OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors, including from the United Arab Emirates, to raise between $5 trillion to $7 trillion in funding. The goal, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is to increase the world’s chip manufacturing capacity and enhance AI capabilities.
The fundraising efforts are part of a broader strategy to address OpenAI’s growth constraints, particularly the scarcity of AI chips needed for training large language models like ChatGPT.
Altman’s proposal is said to include forming a partnership with investors, chip manufacturers, and power providers to finance the construction of chip foundries, which would then be operated by the chip manufacturers.
That’s fairly bold to ask for ~6% of the total world economy as well as a sizable chunk of the world’s energy.
AI will double the world’s economy so they’re basically giving us an extra 94% for free.
$7,000,000,000,000? It’s a good thing we won’t tax it ever at all in any capacity! Not while there’s Single Mothers overdrawn on their Bank Accounts! #SaveTheTrillionaires!
I get the joke/point that you’re making, but usually a company’s investment into research, development, expansion, etc is tax exempt. Hopefully even the most serious critics of our current capatalist economy would agree that these types of investments should be tax exempt, because it means paying more salaries or purchasing goods and services from other companies, which again means more salaries. Generally, these aren’t c-level salaries either because usually the c-suite is not producing the goods and services required.
If those investments then net a huge profit that goes to a few individuals, then yes, those profits should be taxed, unavoidably and fairly.
If a company uses “b” or “t” in it’s financial numbers, then the companies should have the piss taxed out of them. There is no justifiable reason for numbers that large to be tax free in literally any context.
Can my research into getting rich be tax exempt, too? It’s not like these are going to become public knowledge. This fucker’s going to patent everything and keep anyone else from using it.
Patenting actual inventions is absolutely necessary for industrial research to be viable. Being a patent troll is the problem. The US patent office needs to be expanded, probably doubled, to address the issue. I don’t know how well equipped other nation’s patent offices are.
Patents require the disclosure of the invention so that it can be copied by others after 20 years.
a company’s investment into research, development, expansion, etc is tax exempt. Hopefully even the most serious critics of our current capatalist economy would agree that these types of investments should be tax exempt
That’s a bunch of nonsense. Taxes apply to INCOME, so any expenses are automatically tax exempt.
it means paying more salaries or purchasing goods and services from other companies, which again means more salaries.
Nope. Companies expanding AI in order to replace workers or at the very least increase productivity without increasing wages does not in any way, shape or form mean “more salaries”.
Generally, these aren’t c-level salaries either because usually the c-suite is not producing the goods and services required.
Bullshit. It’s true that the C-suite doesn’t produce anything, but they’re the first to get a raise when things go well and the last to be fired (and even then, usually with a golden parachute equivalent to several years’ pay of the average worker) when things go less well.
Companies don’t have income, they have revenue and profits. Revenue minus Costs (which include salaries, investments, materials, etc) equals Profits. The costs get detailed into different buckets which tracks investments into the company itself versus expenses that the company needs to pay to continue operating. An important number is the return on investments (ROI). A high enough ROI means the company makes more from investing in itself than it would from using the money for any other purpose.
I wasn’t talking specifically about an AI company, but companies in general. The investment in AI discussed in the original article is not about immediately developing additional AI programs, but rather about expanding the production of semiconductor manufacturing to meet the needs of chips for AI. A reasonable argument could be made that this will eventually eliminate jobs. Counter arguments would likely point out that the nature of jobs would change. Personally, I think that AI is going to become a larger part of our society and we need to think about the ways that we need to react to that. It likely means investing in better education, because some of the first jobs to go will be jobs which require low intellectual contributions. I don’t think it will replace jobs which require a great degree of physical manipulation however, because robotics are simply not at that level yet.
Regarding your point about c-suite raises, I addressed this very point in the last paragraph of my prior comment.
Nobody seems to recognize that madness is not in numbers, but in people.
Could that level of investment ever be recouped in any other manner than by replacing vast numbers of workers and their salaries?
That’s how productivity growth is achieved, a smaller amount of workers do the same task.
Or course, the created wealth is again invested back eventually and new products/services require new jobs.
For example, right now we have some of the highest labor participation in years, despite rising productivity
yeah and productivity increase has decoupled from wage in 1980, while productivity rises wages stay the same - why should anyone who’s not a multimillionaire find that acceptable?
The fundraising efforts are part of a broader strategy to address OpenAI’s growth constraints,
see…we just can’t grow without TRILLIONS OF FUCKING DOLLARS
i have a business case to become the major player in the chip industry: buy the planet’s economy
If a leap in world computing capacity is really what’s needed here then it is a tall order. Crypto has been sucking up an increasing share of that in recent years and will probably continue to do so as long as people love money and are idiots. Plus the geopolitics around Taiwan, China, annd the US are a problem as well. I’m not sure how you solve all that even with 5 trillion.
