linky (known as griftgate lmao)
text of tweet
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.
At current prices of money, this project has to return 20 billion in profit, and likely operate on 50 billion revenue at least to cover the energy costs
I'm beginning to think that "flipping" the geopolitical/economic board via rampant acceleration of climate change is the US's only real plan for re-asserting hegemony.
Fossil fuel industry expansion, refusal to adhere to Paris Agreement Accords, and now data-centers being plastered across the world burning electricity to enshittify the internet coupled with China going hard on developing renewables and harnessing sustainable energy to me signals that both nations know that there is no cooperation with the West on reduction of emissions, etc.
There is no plan, there is just profits and stock evaluations (in this case, nvidia gimme), and grift. 60 year old dipshits are impressed by chat gpt talking cause that's what they do for work, they immediately think they have solved labor. kissinger invested in theranos as a reminder. These are not smart people, these are incredibly rich people who can warp society with pocket change
I'm sorry, I know this is a popular line of thinking around here, but this is off base.
What's actually happening is that humanity may very well have stumbled into discovering machine reasoning on a level that we haven't even realized yet.
The SOTA in this field as of a couple days ago is a Chinese open source project called Deepseek that just upended the entire industry and pantsed Sam Altman and Silicon Valley in front of the world. They're giving away the secret to their massively efficient results that are besting every benchmark, and have cracked a breakthrough unsupervised learning technique that is allowing these models to demonstrate powerful reasoning capabilities. This stuff isn't Google's botched AI telling you to smoke while pregnant, this is post-graduate mathematics.
This has been great for a couple reasons: 1. we get a lot more performance for less cost and power usage which is seriously bloomer news, and 2. it's been hilarious watching western chauvinists melt down over this massive flex out of China.
Read a good synopsis of the paper that just dropped if you're still thinking it's all a grift. I also hate a lot of the practitioners of this stuff as well as the additional strain on the grid and climate, but I'm telling you folks, this tech is legit and currently improving at an alarming rate!
i think the left has been reflexively anti-LLMs because they haven't been up until recently worth the squeeze, they're emblematic of the continued ignorance of the climate crisis, the worst techbros you know are all in on them, and they're antithetical to the intentionalist view of art, and it's a convenient excuse to cut down on labour costs which are all imo perfectly good reasons to dislike LLMs but i think people are a bit blind to how accurate they've become and still have a view of their tendency to hallucinate based on GPT-3.5 and the memes about google's search summary being confidently incorrect, the latter which is representative of the absolute cheapest bottom of the barrel LLM google has (gemini-flash) and not SOTA which admittedly google has not really pushed.