The AI Stargate Project claims it will "create hundreds of thousands of American jobs". One has doubts.
> 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.
I'm sorry, has SoftBank suddenly become an American company? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this.
Edit: MGX is Saudi company? This is baffling....
0. https://www.thewrap.com/trump-open-ai-oracle-stargate-ai-inf...
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-announces-private-sector-...
For those interested, it looks like Albany, NY (upstate NY) is very likely one of the next growth sites.
[0] https://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schum...
There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that (1) Nippon Steel Corporation, a corporation organized under the laws of Japan . . . might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States;
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/president...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider...
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/12/abandoned-remains-of-s...
It’s incredibly depressing how everyone sees this as something the new administration did in a single day…
(But yes I agree)
The companies said they will develop land controlled by Wise Asset to provide on-site natural gas power plant solutions that can be quickly deployed to meet demand in the ERCOT.
The two firms are currently working to develop more than 3,000 acres in the Dallas-Fort Worth region of Texas, with availability as soon as 2027
[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/rpower-and-wise-a...
[1.a] https://enchantedrock.com/data-centers/
[1.b] https://www.powermag.com/vistra-in-talks-to-expand-power-for...
Here's the presser, Sam is at 9 minutes in.
https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2015-04-10-Presidents-Varela-Ob...
This could also be (at least partly) a reaction to Microsoft threatening to pull OpenAI's cloud credits last year. OpenAI wants to maintain independence and with compute accounting for 25–50% of their expenses (currently) [2], this strategy may actually be prudent.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/03/microsoft-expects-to-spend-8...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4d75zl212o
https://apnews.com/article/trump-apple-tim-cook-tech-0a9fb8e...
You don't need a finance degree to figure out what's happening here. Apple is ripping pages right out of Elon's playbook.
June 2024: Oracle joins in - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-to-use-oci...
January 2025: Softbank provides additional funding, and they for some reason give credit to Trump?
I read this but it lacks information: https://apnews.com/article/wind-energy-offshore-turbines-tru...
>> "a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate, is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers."
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/meta-developing-a...
Ikea's been doing this for a while:
>> Ingka says it has trained 8,500 call centre workers as interior design advisers since 2021, while Billie - launched the same year with a name inspired by IKEA's Billy bookcase range - has handled 47% of customers' queries to call centres over the past two years.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/ikea-bets-remote-interior...
I'm imagining a future where the US builds a Tower of Babel from thousands of data centers just to keep people employed and occupied. Maybe also add in some paperclip factories¹?
I’ve been advocating for a data centre analogue to the Heavy Press Programme for some years [1].
This isn’t quite it. But when I mapped out costs, $1tn over 10 years was very doable. (A lot of it would go to power generation and data transmission infrastructure.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNCZHAQnfGU
The key question then becomes one of political priorities and public understanding. If public opposition to beneficial government spending stems from misunderstanding how modern monetary systems work, then better education about these mechanisms could help advance important policy goals. The focus should be on managing real economic constraints rather than imaginary financial ones.
There is some crypto that we know how to break with a sufficiently large quantum computer [0]. There is some we don't know how to do that to. I might be behind the state of the art here, but when I wasn't we specifically really only knew how to use it to break cryptography that Shor's algorithm breaks.
Remember Trump's BIG WIN of Foxconn investing $10B to build a factory in Wisconsin, creating 13000 jobs?
That was in 2017. 7 years later, it's employing about 1000 people if that. Not really clear what, if anything, is being made at the partially-built factory. [0]
And everyone's forgotten about it by now.
I expect this to be something along those lines.
[0] https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2023/03/23/wha...
Intent is a funny thing—people usually assume that good intent is sufficient because it's obvious to themselves, but the rest of us don't have access to that state, so has to be encoded somehow in your actual comment in order to get communicated. I sometimes put it this way: the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I take your point at least halfway though, because it wasn't the worst violation of the guidelines. (Usually I say "this is not a borderline case" but this time it was!) I'm sensitive to regional flamewar because it's tedious and, unlike national flamewar or religious flamewar, it tends to sneak up on people (i.e. we don't realize we're doing it).
