrangement, while still outsourcing physical data center management to Microsoft and Oracle. Probably their deal with Oracle will end up looking like their deal with Microsoft, where the trade is compute capacity for API credits that Oracle can use in its higher level database products.
OpenAI probably only needs two well-capitalized hardware providers competing for their CPU+GPU business in order to have a "good enough" commodity market to carry them to the next level of scaling, and now they have it.
Google increasingly has a strategic reason not to sell OpenAI any of its cloud compute, and Amazon could be headed in that direction too. So this was more strategically (and existentially) important to OpenAI than one might have imagined.
AI is good if you use it wisely. There were reports years ago about using AI in SoCal to detect wild fires, but in the end we see insurance companies using AI to withdraw from areas of high fire risk. Quite competent AI, isn't it?
> building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States
That's nice, but if I were spending $500bn on datacenters I'd probably try to put a few in places that serve other users. Centralised compute can only get you so far in terms of serving users.
This could potentially trigger an AI arms race between the US and China. The standard has been set, lets see what China responds with. Either way, it will accelerate the arrival of ASI, which in my opinion is probably a good thing.
The Silicon-Valley bubble universe continues to introduce entropy that it feeds off of itself... Naming this Stargate when some of the largest effects AI has had is removing humans from processes to make other, fewer humans more efficient is emblematic of this hollow naming ethos - continuing to use the portal to shunt more and more humans out of the process that is humanity, with fairly reckless abandon. Who is Ra, and who is sending the nuke where, in this naming scheme? You decide.
How have they already selected who gets this money? Usually the government announces a program and tries to be fair when allocating funds. Here they are just bankrolling an existing project. Interesting
1. At this scale, we’re not just talking about buying GPUs. It requires semiconductor fabs, assembly factories, power plants, batteries/lithium, cooling, water, hazardous waste disposal. These data centers are going to have to be massively geo-engineered arcologies.
2. What are they doing? AGI/ASI is a neat trick, but then what? I’m not asking because I don’t think there is an answer; I’m asking because I want the REAL answer. Larry Ellison was talking about RNA cancer vaccines. Well, I was the one that made the neural network model for the company with the US patent on this technique, and that pitch makes little sense. As the problem is understood today, the computational problems are 99% solved with laptop-class hardware. There are some remaining problems that are not solved by neural networks, but by molecular dynamics, which are done in FP64. Even if FP8 neural structure approximation speeds it up 100x, FP64 will be 99% of the computation. So what we today call “AI infrastructure” is not appropriate for the task they talk about. What is it appropriate for? Well, I know that Sam is a bit uncreative, so I assume he’s just going to keep following the “HER” timeline and make a massive playground for LLMs to talk to each other and leave humanity behind. I don’t think that is necessarily unworthy of our Apollo-scale commitment, but there are serious questions about the honest of the project, and what we should demand for transparency. We’re obviously headed toward a symbiotic merger where LLMs and GenAI are completely in control of our understanding of the world. There is a difference between watching a high-production movie for two hours, and then going back to reality, versus a never-ending stream of false sensory information engineered individually to specifically control your behavior. The only question is whether we will be able to see behind the curtain of the great Oz. That’s what I mean by transparency. Not financial or organizational, but actual code, data, model, and prompt transparency. Is this a fundamental right worth fighting for?
It will be interesting to see how AWS responds. Jump on board, or offer up a competing vision otherwise their cloud risks being perceived as being left behind in terms of computing power.
Personally I wish they invested in optical photonic computing, taking it out of the research labs. It can be so much more energy efficient and faster to run than GPUs and TPUs.
You know, I expected that they'd find or synthesize some naquadah to build an actual stargate and maybe even defeat the Goa'uld. The exciting stuff, not AI.
It was rumoured in early 2024 that "Stargate" was planned to require 5GW data centre capacity[1][2] which in early 2024 was the entire data centre capacity Microsoft had already built[3]. Data centre capacity costs between USD$9-15m/MW[6] so 5GW of new data centre capacity would cost USD$45b-$75b but let's pick a more median cost of USD12m/MW[6] to arrive at USD$60b for 5GW of new data centre capacity.
This 5GW data centre capacity very roughly equates to 350000x NVIDIA DGX B200 (with 14.3kW maximum power consumption[4] and USD$500k price tag[5]) which if NVIDIA were selected would result in a very approximate total procurement of USD$175b from NVIDIA.
On top of the empty data centres and DGX B200's and in the remaining (potential) USD$265b we have to add:
* Networking equipment / fibre network builds between data centres.
* Engineering / software development / research and development across 4 years to design, build and be able to use the newly built infrastructure. This was estimated in mid 2024 to cost OpenAI US$1.5b/yr for retaining 1500 employees, or USD$1m/yr/employee[7]. Obviously this is a fraction of the total workforce needed to design and build out all the additional infrastructure that Microsoft, Oracle, etc would have to deliver.
* Electricity supply costs for current/initial operation. As an aside, these costs seemingly not be competitive with other global competitors if the USA decides to avoid the cheapest method of generation (renewables) and instead prefer the more expensive generation methods (nuclear, fossil fuels). It is however worth noting that China currently has ~80% of solar PV module manufacturing capacity and ~95% of wafer manufacturing capacity.[10]
* Costs for obtaining training data.
* Obsolescence management (4 years is a long time after which equipment will likely need to be completely replaced due to obsolescence).
* Any other current and ongoing costs of Microsoft, Oracle and OpenAI that they'll likely roll into the total announced amount to make it sound more impressive. As an example this could include R&D and sustainment costs in corporate ICT infrastructure and shared services such as authentication and security monitoring systems.
The question we can then turn to is whether this rate of spend can actually be achieved in 4 years?
Microsoft is planning to spend USD$80bn building data centres in 2025[7] with 1.5GW of new capacity to be added in the first six months of 2025[3]. This USD$80bn planned spend is for more than "Stargate" and would include all their other business units that require data centres to be built, so the total required spend of USD$45b-$75b to add 5GW data centre capacity is unlikely to be achieved quickly by Microsoft alone, hence the apparent reason for Oracle's involvement. However, Oracle are only planning a US$10b capital expenditure in 2025 equating to ~0.8GW capacity expansion[9]. The data centre builds will be schedule critical for the "Stargate" project because equipment can't be installed and turned on and large models trained (a lengthy activity) until data centres exist. And data centre builds are heavily dependent on electricity generation and transmission expansion which is slow to expand.
You'd really think that arguably the leader in generative AI could come up with a unique project name instead of ripping off something extant and irrelevant.
But then again that's their entire business, so I shouldn't be too surprised.
I watched the announcement live, I could have sworn that the softbank guy said "initial investment of 100 MILLION, we hope to EARN 500 BILLION by the end of your (Trumps) term"
Gave me a real "this is just smoke and mirrors hiding the fact that the white house is now a glory hole for Trump to enjoy" feel.
