$5 to $7 Trillion? Developing cutting edge chip fabrication technologies is insanely expensive but that number still strikes me as far too high. Unfortunately, the article doesn't go into any detail on the allocation of funds for a capital raise that unprecedentedly massive. I don't doubt that Altman may have cited that range, my skepticism is more centered on the practical possibility of productively putting that much money to work in a relevant startup time frame (~five years). Maybe there's missing relevant detail, like perhaps he was referencing a cumulative total spend over a decade or longer.<p>Just for comparison TSMC's market cap is ~$500B, ASML (who makes the cutting edge fab machines) is ~$350B. NVidia itself is ~$1.7T but that also includes non-AI things. Even if you include buying smaller players in addition to those, you could theoretically outright own the entire relevant market for less than $3T. And that's at full de-risked, retail public market price in a very frothy time period. The new venture cost should be less, otherwise investors would be wiser to just buy the existing players with all their IP, proven know-how and market momentum.
I don't know why HN loves Sam Altman so much. Has he ever written a significant piece of software or invented anything? Has he ever built a significant, profitable business from the ground up? The guy was a fundraiser superstar when money was easy to get in the 2010s but I have yet to see technical or business competence sufficient to grant him the level of respect many in this community seem to grant him.<p>There are people who are technically competent or genuinely intelligent who can also raise funds.<p>The guy reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes or Eliezer Yudkowski of "lesswrong."<p>A sophomoric guy with minimal technical or business accomplishments who is just smart enough to tell rich people what they wanna hear to fuel his game.<p>There is an old term for this personality type. Snake oil salesman aka con artist.<p>See <a href="https://blog.piekniewski.info/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.piekniewski.info/</a><p>For a sane take on AI by someone who actually got an education and is an expert in his field.
You can work backwards. For $5T investment, you need revenues of at least $500B. Nvidia revenues are currently ~18B/quarter or roughly $75B/yr. If you think 5X growth in AI in next 5 year is possible but current supply chain cannot deliver then all these totally makes sense.<p>To me, AI is starting to replace convectional search within early adopters already. The new search is not firing query to get references but rather converse to get answer. In my vicinity, 90% of the population has not even caught up on this progress, let alone change of muscle memory which often takes half decade.<p>And search is still just one of many segments. So, market has 10X growth potential from here with fair certainty. Although, as it often happens, we will overshoot expectations that causes crash followed by more regularized growth.<p>Fun thing is that a ton of wild predictions that created Internet bubble in 2000 actually were rather timid. Internet did changed everything and delivered way beyond expected during the bubble. It was only a matter of time.
Sam Altman is just repeating the early days Elon playbook.<p>He tries to keep the media coverage saturated with bullshit which avoids scrutiny on the wrong things and has the convenient side effect of burning attention otherwise drawn towards things like Google’s Gemini Product launch.<p>The fact that things are basically verbatim reported without any critical thinking shows he’s right, it works. Trump employed the same strategy too.<p>It takes advantage of our terminally broken media ecosystem (no incentive to call bullshit), personality cult and attention economy.<p>The only way to read Silicon Valley is to look at actions, not words.
Is it Sam Altman or OpenAI?<p>If Altman, then is he doing like what Musks says he will do – and do new AI-investments outside of the company he is CEO at, to own more of it?<p>What kind of company owners allows their CEO:s to do such things?
This seems like a smart move. OpenAI needs to run models more cheaply for profitability. He wants to start a hardware venture in parallel with the goal of selling better hardware to OpenAI. If it fails, it's not his money that was lost. If it succeeds, he has two successful ventures on his hands.<p>Anybody know what happened to George Hotz' hardware company? Or did he give up on it after 2 weeks like his Twitter frontend job?