[0] - https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/china-is-catching-up-with...
This is unfortunately paywalled but a good writeup on how the datacenter came to be: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-openai-and-oracl...
This 5GW data centre capacity very roughly equates to 350000x NVIDIA DGX B200 (with 14.3kW maximum power consumption[4] and USD$500k price tag[5]) which if NVIDIA were selected would result in a very approximate total procurement of USD$175b from NVIDIA.
On top of the empty data centres and DGX B200's and in the remaining (potential) USD$265b we have to add:
* Networking equipment / fibre network builds between data centres.
* Engineering / software development / research and development across 4 years to design, build and be able to use the newly built infrastructure. This was estimated in mid 2024 to cost OpenAI US$1.5b/yr for retaining 1500 employees, or USD$1m/yr/employee[7]. Obviously this is a fraction of the total workforce needed to design and build out all the additional infrastructure that Microsoft, Oracle, etc would have to deliver.
* Electricity supply costs for current/initial operation. As an aside, these costs seemingly not be competitive with other global competitors if the USA decides to avoid the cheapest method of generation (renewables) and instead prefer the more expensive generation methods (nuclear, fossil fuels). It is however worth noting that China currently has ~80% of solar PV module manufacturing capacity and ~95% of wafer manufacturing capacity.[10]
* Costs for obtaining training data.
* Obsolescence management (4 years is a long time after which equipment will likely need to be completely replaced due to obsolescence).
* Any other current and ongoing costs of Microsoft, Oracle and OpenAI that they'll likely roll into the total announced amount to make it sound more impressive. As an example this could include R&D and sustainment costs in corporate ICT infrastructure and shared services such as authentication and security monitoring systems.
The question we can then turn to is whether this rate of spend can actually be achieved in 4 years?
Microsoft is planning to spend USD$80bn building data centres in 2025[7] with 1.5GW of new capacity to be added in the first six months of 2025[3]. This USD$80bn planned spend is for more than "Stargate" and would include all their other business units that require data centres to be built, so the total required spend of USD$45b-$75b to add 5GW data centre capacity is unlikely to be achieved quickly by Microsoft alone, hence the apparent reason for Oracle's involvement. However, Oracle are only planning a US$10b capital expenditure in 2025 equating to ~0.8GW capacity expansion[9]. The data centre builds will be schedule critical for the "Stargate" project because equipment can't be installed and turned on and large models trained (a lengthy activity) until data centres exist. And data centre builds are heavily dependent on electricity generation and transmission expansion which is slow to expand.
[1] >>39869158
[2] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-openai-...
[3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-to-doub...
[4] https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-dgx-systems/dgx-b200-data...
[5] https://wccftech.com/nvidia-blackwell-dgx-b200-price-half-a-...
[6] https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/united-states/insights/d...
[7] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/01/03/the-gol...
[8] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-training-a...
[9] https://www.crn.com.au/news/oracle-q3-2024-ellison-says-ai-i...
[10] https://www.iea.org/reports/advancing-clean-technology-manuf...
This is Abu Dhabi money.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/t...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/18/bt-cut-jobs...
>> “For a company like BT there is a huge opportunity to use AI to be more efficient,” he said. “There is a sort of 10,000 reduction from that sort of automated digitisation, we will be a huge beneficiary of AI. I believe generative AI is a huge leap forward; yes, we have to be careful, but it is a massive change.”
Goldman Sacs:
https://www.gspublishing.com/content/research/en/reports/202...
>> Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300mn full-time jobs to automation.