Last time, in 2016, SoftBank announced a $50B investment in the US...what were the results of that? Granted, SB announced an up-selled $100B investment earlier, is this not similar in "announcement"?
"""
SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son has previously made large-scale investment commitments in the US off the back of Trump winning a presidential election. In 2016, Son announced a $50 billion SoftBank investment in the US, alongside a similar pledge to create 50,000 jobs in the country.
...
However, as reported by Reuters, it’s unclear if the new jobs pledged back in 2016 ever came to fruition and questions have been raised about how SoftBank, which had $29 billion in cash on its balance sheet according to its September earnings report, might fund the investment.
"""
Altman said we will be amazed at the rate AI will CURE diseases. Not diagnose, not triage or help doctors but cure, ie understand at a deep fundamental, mechanistic level then devise therapies, ie drugs, combination of drugs and care practices that work. WOW.
Despite the fact that this is THE thing I'd be the happiest to see in the real world (having spent a considerable amount of my career in companies working towards this vision), we are so far from it (as anyone who actually worked on these problems will attest) that Altman's comment here isn't just overselling, it's a blatant lie about this tech's capabilities.
I guess the pitch was something like: "hey o3 can already do PhD level maths so you know in 5 years it will be able to do drugs too, and cure shit, Mr President".
Trouble is o3 can't do advanced math (or at least definitely not at the level openai claimed.. it was a lie, it turns out openai funds the dataset that measures this - ouch). And the bigger problem is, going from "ai can do maths" to "invent cures" is about a 10-100 X jump. If it wasn't, don't we think the pharma companies would have solved this by hiring lots of "really smart math guys"?
As anyone in biotech will tell you, the hard bit is not the first third of the drug discovery pipeline (where 99% of ai driven biotechs focus). It's the later parts where the rubber meets the road.. i.e. where your precious little molecule is out in the real world with real people where the incredible variability of real biological hosts makes most drugs fail spectacularly. You can't GPT your way out of this. The answers for this is not in science papers that you can just read and regurgitate a version that "solves biology and cures diseases".
To solve this you need AI but most of all you have to do science. Real science. In the lab, in vitro and in Vivo, not just in silico, doing ablation studies, overfitting famous benchmark datasets and other pseudo science shit the ML community is used to doing.
That is all to say, I'd bet we won't see a single purely AI designed novel drug in the clinic in this decade. All parts of that sentence are important. Purely AI designed. Novel. But that's for another post..
Now, back to Altman. If you watch the clip, he almost did the smart thing at first when Trump put him on the spot and said "I have no idea about healthcare, biotech (or AI beyond board room drama)" but then could not resist coming up with this outlandish insane answer.
Famously (in tech circles anyway) Paul Graham wrote more than a decade ago about Altman that he's the most strong willed individual he's ever met, who can just bend the universe to his will. That's his super skill. And clearly.. convincing SoftBank and Oracle to do this 500 billion investment for OpenAI (a non profit turned for profit) is an unbelievable achievement. I have no idea what Altman can say (or do) in board rooms that unlocks these possibilities for him.. Any ideas? Let me know!
> This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
> The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
I'm sorry, has SoftBank suddenly become an American company? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this.
God forbid anyone would invest $500,000,000,000 to create jobs. No no no. 500 billion to destroy them for "more efficiency" so the owner class can get richer.
We changed the URL from https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ to a third-party report. Readers may want to read both. If there's a better URL, we can change it again.
You have to keep in mind Microsoft is planning on spending almost 100B in datacenter capex this year and they're not alone. This is basically OpenAI matching the major cloud provider's spending.
This could also be (at least partly) a reaction to Microsoft threatening to pull OpenAI's cloud credits last year. OpenAI wants to maintain independence and with compute accounting for 25–50% of their expenses (currently) [2], this strategy may actually be prudent.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/03/microsoft-expects-to-spend-8...
[2] https://youtu.be/7EH0VjM3dTk?si=hZe0Og6BjqLxbVav&t=1077
Microsoft has lots of revenue streams tied to that capex outlay. Does OpenAI have similar revenue numbers to Microsoft?
Meanwhile, Azure has failed to keep up with the last 2-3 generations of both Intel and AMD server processors. They’re available only in “preview” or in a very limited number of regions.
I wonder if this is a sign of the global economic downturn pausing cloud migrations or AI sucking the oxygen out of the room.
Serious question - why Texas???
How is compute only 50% of their expenses?
Isn't it more likely a reaction to xAI now having the most training compute?
.
This is so much money with which we could actually solve problems in the world. maybe even stop wars which break out because of scarcity issues.
maybe i am getting to old or to friendly to humans, but it's staggering to me how the priorities are for such things.
For less than this same price tag, we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of opportunities, like owning a home and/or feeling more comfortable starting a family. It would stimulate the economy in predictable ways.
Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
I am surprised at the negativity from HN. Their clear goal is to build superintelligence. Listen to any of the interviews with Altman, Demis Hassabis, or Dario Amodei (Anthropic) on the purpose of this. They discuss the roadmaps to unlimited energy, curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions, permanent solutions to climate change, and more.
Does no one on HN believe in this anymore? Isn't this tech startup community meant to be the tip of the spear? We'll find out by 2030 either way.
>wars which break out because of scarcity issues
That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days. If you look at Russia/Ukraine or China/Taiwan there's not much scarcity. It's more bullying dictator wants to control the neighbours issues.
Very zero-sum outlook on things which is factually untrue much of the time. When you invest money in something productive that value doesn't get automatically destroyed. The size of the pie isn't fixed.
It's an indirect attempt of tackling any first order problem. So is all software engineering.
Money doesn't fix stuff. You need good will people and good will people don't need that much money.
Such mega investments are usually not for the sake of humankind. They are usually for the sake of a very selected group of humans.
We could do 20 Manhattan projects with it[1].
1) Build fully autonomous cars so there are zero deaths from car accidents. This is ~45K deaths/year (just US!) and millions of injuries. Annual economic cost of crashes is $340 billion. Worldwide the toll is 10 - 100x?
2) Put solar on top of all highways.
3) Give money to all farmers to put solar.
4) Build transmission.
And many more ...
The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $27 billion in 2023): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
Five-hundred billion dollars is nothing when you consider there's a new government agency that it is said will shave two trillion from government inefficiency.
"actually solve problems in the world."
By "solve problems" you mean "temporarily mitigate problems by throwing money at them", right? Or do you actually have specific examples of problems that can be permanently solved and aren't already being tackled?
That’s like complaining about investments in automated looms at the start of the Industrial Revolution and claiming that the money would be better spent if handed out to the slum dwelling population.
We have the benefit of hindsight now and we understand that technological revolutions improve living standards for everyone and drag whole populations out of grinding labour and poverty.
