Elon Musk and Sam Altman sharing a stage in 2015. Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
A report this week that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is attempting to raise up to $7 trillion left many tech-industry observers scratching their heads. This amount easily exceeds the market cap of any company – including Microsoft, which recently reached $3.1 trillion and overtook Apple to become America's most valuable company.
Of course, Microsoft has been boosted by the artificial intelligence boom sparked by ChatGate maker OpenAI, in which it is the biggest investor. But as AI makes its way into how we work and play in the coming years, Altman anticipates a problem: an insufficient number of AI chips and chip-making facilities.
With this in mind, he is looking to raise large sums of money from wealthy investors around the world for a project that will boost the production of AI chips. wall street journalSpeaking to unnamed sources, it was reported this week that Altman wants $5 trillion to $7 trillion for the project, in which OpenAI, investors, chip makers and electricity suppliers would come together to build a chip foundry.
The amount becomes dwarf, like magazine Notes, The size of today's global semiconductor industry.
Sam Lessin, a Silicon Valley investor and early Facebook executive — he's running for a slot on the Harvard Board of Overseers, an effort backed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a former classmate — was thinking about fundraising at an Post The headline on Friday was “The Age of Absurd Capitalism.”
When trillions in fundraising are being sought, Lessin wrote, “You have to question what has happened to society/our system.”
He wrote, referring to Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk: “I'm not angry at Sam's showmanship—he's just expanding the game that Elon has played by talking about 'self-driving cars around the corner' or 'Mars by.' Have played with.” 2024.
Read more: Sam Altman sheds light on feud with Elon Musk: 'The closer people are pointed in the same direction, the more contentious the disagreement will be'
In 2020, Musk said that SpaceX's first crewed Mars mission could launch as early as 2024. Two years later they pushed it back to 2029.
Lesin wrote, “Sam is just playing a game of one-upmanship.” “Start with fear-mongering AGI, and when that's over…let's think about the biggest number we can think of.”
AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical type of AI that can perform any task a human can perform. Altman spent much of the last year warning world leaders and others about the potential dangers of advanced AI, a practice that also helped drive interest in OpenAI's products. financial Times It was reported this week that OpenAI's revenues have exceeded $2 billion on an annual basis.
Lessin suggested that the danger is that capitalism, rather than being an invisible hand guiding us, “becomes a game of 'absurdity' versus discipline.”