OpenAI's hunger for computing power(wsj.com)
69 points by doener 12 hours ago | 61 comments
- neonate 11 hours ago
- vineyardmike 10 hours agoWhat is their angle with this?
Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years? I’m sure the researchers there would love to do more research, with more compute, faster, but 20+x growth is not a practical expectation.
Is the goal here to create a mad rush to build data centers, which should decrease their costs with more supply? Do they just want governments to step in and to help somehow? Is it part of marketing/hype? Is this trying to project confidence to investors on future revenue expectations?
[-]- p1esk 10 hours agoSurely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years?
If their goal is to train say, a 100T model on the whole youtube dataset they will need 20000x more compute. And that would be my goal if I were him.
[-]- bix6 10 hours agoWhy 20000x more compute? I thought they were at approx 1T with current compute?
Edit: looked it up. 10k+ times more for training compute. Sheesh. Get the Dyson sphere ready lol.
[-]- esafak 9 hours ago[-]
- indolering 8 hours agoNow I'm more on the side of him being delusional.[-]
- zeroq 5 hours ago"At this point I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth."
It's that dumbass at your work who thinks that solely because he landed a job that pays him more than their parents ever made combined in his early 20s he can school everyone on every topic imaginable, from nutrition to religion.
Him and Elon makes way more than that dumbass so ego get inflated even more.
I don't especially like Tucker Carlson, but I think the more screen time we'll give to this people with an open mic it's better for everyone to have a first hand experience of how detached from reality these people are.
[-]- blitzar 3 hours agoIt is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt
- johnnienaked 3 hours agoAbsolutely right, and it's ubiquitous across organizations too.
I've never met an executive I respect. They're all absolute experts at appearing competent.
- kadushka 9 hours agoMainly because global video data corpus is > 100k larger than global text corpus, so you will need to train much larger models for much longer (than current LLMs).
- Drblessing 8 hours agoThat would be awesome.
- zingerlio 7 hours agoThe AI bubble bursts when he stumbles to get that money.
- pram 9 hours agoPerceptually, it helps to take scrutiny off the current spend? It isn't a bubble if you can just scoff at $100 billion and say like" "thats pocket change, this will actually require 10 quadrillion dollars!!"
- ants_everywhere 8 hours agoIf they want to survive they need to outrun Google and have a differentiated service. Which as of now it's not clear that OpenAI will have a reason to exist in the near future with Anthropic and Google.
They're likely betting on either training a model so big they can't be ignored or possibly focusing more B2B which means lots of compute to resell.
- skywhopper 9 hours agoHe needs 11 figures of cash injected as soon as possible. The people who can give it want a big return. Given the current losses, the only way to make the math right is to lie outrageously about what’s possible.[-]
- karmakurtisaani 2 hours agoHe's been kicking this can for years now. Looking forward to the day he's forced to stop.
- refulgentis 10 hours ago> Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years?
He does, or at least, he believes if its plausible they should attempt to.
We live in odd times. It sort of reminds me of Feb 2020. All you really needed to know was the Rt and rest was just math. Who knows if it'll matter or pencil out in a decade, but, it's completely reasonable at these growth rates and with the iron laws known to keep scaling.
- indolering 9 hours agoIn the early days of Bitcoin, we would argue security models and laugh about Bitcoin mining taking some significant percentage of global power supply. It's been giving around 1% for a while now despite the supply falling off.
I wouldn't put bets on what the outer limits for AI are going to be. However, it's a huge productivity boost across a huge range of workflows. Models are still making large gains as they become more sophisticated.
If I had Sam Altman's access to other people's capital, I would be making large bets that it will keep growing.
- Incipient 5 hours agoIs it just me, or does this extreme demand for compute imply they've realised the core tech is mostly stagnant, and needs compute to possibly scale towards anything AGI-like? (however unlikely that is).[-]
- general1465 1 hour agoI see it the same way. It is like automotive manufacturer who is using bigger engines with more and more pistons and wondering how much bigger engine next model iteration will need to make it go faster and how many iterations until they will finally break the sound barrier. However their product is looking like a school-bus box on wheels which is going to rip itself apart long before even reaching the sound barrier.
- Drblessing 8 hours agoThe AI-powered tiktok competitor is not going to be cheap on compute
- banandys 8 hours agoI mean yeah we all saw the video of him stealing gpus and getting arrested
- bgwalter 7 hours ago40% of global DRAM output:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
All for creating worthless TikTok videos with Sora 2, while we don't get graphics cards and DRAM and our electricity prices rise.
Trump will get another "win" for "his" Stargate project. The meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung was NOT arranged by Altman, he is the messenger boy:
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/samsung-sk-hy...
[-]- johnnienaked 3 hours agoAnd our water runs out, and we pollute and destroy the planet past the point of no return.
AI will fix it though?
- lemonlearnings 10 hours ago
- lemonlearnings 10 hours agoToo big to fail is the goal. If the world is powered by openai but it aint making a profit in 2028 they can just put their "were a utility like water" facemask on and get bailed out.[-]
- stevenwoo 9 hours agoAt least in the USA, I think if consumers realized their power bills going up every year are tied to these new data centers, there would be more opposition to data centers going up politically. https://apnews.com/article/electricity-prices-data-centers-a... I don't know if the electricity markets work differently in other countries.[-]
- omcnoe 7 hours agoThe US needs sufficient energy surplus to power industry. US energy production has been essentially flat for the past 25 years and the country has forgot how to bring new capacity online. Chinese energy production is up over 6x over the same period. China has more clean energy generation capacity today than their entire capacity a little over a decade ago.
Instead of panicking about data center electricity usage we need to be worrying about getting back to a state where we regularly bring new (clean) generation capacity online.