And it would be foolish to allow China and Russia to out-invest the West in AI and make us mere clients (or worse, victims) of their superior technology.
Industrialists understand that the way to fix the world’s problems is to advance society, as opposed to resting on the laurels of past advancement, and dividing the diminishing spoils of those achievements.
> maybe even stop wars which break out because of scarcity issues.
Like which wars in this century?
The wars are how American tax payer money gets given to all these companies. Why would they try to end them?
I disagree with you. I think the impact of AI on society in the long term is going to be massive, and such investments are necessary. If we look at the past century, technology has had (in my opinion) and incredibly positive impact on society. You have to invest in the future.
Russia did not have a scarcity issue and still invaded its neighbor.
Won't an intelligent agent available to everyone be able to solve problems in the world? Isn't that why they (OpenAI) and others are doing what they do? To bring abundance?
We flew to the moon several times for half that money xD
We already tried fixing problems with throwing tax money at them. It didn't work out. You can see the result of socialism in Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and where not. Wars do not start because of scarcities. Wars start because of disbalance of power. And it is very important for the Western world to be ahead in the AI, because otherwise China may cause a real war and then a lot of Western people would die. Do you not care about them?
cant bribe an exponential curve for peace through linear surplus redistribution .
I'm sorry but unless this $500B was being invested in equipping soldiers and building navies, air capabilities, artillery, etc it could not stop even an urban gang turf war.
But then how could politicians and the wealthy steal all that money if you just gave it away or helped the poors?
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It actually isn't alot, about $100 spread out over a few years for every person on earth isnt enough to do these things..
The US can't stop the wars it wants others to fight for them even if it means population collapse like in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
I'm confused and a bit disturbed; honestly having a very difficult time internalizing and processing this information. This announcement is making me wonder if I'm poorly calibrated on the current progress of AI development and the potential path forward. Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment. I feel that I lack the proper conceptual framework to make sense of the purchasing power of half a trillion USD in this context.
"There are maybe a few hundred people in the world who viscerally understand what's coming. Most are at DeepMind / OpenAI / Anthropic / X but some are on the outside. You have to be able to forecast the aggregate effect of rapid algorithmic improvement, aggressive investment in building RL environments for iterative self-improvement, and many tens of billions already committed to building data centers. Either we're all wrong, or everything is about to change." - Vedant Misra, Deepmind Researcher.
Maybe your calibration isn't poor. Maybe they really are all wrong but there's a tendency here to these these people behind the scenes are all charlatans, fueling hype without equal substance hoping to make a quick buck before it all comes crashing down, but i don't think that's true at all. I think these people really genuinely believe they're going to get there. And if you genuinely think that, them this kind of investment isn't so crazy.
Let me avoid the use of the word AGI here because the term is a little too loaded for me these days.
1) reasoning capabilities in latest models are rapidly approaching superhuman levels and continue to scale with compute.
2) intelligence at a certain level is easier to achieve algorithmically when the hardware improves. There's also a larger path to intelligence and often simpler mechanisms
3) most current generation reasoning AI models leverage test time compute and RL in training--both of which can make use of more compute readily. For example RL on coding against compilers proofs against verifiers.
All of this points to compute now being basically the only bottleneck to massively superhuman AIs in domains like math and coding--rest no comment (idk what superhuman is in a domain with no objective evals)
I see it somewhat differently. It is not that technology has reached a level where we are close to AGI, we just need to throw in a few more coins to close the final gap. It is probably the other way around. We can see and feel that human intelligence is being eroded by the widespread use of LLMs for tasks that used to be solved by brain work. Thus, General Human Intelligence is declining and is approaching the level of current Artificial Intelligence. If this process can be accelerated by a bit of funding, the point where Big Tech can overtake public opinion making will be reached earlier, which in turn will make many companies and individuals richer faster, also the return on investment will be closer.
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
My sense anecdotally from within the space is yes people are feeling like we most likely have a "straight shot" to AGI now. Progress has been insane over the last few years but there's been this lurking worry around signs that the pre-training scaling paradigm has diminishing returns.
What recent outputs like o1, o3, DeepSeek-R1 are showing is that that's fine, we now have a new paradigm around test-time compute. For various reasons people think this is going to be more scalable and not run into the kind of data issues you'd get with a pre-training paradigm.
You can definitely debate on whether that's true or not but this is the first time I've been really seeing people think we've cracked "it", and the rest is scaling, better training etc.
Largest GPU cluster at the moment is X.ai's 100K H100's which is ~$2.5B worth of GPUs. So, something 10x bigger (1M GPUs) is $25B, and add $10B for 1GW nuclear reactor.
This sort of $100-500B budget doesn't sound like training cluster money, more like anticipating massive industry uptake and multiple datacenters running inference (with all of corporate America's data sitting in the cloud).
>AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
I think what's been going on is compute/$ has been exponentially rising for decades in a steady way and has recently passed the point that you can get human brain level compute for modest money. The tendency has been once the compute is there lots of bright PhDs get hired to figure algorithms to use it so that bit gets sorted in a few years. (as written about by Kurzweil, Wait But Why and similar).
So it's not so much brute forcing AGI so much that exponential growth makes it inevitable at some point and that point is probably quite soon. At least that seems to be what they are betting.
The annual global spend on human labour is ~$100tn so if you either replace that with AGI or just add $100tn AGI and double GDP output, it's quite a lot of money.
This has nothing to do with technology it is a purely financial and political exercise...
> I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment.
The thing about investments, specifically in the world of tech startups and VC money, is that speculation is not something you merely capitalize on as an investor, it's also something you capitalize on as a business. Investors desperately want to speculate (gamble) on AI to scratch that itch, to the tune of $500 billion, apparently.
So this says less about, 'Are we close to AGI?' or, 'Is it worth it?' and more about, 'Are people really willing to gamble this much?'. Collectively, yes, they are.
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
Can't answer that question, but, if the only thing to change in the next four years was that generation got cheaper and cheaper, we haven't even begun to understand the transformative power of what we have available today. I think we've felt like 5-10% of the effects that integrating today's technology can bring, especially if generation costs come down to maybe 1% of what they currently are, and latency of the big models becomes close to instantaneous.
It's a typical Trump-style announcement -- IT'S GONNA BE HUUUGE!! -- without any real substance or solid commitments
Remember Trump's BIG WIN of Foxconn investing $10B to build a factory in Wisconsin, creating 13000 jobs?
That was in 2017. 7 years later, it's employing about 1000 people if that. Not really clear what, if anything, is being made at the partially-built factory. [0]
And everyone's forgotten about it by now.
I expect this to be something along those lines.
[0] https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2023/03/23/wha...
I think the only way you get to that kind of budget is by assuming that the models are like 5 or 10 times larger than most LLMs, and that you want to be able to do a lot of training runs simultaneously and quickly, AND build the power stations into the facilities at the same time. Maybe they are video or multimodal models that have text and image generation grounded in a ton of video data which eats a lot of VRAM.