I doubt the US choice of energy generation is ideological as much a practicality. China absolutely dominates renewables with 80% of solar PV modules manufactured in China and 95% of wafers manufactured in China.[3] China installed a world record 277GW of new solar PV generation in 2024 which was a 45% year-on-year increase.[4] By contract, the US only installed ~1/10th this capacity in 2024 with only 14GW of solar PV generation installed in the first half of 2024.[5]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
[2] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lcoe-and-valu...
[3] https://www.iea.org/reports/advancing-clean-technology-manuf...
[4] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/01/21/china-hits-277-17-gw-...
[5] https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/quarterly-solar-industry-u...
In 2023 China had more net new solar capacity than the US has in total, and it will only climb from there. In order to do this, they're flexing muscles in R&D and mass production that the US has actually started to flex, and now will face extreme headwinds and decreased capital investment.
Regarding agriculture: America's agricultural powerhouse, California's Central Valley, is rapidly depleting its water supplies. The midwest is depleting its topsoil at double the rate that USDA considers sustainable.
None of this is irreversible or irrecoverable, but it very clearly requires some countervailing push on market forces. Market forces do not naturally operate on these types of time scales and repeatedly externalize costs to neighbors or future generations.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35582-x
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/57-billion-tons-of...
This is true for brute force algorithms as well and has been known for decades. With infinite compute, you can achieve wonders. But the problem lies in diminishing returns[1][2], and it seems things do not scale linearly, at least for transformers.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-19/anthropic...
2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-go...
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/japans-seven-i-deal-re...
> The president indicated he would use emergency declarations to expedite the project’s development, particularly regarding energy infrastructure.
> “We have to get this stuff built,” Trump said. “They have to produce a lot of electricity and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily at their own plants.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/21/trump-ai-joi...
twitter hype is out of control again.
we are not gonna deploy AGI next month, nor have we built it.
we have some very cool stuff for you but pls chill and cut your expectations 100x!
The Flood Control Act [0], TVA, Heavy Press, etc.
They all created generally useful infrastructure, that would be used for a variety of purposes over the subsequent decades.
The federal government creating data center capacity, at scale, with electrical, water, and network hookups, feels very similar. Or semiconductor manufacture. Or recapitalizing US shipyards.
It might be AI today, something else tomorrow. But there will always be a something else.
Honestly, the biggest missed opportunity was supporting the Blount Island nuclear reactor mass production facility [1]. That was a perfect opportunity for government investment to smooth out market demand spikes. Mass deployed US nuclear in 1980 would have been a game changer.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_Control_Act_of_1928
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems#Const...
Wouldn't surprise me Sam Altman convinced Trump/Son/Ellison that this AI can reverse their aging. And Ellison does have a ton of money - $208bn.
With a state like Texas and a Federal Government thats onboard these permits would be a much smaller issue. The press conference makes this seem more like, "drill baby drill" (drilling natural gas) and directly talking about them spinning up their own power plants.
[1] https://www.kunr.org/npr-news/2024-09-11/how-memphis-became-...
[2] https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/resources/case-studies/t...
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780
They don’t actually have the money
And Stargate Project is... what exactly? What is the goal? To make Altman richer, or is there any more or less concrete goal to achieve?
Also, few items for comparison, that I googled while thinking about it:
- Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository: $96B
- ITER: $65B
- Hubble Space Telescope: $16B
- JWST: $11B
- LHC: $10B
Sources:
https://jameswebbtracker.com/jwst/budget
https://situational-awareness.ai/racing-to-the-trillion-doll...
Yes, a very interesting project; similar power output to an AP1000. Would have really changed the energy landscape to have such a deployable power station. https://econtent.unm.edu/digital/collection/nuceng/id/98/rec...
Perhaps.
For context see https://masdar.ae/en/news/newsroom/uae-president-witnesses-l... which is a bit further south than the bulk of Texas and has not yet been built; 5.2GW of panels, 19GWh of storage. I have seen suggestions on Linkedin that it will be insufficient to cover a portion of days over the winter, meaning backup power is required.