- MountDoom 8 hours agoTaxpayers subsidize data centers in many other ways. These are prestige projects for politicians, so they often get long-term tax breaks and other preferential treatment.
I think it's part vanity, part a misunderstanding about the economic benefits of a datacenter (which are nearly nil, as they employ very few people and produce nothing for the local market), and part just a desire to score brownie points with wealthy corporations, which might mean donations, campaign support, or other perks for the politician who makes it happen.
- fooker 5 hours agoIt's correlated to be data centers, not tied to. That's an important difference.
We could easily build ..say.. 10 nuclear reactors and halve the utility bills with amortization.
- noosphr 8 hours agoThe power bill going up is because the US, and the West in general, bet on renewables and a low energy future.
Neither of those things turn out to be a good fit for the new economy. The only thing left for people who derided nuclear for the last 40 years is to hope this is a bubble that sends us back to the 17th century when it pops. Anything else means we have to invest trillions in nuclear right now.
[-]- DavidPiper 8 hours agoGenuine question from a non-American: What is "the new economy"?[-]
- noosphr 8 hours agoMalthusianism for computers.
Moore's law is dead. The only way to increase compute is to increase the power we feed to computers. AI is just the shiniest example. Everything else will follow suit until electricity costs increase enough that it doesn't make sense to throw any more computation at it.
Any country that doesn't have energy to spare will be in the position of countries which didn't have food to support armies before the industrial revolution.
[-]- fooker 5 hours agoInteresting point. I can see this could turn out to be true.
If we needed, for example, 1000 TWH to power AI for a huge drone swarm but could not do it while China could, this would be problematic.
It requires a future where MAD with nuclear weapons is obsolete though, with some futuristic new missile defense tech. I don't see that happening until some currently unknown physics makes it possible.
- jimbob45 5 hours agoWhat’s your beef with solar? Both parties seem to like it just fine, despite it not covering as much of the total demand as anyone would like.[-]
- noosphr 2 hours agoBoth parties like it better because it turns the electricity market into another casino that lets you take billions from the parts of the economy that do things.
I worked as a quant in the electric market. There wasn't a single dataset I saw where more renewables resulted in lower total costs for consumers.
- Drblessing 8 hours agoThe amount of money being invested in AI should've been invested into nuclear, both fusion and fission. The AI bubble will burst, but the energy bubble never bursts.
- kortilla 9 hours agoThat’s a fun trope but it’s a terrible outcome for shareholders.[-]
- avs733 9 hours agoWhich means it will be made into a terrible outcome for everyone.
- jacquesm 9 hours agoGood.
- throwaway290 9 hours agoshareholders like a business that can never fail...
- lemonlearnings 5 hours agoLess terrible than being allow to go bust though.
- nelsonic 10 hours ago[flagged][-]
- bwfan123 10 hours ago> Definitely not a bubble. ;)
When you square that with the total revenues of 6B in 1H.
[-]- roenxi 9 hours agoThey haven't put ads in ChatGPT yet as far as I know. It doesn't really make sense to work off the raw revenue before they put the main revenue-raiser in. Search isn't a very impressive money maker either if we take AdWords out.[-]
- sverhagen 9 hours agoI have a subscription. Dang, who does every profit model have to involve ads?[-]
- fooker 5 hours agoBecause not everyone wants to pay for a subscription, certainly not the 5 billion Asians in any reasonable numbers.
There's a reason Google and Facebook run the tech world as we know it.
- thereitgoes456 8 hours agoYou and everyone else seem to assume on faith that OpenAI's ads revenue is going to dwarf their subscription revenue -- but you're being suckered. If you do the math, you'll find it's not nearly as clear-cut as you think.
Not impossible, but not a given.
[-]- og_kalu 7 hours ago>If you do the math
On the contrary the math makes it very clear. They need a free user ARPU of $11 to 12 per quarter to be profitable with billions to spare.
That's a low bar to clear for a platform with 700M+ Weekly Active Users who are more personal with it than any Google search.
- lemonlearnings 10 hours agoBitcoin:
AI: Hold my beer.
- username223 8 hours ago> $16Bn in compute spend (rent) rising to $400bn in 4 years. Definitely not a bubble. ;)
Just to put that in context, US GDP last year was about $30tn, and Apple's revenue was about $400bn. So Altman is saying he wants to spend around 1% of US GDP, or most of Apple's revenue, on compute alone in 2029. He's clearly using the "fire all your white collar employees" pitch deck at the very least, if not the "prepare to meet your Silicon God" one.
- dgfitz 10 hours agoI also feel like there is a bubble.
However, looking at it impartially, it seems to mean sama is planning on making more money. Which seems to conclude in ads are incoming.
[-]- ares623 10 hours agoWe give a lot of shit when LLMs get lost in context, digging themselves deeper and deeper into illogical trains of thoughts.
But is this sama doing the same thing. He CAN NOT stop and MUST NOT slow down. The slightest display of hesitation and doubt will make it all come crashing down.
And everyone else is doing the same. It’s an international game of chicken.
- nakamoto_damacy 9 hours ago[flagged][-]
- nebula8804 7 hours agoIts cheap because you aren't paying the full cost, you are externalizing some of the costs onto others.
- artursapek 9 hours agoIt’s ok you don’t have to add a disclaimer before complimenting Musk we’re not going to lynch you[-]
- nakamoto_damacy 9 hours agoIt's for your protection.
- hagbard_c 8 hours ago[flagged][-]
- qingcharles 8 hours agoI'd get a lot more done if I had half a trillion dollars and were best friends with the president of the United States.
- bix6 8 hours agoHow about Nazi puns and DOGE for starters?[-]