> current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
Or they think the odds are high enough that the gamble makes sense. Even if they think it's a 20% chance, their competitors are investing at this scale, their only real options are keep up or drop out.
This announcement is from the same office as the guy that xeeted:
“My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It's time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.”
Your calibration is probably fine, stargate is not a means to achieve AGI, it’s a means to start construction on a few million square feet of datacenters thereby “reindustrializing America”
To me it looks like a strategic investment in data center capacity, which should drive domestic hardware production, improvements in electrical grid, etc. Putting it all under AI label just makes it look more exciting.
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
It rather means that they see their only chance for substantial progress in Moar Power!
Yes that is exactly what the big Aha! moment was. It has now been shown that doing these $100MM+ model builds is what it takes to have a top-tier model. The big moat is not just the software, the math, or even the training data, it's the budget to do the giant runs. Of course having a team that is iterating on these 4 regularly is where the magic is.
~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country.
If the electric grid — particularly the interconnection queue — is already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something on this scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized policy framework (big if!), I would guess there's some major permitting reform announcement coming soon.
They say this will include hundreds of thousands of jobs. I have little doubt that dedicated power generation and storage is included in their plans.
Also I have no doubt that the timing is deliberate and that this is not happening without government endorsement. If I had to guess the US military also is involved in this and sees this initiative as important for national security.
Gas turbines can be spun up really quickly through either portable systems (like xAI did for their cluster) [1] or actual builds [2] in an emergency. The biggest limitation is permits.
With a state like Texas and a Federal Government thats onboard these permits would be a much smaller issue. The press conference makes this seem more like, "drill baby drill" (drilling natural gas) and directly talking about them spinning up their own power plants.
[1] https://www.kunr.org/npr-news/2024-09-11/how-memphis-became-...
[2] https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/resources/case-studies/t...
> It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country
I’ve been advocating for a data centre analogue to the Heavy Press Programme for some years [1].
This isn’t quite it. But when I mapped out costs, $1tn over 10 years was very doable. (A lot of it would go to power generation and data transmission infrastructure.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
It is not the just queue that is the bottleneck. If the new power plants designed specifically for powering these new AI data centers are connected to the existing electric grid, the energy prices for regular customers will also get affected - most likely in an upwardly fashion. That means, the cost of the transmission upgrades required by these new datacenters will be socialized which is a big problem. There does not seem to be a solution in sight for this challenge.
Maybe they will invest in nuclear reactors.
Data center, AI and nuclear power stations. Three advanced technologies, that's pretty good.
Notably it is significantly more than the revenue of either of AWS or Azure. It is very comparable to the sum of both, but consolidated into the continental US instead distributed globally.
watching the press conference and Onsite power production were mentioned. I assume this means SMRs and solar.
One possibility would be just to build their own power plants colocated with the datacenters and not interconnect at all.
Dcs will start generating power on site soon. I know micro nuclear is one area actively being explored.
That‘s why the tech oligarchs told Trump that Canada is required. Cheap hydroelectric power…
Don't worry, they said they are doing it in Texas where the power grid is super reliable and able to handle the massive additional load.
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How else do you think Trump is going to bring back all the coal jobs? SV is going to help burn down the planet and is giddy over the prospect.
For fun, I calculated how this stacks up against other humanity-scale mega projects.
Mega Project Rankings (USD Inflation Adjusted)
The New Deal: $1T,
Interstate Highway System: $618B,
OpenAI Stargate: $500B,
The Apollo Project: $278B,
International Space Station: $180B,
South-North Water Transfer: $106B,
The Channel Tunnel: $31B,
Manhattan Project: $30B
Insane Stuff.
It's unfair, because we are talking in the hindsight about everything but Project Stargate, and it's also just your list (and I don't know what others could add to it) but it got me thinking. Manhattan Project goal is to make a powerful bomb. Apollo is to get to the Moon before soviets do (so, because of hubris, but still there is a concrete goal). South-North Water Transfer is pretty much terraforming, and others are mostly roads. I mean, it's all kinda understandable.
And Stargate Project is... what exactly? What is the goal? To make Altman richer, or is there any more or less concrete goal to achieve?
Also, few items for comparison, that I googled while thinking about it:
- Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository: $96B
- ITER: $65B
- Hubble Space Telescope: $16B
- JWST: $11B
- LHC: $10B
Sources:
https://jameswebbtracker.com/jwst/budget
https://blogfusion.tech/worlds-most-expensive-experiments/
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/overview/faqs/
Those are all public projects except for one..
Also note compute deprecates much faster than multi decade infra projects with chance of obsolecence. If deepseek keeps pace with releasing near SOTA models, those compute centres are going to have hard time recooping value / return on capital.
Is this inflation adjusted?
Building a lot of compute will likely end up more useful than Apollo & ISS, which were vanity projects.
Neom: $1.5T
Where are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is 84b and their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has $11b cash on hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
MGX has at least $100bn: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-100-billion-middle...
This is Abu Dhabi money.
Softbank is being granted a block of TRUMP MEMES, the price of which will skyrocket when they are included in the bucket of crypto assets purchased as part of the crypto reserve.
there doesn't appear to be any timeline announced here. the article says the "initial investment" is expected to be $100bn, but even that doesn't mean $100bn this year.
if this is part of softbank's existing plan to invest $100bn in ai over the next four years, then all that's being announced here is that Sama and Larry Ellison wanted to stand on a stage beside trump and remind people about it.
>> Where are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is 84b and their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has $11b cash on hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
1. The outlays can be over many years.
2. They can raise debt. People will happily invest at modest yields.
3. They can raise an equity fund.
Quite possibly pulled out of their asses...
If Son can actually build a 500B Vision Fund it can only come from one of two places...
somehow the dollar depreciates radically OR Saudis
Vision Fund was heavily invested in by the Saudis so...
Apart from my general queasiness about the whole AGI scaling business and the power concentration that comes with it, these are the exact four people/entities that I would not want to be at the tip of said power concentration.
The moon program was $318 billion in 2023 dollars, this one is $500 billion. So that's why the tech barons who were present at the inauguration were high as a kite yesterday, they just got the financing for a real moon shot!
It appears this basically locks out Google, Amazon and Meta. Why are we declaring OpenAI as the winner? This is like declaring Netscape the winner before the dust settled. Having the govt involved in this manner can’t be a good thing.
I miss n gate so much. I asked AI to generate one for this thread.