So I do question if OpenAI is able to make a profit, even if you remove training and R&D. The $20 plan may be more profitable, but now it will need to cover the R&D and training, plus whatever they lose on Pro.
Even when accounting for announced capacity expansion, the USA is currently on target to remain a very small player in the global market with announced capacity of 33GW/yr polysilicon, 13GW/yr ingots, 24GW/yr wafers, 49GW/yr cells and 83GW/yr modules (13GW/yr sovereign supply chain limitation).
In 2024, China completed sovereign manufacturing of ~540GW of modules[2] including all precursor polysilicon, ingots, wafers and cells. China also produced and exported polysilicon, ingots, wagers and cells that were surplus to domestic demand. Many factories in China's production chain are operating at half their maximum production capacity due to global demand being less than half of global manufacturing capacity.[3]
[1] https://seia.org/research-resources/solar-storage-supply-cha...
[2] Estimated figure extrapolated from Jan-Oct 2024 data (10 months). https://taiyangnews.info/markets/china-solar-pv-output-10m-2...
[3] https://dialogue.earth/en/business/chinese-solar-manufacture...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Also, "Dario Amodei says what he has seen inside Anthropic in the past few months leads him to believe that in the next 2 or 3 years we will see AI systems that are better than almost all humans at almost all tasks"
Regarding to your question, yes. I'd prefer a healthy counterbalance to what we have currently. Ideally, I'd prefer cooperation. A worldwide cooperation.
The intro paragraph in the original URL https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ mentions US/America for 5 times!
“Preprint out today that tests o1-preview's medical reasoning experiments against a baseline of 100s of clinicians.
In this case the title says it all:
Superhuman performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician
Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10849”. — Adam Rodman, a co-author of the paper https://x.com/AdamRodmanMD/status/186902305691786464
—-
Have you tried using o1 with a variety of problems?
The current situation with Russia and China seems caused by them becoming prosperous. In the 1960s in China and 1990s in Russia they were broke. Now they have money they can afford to put it into their militaries and try to attack the neighbours.
I'm reminded of the KAL cartoon on Russia https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8... That was from 2014. Already Russia is heading to the next panel in the cycle.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
https://apnews.com/article/wind-energy-offshore-turbines-tru...
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/trump-offshore-wind-leasing...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
The man has the moral system of a private prison and the money to build one.
Nice euphemism for giving people autonomy in their data and privacy.
Most of there companies are so large that they cannot really fail anymore. At this point it has very little to do with protecting themselves, more with making them more powerful than governments. JD Vance are said that the US could drop support for NATO if Europe tries to regulate X [1]. Oligarchs have fully infiltrated the US government and are trying to do the same to other countries.
I disagree with the grandparent. They don't support Trump because they do not want to be on his bad side (well, at least not only that), they support Trump because they see the opportunity to suppress regulation worldwide and become more powerful than governments.
We just keep making excuses (fiduciary duties, he just doesn't know how to wave his arm because he's an autist [2]). Why not just call it what it is?
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[2] Which is pretty offensive to people on the spectrum.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...
Re H.E.R phone - I see people already trying to build this type of product, one example: https://www.aphoneafriend.com
""" SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son has previously made large-scale investment commitments in the US off the back of Trump winning a presidential election. In 2016, Son announced a $50 billion SoftBank investment in the US, alongside a similar pledge to create 50,000 jobs in the country.
...
However, as reported by Reuters, it’s unclear if the new jobs pledged back in 2016 ever came to fruition and questions have been raised about how SoftBank, which had $29 billion in cash on its balance sheet according to its September earnings report, might fund the investment. """
- https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/softbank-pledges-...
Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Example: Cities are being presented a false choice between accepting deadly high speed chases vs zero criminal accountability [1], which in the world of drones seems silly [2]
I don't want the police to have unfettered access to surveil any and all citizens but putting camera access behind a court warrant issued by a civilian elected judge doesn't feel that dystopian to me.
