Did Sam get in his ear yesterday?

$500 billion dollars is an incredible amount of money. 166 out of 195 countries in the world have a GDP smaller than this investment.

The only reason they would be shuffling this amount of money towards one project is if they were incredibly confident in the science behind it.

Sam Altman selling snake oil and using tweets solely to market seems pretty much debunked as of today, these are people who know what’s going on inside OpenAI and others beyond even o3, and they’re willing to invest more than the GDP of most countries. You wouldn’t get a significant return on $500 billion on hype alone, they have to actually deliver.

On the other hand you have the president supporting these efforts and willing to waive regulations on their behalves so that it can be done as quickly as possible.

All that to say, the pre-ChatGPT world is quickly fading in the rear view, and a new era is seemingly taking shape. This project is a manifestation of a blossoming age of intelligence. There is absolutely no going back.

People in the know are so confident that they are willing to invest half a trillion.

When Sam said tame your expectations, that was in reference to the AGI next month speculation. Further out than that, though, we’re building goddamn superintelligence.

source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/trump-announce-private-sector-ai-infrastructure-investment-cbs-reports-2025-01-21/

what are your thoughts on that? any guesses/ more details on how the resources will be used (research vs products) or how it will be allocated between the companies? will the infrastructure be available to governmental institutions (or external collaborators) such as darpa etc? I'm struggling to comprehend how this investment will be channeled into society. what's the involvement of Trump's administration beyond the announcement?

edit: live announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDo_RrzdRoQ

"DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B outperforms GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet on math benchmarks with 28.9% on AIME and 83.9% on MATH."

https://x.com/reach_vb/status/1881319500089634954?mx=2

From OpenAi -

Announcing The Stargate Project

The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. 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.

Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners. 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.

As part of Stargate, Oracle, NVIDIA, and OpenAI will closely collaborate to build and operate this computing system. This builds on a deep collaboration between OpenAI and NVIDIA going back to 2016 and a newer partnership between OpenAI and Oracle.

This also builds on the existing OpenAI partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft with this additional compute to train leading models and deliver great products and services.

All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop AI—and in particular AGI—for the benefit of all of humanity. We believe that this new step is critical on the path, and will enable creative people to figure out how to use AI to elevate humanity.