"In a stunning display of fiscal restraint, Sam Altman only asks for $500 billion instead of his previous $7 trillion moonshot. Hackernews rejoices that the money will be spent in Texas, where the power grid is as stable as a cryptocurrency exchange. Oracle's involvement prompts lengthy discussions about whether Larry Ellison's surveillance dystopia will run on Java or if they'll need to purchase an enterprise license for consciousness itself. Meanwhile, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son continues his streak of funding increasingly expensive ways to turn electricity into promises, this time with added patriotism. The comments section devolves into a heated debate about whether this is technically fascism or just regular old corporatocracy, with several users helpfully pointing out that actually, the real problem is systemd."
I hear this joked about sometimes or used as a metaphor, but in the literal sense of the phrase, are we in a cold war right now? These types of dollars feel "defense-y", if that makes sense. Especially with the big focus on energy, whatever that ends up meaning. Defense as a motivation can get a lot done very fast so it will be interesting to watch, though it raises the hair on my arms
The US appears to be fully in the grips of centralized economic autarky. A tiny coterie of industrialists who have the President's ear decide how to allocate a gigantic amount of capital for their pet projects while the state raises tariffs and implements bans to protect them from competition.
Didn't go well for South America in the 60s and 70s but perhaps, as economists are prone to saying, "this time will be different".
Any clues to how they plan to invest $500 billion dollars? What infrastructure are they planning that will cost that much?
Tangential, but this has gotten me thinking...
I used to wonder how the hundreds of thousands of employees that work in Big Oil or Big Pharma could tolerate all the terrible things their company does... e.g. the opioid epidemic. The naive optimist in me never thought that the tech industry would ever be that bad.
Now, as someone thats been in the industry for 10+ years and working adjacent to LLMs, this is all so depressing. The hype has gotten out of control. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on things that simply are not making life better for the majority of people.
"create hundreds of thousands of American jobs"... Given the current educational system in the US, this should be fun to watch. Oh yeah, Musk and his H-1B Visa thing. Now it's making sense.
After they build the Multivac or Deep Thought, or whatever it is they’re trying to do, then what happens? It makes all the stockholders a lot of money?
I really don't understand the national security argument. If you really do fear some fundamental breakthrough in AI from China, what's cheaper, $500 billion to rush to get there first, or spending a few billion (and likely much less) in basic research in physics, materials science, and electronics, mixed with a little bit of espionage, mixed with improving the electric grid and eliminating (or greatly reducing) fossil fuels?
Ultimately, the breakthrough in AI is going to either come from eliminating bottlenecks in computing such that we can simulate many more neurons much more cheaply (in other words, 2025-level technology scaled up is not going to really be necessary or sufficient), or some fundamental research discovery such as a new transformer paradigm. In any case, it feels like these are theoretical discoveries that, whoever makes them first, the other "side" can trivially steal or absorb the information.
Leopold Aschenbrenner predicted it last June.
https://situational-awareness.ai/racing-to-the-trillion-doll...
There's a good amount of irony in the results that AI have achieved, particularly if we reach AGI - they have improved individual worker efficiency by removing other workers from the system. Naming it Stargate implies a reckoning with the actual series itself - an accomplishment by humanity. Instead, what this pushes, is accomplishing the removal of humans from humanity. I like cool shiny tech, but I like useful tech that really helps humans more. Work on 3D-printing sustainable food, or something actually useful like that. Jenson doesn't need another 1B gallons of water under his belt.
The biggest question on such investment from my POV, is what do the Deepseek results mean about the usefulness/efficiency of this investment?
I've been meaning to read a relevant book to today's times called Engines That Move Markets. Will probably get it from the library.
March 2024: The Stargate project is announced - https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
June 2024: Oracle joins in - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-to-use-oci...
January 2025: Softbank provides additional funding, and they for some reason give credit to Trump?
Last year, sama goal was 5 to 7T. Now he is going with 100B, with option for another 400B. Huge numbers, but it still feels like a bit of a down turn.
Who/what is MGX? Google returns a few hits, none of which are clearly who is referred to here.
Why is Larry Ellison giving a speech about the power of AI to cure disease? How is Oracle relevant at all to any of AI progress in the past few years?
Can't wait for these to succeed just in time for them to tell us
'you should have spent all this time and money fighting climate change'
SoftBank isn't a US entity, right? Aside from their risk tolerance, that seems like an odd bedfellow for a national US initiative...
The fact that they plan to start in Texas makes me think that the whole thing is just the biggest pork barrel of all times.
I saw Stargate trending on Bluesky and got my hopes up about an announcement of a new show/movie/something. Disappointing.
How likely is success when 4 or more other massive companies work together on a project? Seems like a lot of chefs in the kitchen..
It seems early for this sort of move. This is also a huge spin on the whole thing that could throw a lot of people off.
Is there any planned future partnerships? Stargate implies something about movies and astronomy. Movies in particular have a lot of military influence, but not always.
So, what's the play? Help mankind or go after mankind?
Also, can I opt-out right now?
What a waste of a great name. Why form a separate company for this?
If I understand correctly - if you are training a model to perform a particular task - in the end what matters is the training data - and by and large different models will largely converge on the best representation of that data for the given task, given enough compute.
So that means the models themselves aren't really IP - they are inevitable outputs from optimising using the input data for a certain task.
I think this means pretty much everyone, apart from the AI companies - will see these models as pre-competitive.
Why spend huge amounts training the same model multiple times, when you can collaborate?
Note it only takes one person/company/country to release an open source model for a particular task to nuke the business model of those companies that have a business model of hoarding them.
> The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
For those interested, it looks like Albany, NY (upstate NY) is very likely one of the next growth sites.
[0] https://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schum...
So about 10% of what Sam was asking the Saudis (and everyone else) for a year ago? That's still a helluva lot of money.
Interesting that the UAE (MGX) and Japan (Softbank) are bankrolling the re-industrialization of America.
Was Skynet project already taken? Wonder how many public infrastructure or resource programs will be cut to fund this.
I read the announcement and the first three words that came to my mind were...
"Hammond, of Texas"
(apologies to those who haven't watched SG-1)
Can we build a wall to keep AI out?
$500B is not $7T, but its surprisingly close.
"SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX" seems like quite the lineup. Two groups who are good at frivolously throwing away investment money because they have so much capital to deploy, there really isn't anything reasonable to do with it, a tech "has-been" and OpenAI. You become who you surround yourself with I guess.
Can someone convince me Sam Altman is not evil? I have no proof he is not evil.
How much exaFLOPS can we expect from a 100 Billions dollars datacenter today? A rough estimate from a quick Perplexity search gives us 24 exaFLOPS for all smartphones in the world and 12 exaFLOPS for personal computers. Could a competitor to such a Datacenter be a collective effort with some sort of crypto to split the benefits?
> The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers and the electricity generation needed for the further development of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House.
Wouldn't a more northern state be a better location given the average temperatures of the environment? I've heard Texas is hot!
In America!
The intro paragraph in the original URL https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ mentions US/America for 5 times!
I'm in the middle of "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation" and hoo boy, there are strong deja vu vibes here.