Is that what Ellison was alluding to? I have no idea, but we are no longer in a world where we should disregard this prima facie.
[1]: https://www.ktvu.com/news/controversial-oakland-police-pursu...
[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-poli...
2) As mentioned in the chart label, earlier systems require manual symptom extraction.
3) An important point well articulated by a cancer genomics faculty member at Harvard:
“….Now, back to today: The newest generation of generative deep learning models (genAI) is different.
For cancer data, the reason these models hold so much potential is exactly the reason why they were not preferred in the first place: they make almost no explicit data assumptions.
These models are excellent at learning whatever implicit distribution from the data they are trained on
Such distributions don’t need to be explainable. Nor do they even need to be specified
When presented with tons of data, these models can just learn, internalize & understand…..”
More here: https://x.com/simocristea/status/1881927022852870372?s=61&t=...
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/11/03/violent-crime-...
Two Toshiba 4S reactors at the 50 MW version can cost about $3,000,000,000.
Two of those produces 100 MW.
They don't require refueling for around 30 years. $6,000,000,000 to power a 100 MW datacenter when we're talking about $500,000,000,000 is not too dramatic. Especially consider the amortized yearly cost.
Not this specificay but this kinda thing. If I am getting billions like this, I wanna keep this gravy going. And it comes from shareholders ultimately.
112 reactors.
A gigawatt each.
Over 10 years ago.
This is, in fact, a generalized experience: [0]
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/14/millenn...
This is disputed [1]. In reality, a handful of individuals have the capital to seed a half-a-trillion dollar megaproject, which then entails the project to raise capital from more people.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/musk-pours-cold-water-on-trump-back...
Your article is from 2019. We're now "wealthier than previous generations were at [our] age" [1].
[1] https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/millennials-personal-fi...
It's divided by whether you own real estate or equities.
Immigrant homeownership is starkly lower than native-born Americans' [1].
We're probably going to see a surge in that disparity, now, given the immigrant workforce that builds and renovates houses is in the process of being gutted. That increases the value of existing stock.
[1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/research/fi...
That being said, it seems to reference property owners. Hell, if I'd had the money to buy a house prior to the pandemic, I would have. I didn't because of constant reorgs at my employer at the time, which resulted in hiring freezes and reduced raises. The goal behind these was to make the company attractive to buyers. Eventually, they did find one: Oracle. They've since gutted what was a major employer for my region.
Since the pandemic housing has skyrocketed and pay hasn't kept up. It's been stagnant for 40 years while economic output has risen, along with COL [0].
Where'd all of the value go?
(that's a rhetorical question)
[0]https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/comparing-the-costs-...
It's not only Trump. Before leaving Biden already ordered the DoE and the DoD to lease sites for data centers and energy generation. The only reason we don't see a "Department of AI" or a "National AI Agency" is due to how the military industrial complex works, and a lot of lobbying I'm sure.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3295662/beijing-mee...
[2] https://www.insideglobaltech.com/2025/01/20/biden-administra...
[3] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/biden-doe-dod-lease-sites-a...
[4] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/21/1110269/there-ca...
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
2. There is no commitment to spend in a single year
3. There is no actual contractual commit here, this is a press release (i.e. Marketing)
4. There is not actually a $500B pile of gold being spent. This is more of a "this is how big we think this industry will be and how much we may spend to get exposure to that industry"
[1] https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
Stock price ! profitability, but you're still correct. UnitedHealth's operations have churned out cash each of the last four years [1], as have Cigna [2] and Elevance [3]. Underwriting gains across the industry have been strong for years [4]. The only story I can think of where American health insurers lost money was Aetna with its underpriced ACA plans [5].
That said, whimsicalism is also partly right in that insurers aren't the cause of the unaffordability of American healthcare. They by and large pay out most of their premiums. (With some variance.)
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UNH/cash-flow/
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CI/cash-flow/
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ELV/cash-flow/
[4] https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/2021-Annual-Hea...
