zlacker

The supply of chips is limited by foundry capacity, starting a new fabless chip designer would do nothing to fix that bottleneck. A new chip designer would also not be releasing a competitive product for at least 5 years, even if done by the most talented and experienced engineering team of the generation (rather than by a career bullshitter like Altman).

This would most likely have been a pure grift play, finding some stupid money and using his position at OpenAI to convince them to invest in a doomed proposition.

>>jsnell+(OP)
> A new chip designer would also not be releasing a competitive product for at least 5 years

Best time to start was 10 years ago…

>>foogaz+l9
Sure, but there must be dozens of credible AI chip startups in various parts of their lifecycle started in the last decade. If the goal really was, as originally proposed, to solve the chip bottleneck for OpenAI you'd be better of backing one of those. And if literally all of these startups are on the wrong path and OpenAI beliefs a different kind of design philosophy would work better, I'm sure most if not all of those startups would be delighted to know about it, and quickly change their plans.

Starting from scratch would make sense if Altman personally were some kind of chip design savant with unique insight to the problem domain, and he definitely isn't that. Alternatively it makes sense if had nothing to do with saving OpenAI from the compute bottleneck, and was another one of Altman's Worldcoin-like grifter schemes.