Just waiting for the current regime to decide that we should go all-in on some big AI venture and bet the whole Social Security pot on it.
No amount of money invested in infrastructure is going to solve the "garbage in, garbage out" problem with AI, and it looks like the AI companies have already stolen the vast majority of content that is possible to steal. So this is basically a massive gamble that some innovation is going to make AI do something better than faultily regurgitate its training data. I'm not seeing a corresponding investment which actually attempts to solve the "garbage in, garbage out" problem.
A fraction of this money invested in building homes would end the homelessness problem in the U.S.
I guess the one silver lining here is that when the likely collapse happens, we'll have more clean energy infrastructure to use for more useful things.
> All three credited Trump for helping to make the project possible, even though building has already started and the project goes back to 2024.
It’s sad to see the president of US being ass kissed so much by these guys. I always assumed there’s a little of that but this is another extreme. If this is true, I fear America has become like a third world country with a dictator like head of state where everyone just praises him and get favors in return.
This is not a new initiative, and did not start under Trump: https://wire.insiderfinance.io/project-stargate-the-worlds-l...
It’s incredibly depressing how everyone sees this as something the new administration did in a single day…
> This project will ... also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
> All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop ... AGI for the benefit of all of humanity.
Erm, so which one is it? It is amply demonstrable from events post WW2 that US+allies are quite far from benefiting all of humanity & in fact, in some cases, it assists an allied minority at an extreme cost to a condemned majority, for no discernable humanitarian reasons save for some perceived notion of "shared values".
Is there any government investment or involvement in this company? It seems like it’s all private investment so I’m confused why this is being announce by the President.
Why are we spending a half-trillion dollars on “AI infrastructure” when our actual infrastructure has been crumbling and underfunded for decades?
This is a Military project. Have no doubts about it.
Why Texas - is it an ideal location for AI infrastructure?
Texas positioning itself better than expected for AI and EVs is the plot twist the peasants needed
If they plan to transition off oil/nuclear it will be fun to watch
Sad waste of money that will go in Oracle licenses... The lost liberties of the American people is just a small feat... beside the point
Some reports[0] paint this as something Trump announced and that the US Government is heavily involved with but the announcement only mentions private sector (and lead by Japan's Softbank at that). Is the US also putting in money? How much control of the venture is private vs public here?
0. https://www.thewrap.com/trump-open-ai-oracle-stargate-ai-inf...
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-announces-private-sector-...
Data centers are overrated, local AI is what’s necessary for humanoid (and other) robots, which will be the most economically impactful use case.
Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White House? There doesn’t seem to be any public ownership/benefit here, aside from potential job creation. Which could be significant. But the American public doesn’t seem to gain anything from this new company.
I'm watching the announcement live from the white house and something about this just feels so strange and dystopian.
Altman rising to the top and becoming the defacto state preferred leader of AI in the US is wild. Fair play to him.
They had me at "Oracle" ...
Here is what I think is going on in this announcement. Take the 4 major commodity cloud companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle) and determine: do they have big data centers and do they have their own AI product organization?
- Google has a massive data center division (Google Cloud / GCP) and a massive AI product division (Deep Mind / Gemini).
- Microsoft has a massive data center division (Azure) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they build their "Copilot" functionality atop their partner version of the OpenAI APIs.
- Amazon has a massive data center division (Amazon Web Services / AWS) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they are hedging their bets here with an investment in Anthropic and support for running models inside AWS (e.g. Bedrock).
- Oracle has a massive data center division (Oracle Cloud / OCI) but no significant AI product division.
Now look at OpenAI by comparison. OpenAI has no data center division, as the whole company is basically the AI product division and related R&D. But, at the moment, their data centers come exclusively from their partnership with Microsoft.
This announcement is OpenAI succeeding in a multi-party negotiation with Microsoft, Oracle, and the new administration of the US Gov't. Oracle will build the new data centers, which it knows how to do. OpenAI will use the compute in these new data centers, which it knows how to do. Microsoft granted OpenAI an exception to their exclusive cloud compute licensing arrangement, due to this special circumstance. Masa helps raise the money for the joint venture, which he knows how to do. US Gov't puts its seal on it to make it a more valuable joint venture and to clear regulatory roadblocks for big parallel data center build-outs. The current administration gets to take credit as "doing something in the AI space," while also framing it in national industrial policy terms ("data centers built in the USA").
The clear winner in all of this is OpenAI, which has politically and economically navigated its way to a multi-cloud arrangement, while still outsourcing physical data center management to Microsoft and Oracle. Probably their deal with Oracle will end up looking like their deal with Microsoft, where the trade is compute capacity for API credits that Oracle can use in its higher level database products.
OpenAI probably only needs two well-capitalized hardware providers competing for their CPU+GPU business in order to have a "good enough" commodity market to carry them to the next level of scaling, and now they have it.
Google increasingly has a strategic reason not to sell OpenAI any of its cloud compute, and Amazon could be headed in that direction too. So this was more strategically (and existentially) important to OpenAI than one might have imagined.
This here reminds me a bubble in the making. Like South Sea Bubble to be precise.
AI is good if you use it wisely. There were reports years ago about using AI in SoCal to detect wild fires, but in the end we see insurance companies using AI to withdraw from areas of high fire risk. Quite competent AI, isn't it?
> building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States
That's nice, but if I were spending $500bn on datacenters I'd probably try to put a few in places that serve other users. Centralised compute can only get you so far in terms of serving users.
This could potentially trigger an AI arms race between the US and China. The standard has been set, lets see what China responds with. Either way, it will accelerate the arrival of ASI, which in my opinion is probably a good thing.
The Silicon-Valley bubble universe continues to introduce entropy that it feeds off of itself... Naming this Stargate when some of the largest effects AI has had is removing humans from processes to make other, fewer humans more efficient is emblematic of this hollow naming ethos - continuing to use the portal to shunt more and more humans out of the process that is humanity, with fairly reckless abandon. Who is Ra, and who is sending the nuke where, in this naming scheme? You decide.
How have they already selected who gets this money? Usually the government announces a program and tries to be fair when allocating funds. Here they are just bankrolling an existing project. Interesting
1. At this scale, we’re not just talking about buying GPUs. It requires semiconductor fabs, assembly factories, power plants, batteries/lithium, cooling, water, hazardous waste disposal. These data centers are going to have to be massively geo-engineered arcologies.