[5] https://spia.princeton.edu/news/why-private-health-insurers-...
> If a subscriber pays them what they do, and they don't have money to pay a claim declared medically necessary by a medical doctor, but do have the money to forward to a retirement fund, they are charging too much.
If it is only legal to lose money on providing insurance, nobody would do it.
> Most of the rest of the industrialized world seems to grasp this concept, and their people live longer.
I agree that there are problems with cost/performance in our healthcare market. I think it is largely due to overutilization & misallocation, combined with some poor genetic/cultural luck around opioids and obesity.
0: https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/industry-analys...
You'd think the healthy working population wouldn't be that much of a burden to care for as well, but they have to go out of pocket and get insurance to provide for themselves after providing for everyone else.
There is a lot of graft going on for this to be the case. It may not be the fault of insurance companies but someone is stealing a great deal of money from the American people.
Now here's the million dollar question; are you aware of this obvious fact? Have you ever heard someone frame the socialized medicine debate in this way: "If we could be as efficient as the UK we could give you free healthcare AND cut your taxes!". If not, why not?
[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...
[0]https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
The problem here being that it was money spent that was never earned back, and money that eventually had to be paid back, right?
This can also happen with private capital. 2008 was a bust caused by private banks, for example. AI hasn't proven to be profitable yet [1], and I'm not sure it'll makes a difference, for the success of projects like this, wether the money is coming from government or not.
In fact, if the 2008 bank bail-out, auto industry bail-out, the Silicon Valley bank prop-up, and other such actions by the US government are considered [2], if this turns out to be a bubble it will be taxpayers who end up fronting the bill.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ai-generative-business-mone...
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/governmen...
As far as I am aware the only information from within OpenAI one way or another is from their financial documents circulated to investors:
> The fund-raising material also signaled that OpenAI would need to continue raising money over the next year because its expenses grew in tandem with the number of people using its products.
Subscriptions are the lions share of their revenue (73%). It's possible they are making money on the average Plus or Enterprise subscription but given the above claim they definitely aren't making enough to cover the cost of inference for free users.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/openai-chatgpt...
[0]https://www.vox.com/2014/9/4/6104533/the-125-percent-solutio...
[1]https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries/summ...
[2]https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/hey-big-spenders-phar...
Economies of scale should make them cheaper. An MRI machine and technician that sits there unused half the day has to charge more per visit than one used all day long. Have too many customers? Get more machines and techs, now the MRI manufacturer is making more units, offering volume discounts...
Rationing of care doesn't explain why the individual units of care are themselves much more expensive. Compare inhaler prices in Canada vs the US, $10 in Canada $100 here[0], that isn't because too many of them are given out. It's theft.
Addendum: Further, the young and healthy ration their care quite a bit under the current system, they are taxed too heavily (to pay for the care of the elderly) to afford it for themselves so they go without.
[0]https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/...
If you look at the original video [1], starting at 1:09:00, he's talking specifically about police body/dashcams recording interactions with citizens during callouts and stops, not everyone all the time as that article strongly implies. The USA already decided to record what police see all the time during these events, so there's no new privacy issue posed by anything he's suggesting. The question is only how those videos are used. In particular, he points out that police are allowed to turn off bodycams for privacy reasons (e.g. bathroom breaks), which is a legitimate need but it can also be abused, and AI can fix this loophole.
In the same segment he also proposes using AI to watch CCTV at schools in real time to trigger instant response if someone pulls out a gun, and using AI to spot wildfires using drones. For some reason the media didn't condemn those ideas, just the part about supervising cop stops. How curious.
[1] https://www.oracle.com/events/financial-analyst-meeting-2024...
Since when does "private capital" speak in such honeyed tones to state powers?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/21/tech/openai-oracle-softbank-t...
you need someone willing shop and pick the cheaper options for competition to bring down prices. You also need someone willing to say "that's too expensive, I wont buy it" and walk away. Same is true for the inhalers. If someone will pay $100 before switching to the generic, that is what they get charged. In Canada, the state is only willing to pay $10, so that is the price. This is the demand side of the problem.
There is also a supply problem, where the state provides medical company monopolies through "certification of need". It is basically illegal to open an MRI clinic that would compete with an existing one in many jurisdictions.
https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/medical-imaging/magneti...
- there is a shortage of housing
- predatory loans for higher education
- chronic health crisis due to terrible government health policy and guidelines
- globalization has led to an international labor market
The last point may be bad for many Americans but an unequivocal good for the world. Global poverty has seen an incredible drop in the past 70 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:Wo...
[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musks-drug-becoming-problem-...
If you've taken a couple of lectures about AI, you've probably been taught not to anthropomorphize your own algorithms, especially given how the masses think of AI (in terms of Skynet, Cortana, "Her", Ex Machina, etc). It encourages people to mistake the capabilities of the models and ascribe to them all of the traits of AI they've seen in TV and movies.
Sam has ignored that advice, and exploited the hype that can be generated by doing so. He even tried to mimic the product in "Her", down to the voice [0]. The old board said his "outright lying" made it impossible to trust him [1]. That behavior raises eyebrows, even if he's got a legitimate product.
[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-gpt-4o-chatgpt-artificial...
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166713/openai-helen-ton...
Well, this one is really simple - nothing of note will happen in the US in the next four years without giving Trump credit for it, because if you don't he'll turn the full power of the state against you. And with no checks on his power, there's nothing to stop him. So yes, this has nothing to do with Trump, but if you don't want to get arrested and harassed, you better give him credit for it. Same playbook Elena Ceausescu used, except she did it just for scientific papers, Trump will do it for everything.
https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/d5f32ef28464d01f195827b...
Furthermore, they became #4 GDP PPP last year and and were reclassified as a high income country.
https://www.intellinews.com/russia-s-economy-is-booming-3289...
The poorer regions are actually benefiting from high contract salaries. How sustainable that is, guess we'll see.
1) Build fully autonomous cars so there are zero deaths from car accidents. This is ~45K deaths/year (just US!) and millions of injuries. Annual economic cost of crashes is $340 billion. Worldwide the toll is 10 - 100x?
2) Put solar on top of all highways.
3) Give money to all farmers to put solar.
4) Build transmission.
And many more ...
The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $27 billion in 2023): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
Automation. Consider the number of jobs today that one can do singly today that didn't even exist then.
> W2 vs. 1099 and/or business owners? 99.78% to 0.22% roughly?
There are about 165 million workers in the American labour force [1]. There are 33 million small businesses [2]. Given 14% have no employees [3], we have a lower bound of 5 million business owners in America, or 3% of the labour force.
Add to that America's 65 million freelancers and you have 2 out of 5 Americans not working for a boss. (Keep in mind, we're ignoring every building, plumber or design shop that has even a single employee in these figures.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_force_in_the_United_Stat...
[2] https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/state-of-small-busi...
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/22/a-look-at...
But yeah, let's make sure we squeeze every drop out of those college students, they should have understood their loan terms.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/10/27/repo...
Why take that at face value? Its generally used for wage suppression[0][1] by big companies (not only in tech) and due to how its structured, creates an unhealthy power balance between employers and H1B employees
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-024-05823-8
[1]: https://www.paularnesen.com/blog/the-h-1b-visa-corporate-ame...
Extropic update on building the ultimate substrate for generative AI https://twitter.com/Extropic_AI/status/1820577538529525977
[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/gjyffoqd/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
> Insane thing: we are currently losing money on OpenAI pro subscriptions! people use it much more than we expected.
But as I said, I'm glad to hear that unconditional cash is gaining traction with those folks, as I think it not only gives someone financial resources but also trust.
> And this trust — another resource it’s difficult to measure — is the aspect of gifts that many have said they value most.