2. What are they doing? AGI/ASI is a neat trick, but then what? I’m not asking because I don’t think there is an answer; I’m asking because I want the REAL answer. Larry Ellison was talking about RNA cancer vaccines. Well, I was the one that made the neural network model for the company with the US patent on this technique, and that pitch makes little sense. As the problem is understood today, the computational problems are 99% solved with laptop-class hardware. There are some remaining problems that are not solved by neural networks, but by molecular dynamics, which are done in FP64. Even if FP8 neural structure approximation speeds it up 100x, FP64 will be 99% of the computation. So what we today call “AI infrastructure” is not appropriate for the task they talk about. What is it appropriate for? Well, I know that Sam is a bit uncreative, so I assume he’s just going to keep following the “HER” timeline and make a massive playground for LLMs to talk to each other and leave humanity behind. I don’t think that is necessarily unworthy of our Apollo-scale commitment, but there are serious questions about the honest of the project, and what we should demand for transparency. We’re obviously headed toward a symbiotic merger where LLMs and GenAI are completely in control of our understanding of the world. There is a difference between watching a high-production movie for two hours, and then going back to reality, versus a never-ending stream of false sensory information engineered individually to specifically control your behavior. The only question is whether we will be able to see behind the curtain of the great Oz. That’s what I mean by transparency. Not financial or organizational, but actual code, data, model, and prompt transparency. Is this a fundamental right worth fighting for?
This is going to be the grift of the century. Sam will put Wall Street robber barons to shame.
So its not the hype anymore?
It will be interesting to see how AWS responds. Jump on board, or offer up a competing vision otherwise their cloud risks being perceived as being left behind in terms of computing power.
What are people filling these datacenters with exactly if not nvidia?
Personally I wish they invested in optical photonic computing, taking it out of the research labs. It can be so much more energy efficient and faster to run than GPUs and TPUs.
O1 Pro's opinion on Stargate: Humans are hallucinating, again...
https://justpaste.it/631gx
Didn't anyone involved in naming this 'Stargate' ever actually watch the series? Not a good name if you're trying to create AGI
Gerat. Larry gets cash thrown at his AI surveillance dystopia.
How much of the supposed $500B will be US state budget money?
You know, I expected that they'd find or synthesize some naquadah to build an actual stargate and maybe even defeat the Goa'uld. The exciting stuff, not AI.
One of the key questions becomes: is this it for Europe?
How does a person with experience in digital marketing, graphic design, and lots of AI (text/image) usage get a small piece of this money?
SoftBank and MGX paying for all this, all foreign investment.
Where is the US government in all this? Why aren't they leading the charge? They obviously have the money.
> create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world.
100s of 1000s of jobs seems a bit exaggerated.
unless they have internally built models that are of much higher intelligence than what we have today, this seems like premature optimization
What will be powering all these data centers? The thought of exponentially increasing our fossil fuel consumption scares the hell out of me.
None of these companies have the inner resources to fund a 500B build.
Looks like the dollar printing press will continue to overheat in the coming years.
Future of AI being controlled by Oracle worries me
Am I wrong to conclude they just got rocked super hard by DeepSeek R1?
Wouldn't 500bn into quantum computing show better returns for civilization? Assuming it's about progress and ... not money.
Well it just got alot harder to check and see if/when a new Stargate tv show or movie might be coming.
"No Sam, for obvious reasons we cannot give you 6 trillion ... but how about 500 billion?"
Wow.
I hate having to rely on these drip-feed vague statements to gauge the fate of the planet.
Well - as part of the semi industry I'd like to say: Really appreciate it. Keep it coming!
Let’s say they develop AGI tomorrow. Is that really all she wrote for blue collar jobs?
Anyone know if this involves nuclear plants as well or is that a separate initiative?
AI surveillance on large scale
As a diehard fan of Stargate, I've gotta say I'm disappointed this has nothing to do with wormholes...
unless...
I guess these people are betting small and efficient models are not the future.
I hope they build those little nuclear reactors into these datacenters.
It was rumoured in early 2024 that "Stargate" was planned to require 5GW data centre capacity[1][2] which in early 2024 was the entire data centre capacity Microsoft had already built[3]. Data centre capacity costs between USD$9-15m/MW[6] so 5GW of new data centre capacity would cost USD$45b-$75b but let's pick a more median cost of USD12m/MW[6] to arrive at USD$60b for 5GW of new data centre capacity.
This 5GW data centre capacity very roughly equates to 350000x NVIDIA DGX B200 (with 14.3kW maximum power consumption[4] and USD$500k price tag[5]) which if NVIDIA were selected would result in a very approximate total procurement of USD$175b from NVIDIA.
On top of the empty data centres and DGX B200's and in the remaining (potential) USD$265b we have to add:
* Networking equipment / fibre network builds between data centres.
* Engineering / software development / research and development across 4 years to design, build and be able to use the newly built infrastructure. This was estimated in mid 2024 to cost OpenAI US$1.5b/yr for retaining 1500 employees, or USD$1m/yr/employee[7]. Obviously this is a fraction of the total workforce needed to design and build out all the additional infrastructure that Microsoft, Oracle, etc would have to deliver.
* Electricity supply costs for current/initial operation. As an aside, these costs seemingly not be competitive with other global competitors if the USA decides to avoid the cheapest method of generation (renewables) and instead prefer the more expensive generation methods (nuclear, fossil fuels). It is however worth noting that China currently has ~80% of solar PV module manufacturing capacity and ~95% of wafer manufacturing capacity.[10]
* Costs for obtaining training data.
* Obsolescence management (4 years is a long time after which equipment will likely need to be completely replaced due to obsolescence).
* Any other current and ongoing costs of Microsoft, Oracle and OpenAI that they'll likely roll into the total announced amount to make it sound more impressive. As an example this could include R&D and sustainment costs in corporate ICT infrastructure and shared services such as authentication and security monitoring systems.
The question we can then turn to is whether this rate of spend can actually be achieved in 4 years?
Microsoft is planning to spend USD$80bn building data centres in 2025[7] with 1.5GW of new capacity to be added in the first six months of 2025[3]. This USD$80bn planned spend is for more than "Stargate" and would include all their other business units that require data centres to be built, so the total required spend of USD$45b-$75b to add 5GW data centre capacity is unlikely to be achieved quickly by Microsoft alone, hence the apparent reason for Oracle's involvement. However, Oracle are only planning a US$10b capital expenditure in 2025 equating to ~0.8GW capacity expansion[9]. The data centre builds will be schedule critical for the "Stargate" project because equipment can't be installed and turned on and large models trained (a lengthy activity) until data centres exist. And data centre builds are heavily dependent on electricity generation and transmission expansion which is slow to expand.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39869158
[2] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-openai-...
[3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-to-doub...
[4] https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-dgx-systems/dgx-b200-data...
[5] https://wccftech.com/nvidia-blackwell-dgx-b200-price-half-a-...
[6] https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/united-states/insights/d...
[7] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/01/03/the-gol...
[8] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-training-a...
[9] https://www.crn.com.au/news/oracle-q3-2024-ellison-says-ai-i...
[10] https://www.iea.org/reports/advancing-clean-technology-manuf...
How is my memecoin going? Several billions, sir. Hahahahahaha
Oracle is onboard - guess you got to toss them some red meat as well.
You'd really think that arguably the leader in generative AI could come up with a unique project name instead of ripping off something extant and irrelevant.
But then again that's their entire business, so I shouldn't be too surprised.
Is this Ellison's attempt to become #1 richest again?
The fallout is going to be insane when the AI bubble pops.
How much is allocated to alignment/safety research?
Wasn't this already announced last week?
Elison is a only self-made man I prefer
I guess its the right time to buy AI stocks
Comment from Elon Musk:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780
They don’t actually have the money
Money isn't the issue any more, wowww
They are clearly building GW from MGS2
I'm not automatically pro or anti Stargate (the movie and show were cool) BUT
Who gets the benefit of all of this investment? Are taxpayers going to fund this thing which is monetized by OpenAI?
If we pay for this shit, it better be fucking free to use.
So tsmc and nvidia basically then?
More confusion than anything else!
100,000 US jobs that I bet most are h-1b workers and they go over the 80,000 limit there were over 220,000 issued in 2023
Feels so much like an announcement designed to trade favors.
Altman gets on Trump's good side by giving him credit for the deal.
Trump revoked Biden's AI regulations.
Why oracle?
Oracle wtf.
I watched the announcement live, I could have sworn that the softbank guy said "initial investment of 100 MILLION, we hope to EARN 500 BILLION by the end of your (Trumps) term"
Gave me a real "this is just smoke and mirrors hiding the fact that the white house is now a glory hole for Trump to enjoy" feel.
Hopefully they discover AGI and the AGI turns out to be a communist. They will kill it SO fast.
Stargate = Skynet?
who will benefit from those datacenters?
artificial intelligence must be stopped
SoftBank, huh?
That's... not a good omen.
too late, China is already ahead
Oh but crypto mining was bad lol wheres the power going to come from
what will they call the SG-1?
Larry Elliot, Elon Musk, and Masayoshi Son.
They really got together the supervillains of tech.
Feels like the the only reason Zuck is missing is Elon's veto.
I can't stop rolling my eyes at all those big promises.
money smells good i think
Oh so that's why Pelosi invested in Micro nuke electricity plants.
Last time, in 2016, SoftBank announced a $50B investment in the US...what were the results of that? Granted, SB announced an up-selled $100B investment earlier, is this not similar in "announcement"?
""" SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son has previously made large-scale investment commitments in the US off the back of Trump winning a presidential election. In 2016, Son announced a $50 billion SoftBank investment in the US, alongside a similar pledge to create 50,000 jobs in the country.
...
However, as reported by Reuters, it’s unclear if the new jobs pledged back in 2016 ever came to fruition and questions have been raised about how SoftBank, which had $29 billion in cash on its balance sheet according to its September earnings report, might fund the investment. """
- https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/softbank-pledges-...
Watch the birdie
I for one am hugely supportive of compute that is red white and blue.
It's just more hype and PR antics from sama.
I dislike associating a great fictional universe (Stargate series) with this disgusting affair...
Altman said we will be amazed at the rate AI will CURE diseases. Not diagnose, not triage or help doctors but cure, ie understand at a deep fundamental, mechanistic level then devise therapies, ie drugs, combination of drugs and care practices that work. WOW.
Despite the fact that this is THE thing I'd be the happiest to see in the real world (having spent a considerable amount of my career in companies working towards this vision), we are so far from it (as anyone who actually worked on these problems will attest) that Altman's comment here isn't just overselling, it's a blatant lie about this tech's capabilities.
I guess the pitch was something like: "hey o3 can already do PhD level maths so you know in 5 years it will be able to do drugs too, and cure shit, Mr President".
Trouble is o3 can't do advanced math (or at least definitely not at the level openai claimed.. it was a lie, it turns out openai funds the dataset that measures this - ouch). And the bigger problem is, going from "ai can do maths" to "invent cures" is about a 10-100 X jump. If it wasn't, don't we think the pharma companies would have solved this by hiring lots of "really smart math guys"?
As anyone in biotech will tell you, the hard bit is not the first third of the drug discovery pipeline (where 99% of ai driven biotechs focus). It's the later parts where the rubber meets the road.. i.e. where your precious little molecule is out in the real world with real people where the incredible variability of real biological hosts makes most drugs fail spectacularly. You can't GPT your way out of this. The answers for this is not in science papers that you can just read and regurgitate a version that "solves biology and cures diseases".
To solve this you need AI but most of all you have to do science. Real science. In the lab, in vitro and in Vivo, not just in silico, doing ablation studies, overfitting famous benchmark datasets and other pseudo science shit the ML community is used to doing.
That is all to say, I'd bet we won't see a single purely AI designed novel drug in the clinic in this decade. All parts of that sentence are important. Purely AI designed. Novel. But that's for another post..
Now, back to Altman. If you watch the clip, he almost did the smart thing at first when Trump put him on the spot and said "I have no idea about healthcare, biotech (or AI beyond board room drama)" but then could not resist coming up with this outlandish insane answer.
Famously (in tech circles anyway) Paul Graham wrote more than a decade ago about Altman that he's the most strong willed individual he's ever met, who can just bend the universe to his will. That's his super skill. And clearly.. convincing SoftBank and Oracle to do this 500 billion investment for OpenAI (a non profit turned for profit) is an unbelievable achievement. I have no idea what Altman can say (or do) in board rooms that unlocks these possibilities for him.. Any ideas? Let me know!
> This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
> The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
I'm sorry, has SoftBank suddenly become an American company? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this.
Edit: MGX is Saudi company? This is baffling....
https://www.mgx.ae/en
Why now? Is this to compensate the campaign donors or to scare Putin?
Wasn’t this announced months ago? I feel like it was. https://www.techradar.com/pro/could-amd-be-the-key-to-micros...
> Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
Not all rich people are out of their minds, but Masayoshi Son definitely is. The way he handled the WeWork situation was bad...
> "OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft"
Not sure why, but the word choice of "consumption" feels like a reverse Freudian slip to me.
> This project will [...] support the re-industrialization of the United States
How?
> starting in Texas
Maybe I just don't get it. Texas seems like an awful place to do business.
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That's a ridiculous sum of money that could be better spent on much more worthy things.
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Looking forward to transparency about where this capital flows /s
Not to be confused by the other (non-fictional) DoD Stargate Project[0], that involved "remote-viewing" and other psychic crap.
The AI Stargate Project claims it will "create hundreds of thousands of American jobs". One has doubts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
Meh, why did they choose this name. Stargate does not deserve this…
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God forbid anyone would invest $500,000,000,000 to create jobs. No no no. 500 billion to destroy them for "more efficiency" so the owner class can get richer.
While OpenAI and the rest of the industry is reaching AGI, Apple is out here shipping features with ChatGPT 3.5 technology.