The above is an excerpt from MacKenzie Scott's essay, "No Dollar Signs This Time." [0] I really appreciate the approach she is taking, which seems to be especially embracing the uncertainty of it all and trusting people to do what they believe is best.
[0]: https://yieldgiving.com/essays/no-dollar-signs-this-time
It actually reminds me of an essay I wrote years ago called "The Subjective Adjective" [0] (wow, I wrote it 10 years ago!) The premise is that we take how we subjectively feel and then transform it into an objective statement on reality, overlooking how subjective it really is.
Anyways, I agree some of these conversations seem to devolve into definitional debates that may not get at the real point.
I think I also replied to a different comment thinking it was you—identity and conversational continuation, an aspect of context so often hidden/lacking on HN.
In general, I agree with you that a policy could be equal/fair as in giving everyone an equal amount of X, and that the unfair part is where people are in life. I actually liked the idea of charging a flat tax across the US and then having people voluntarily pay the tax for those who couldn't pay it, because I agree, I would see the tax as fair but the wealth inequality as unfair and one way to rectify that is for people to voluntarily rebalance the wealth. But yeah, I'm sure tons of people would see that as unfair.
I really don't know lol.
Putin growing concerned by Russia’s economy, as Trump pushes for Ukraine deal https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-growing-concerned...
Also basically the whole western world are progressively sanctioning them eg. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-imposes-new-wave-of-sa... and https://kyivindependent.com/us-likely-to-sanction-russia-if-...
Plus the war is expensive. Plus Ukraine's main strategy at the moment seems to be to take out their oil and related industries using drones https://www.newsweek.com/russia-map-shows-critical-infrastru...
I'm not sure it's going to change unless there is some sort of deal or Putin goes.
[1] https://www.stern.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/assets/documen...
Her face and arms began to swell, and whitey's on the moon.
I can't pay no doctor bills, but whitey's on the moon.
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still, while whitey's on the moon.
The man just upped my rent last night, cause whitey's on the moon.
No hot water, no toilets, no lights, but whitey's on the moon.
I wonder why he's upping me? Cause whitey's on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week with whitey on the moon.
Taxes taking my whole damn check, junkies making me a nervous wreck,
the price of food is going up, and as if all that shit wasn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell, with whitey on the moon.
Her face and arm began to swell, and whitey's on the moon.
Was all that money I made last year for whitey on the moon?
How come I ain't got no money here? Hmm! Whitey's on the moon.
Y'know I just 'bout had my fill of whitey on the moon.
I think I'll send these doctor bills
airmail special
to whitey on the moon.
—Gilbert Scott-Heron
This shows the average total owed by graduate students is much higher than undergraduates, about 3x. https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/student-loans/avera... So just spitballing here, if there are more than 3x undergraduates than graduate students, and the same number have loans, the undergraduate debt is higher overall.
But then there's this showing the median being closer to only 2x different https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/18/facts-abo...
The long rise of for profit undergraduate institutions until quite recently says it was extremely profitable to get students into debt for questionable education value, it's almost like payday loan shops, just preying on different segment of population.
https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2022/01/how-universi...
I don't think traditional public or private four year universities are blameless, either, raising tuition to match this endlessly rising loans guaranteed by Federal government with spiraling administrative system costs.
Even though the cost is high I thought in the USA the number of med school students is restricted to a very small number.
This reminded me of https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
I don't consider models suddenly lifting off and acquiring 1000 times human intelligence to be a realistic outcome. To my understanding, that belief is usually based around the idea that if you have a model that can refine its own architecture, say by 20%, then the next iteration can use that increased capacity to refine even further, say an additional 20%, leading to exponential growth. But that ignores diminishing returns; after obvious inefficiencies and low-hanging fruit are taken care of, squeezing out even an extra 10% is likely beyond what the slightly-better model is capable of.
I do think it's possible to fight against diminishing returns and chip away towards/past human-level intelligence, but it'll be through concerted effort (longer training runs of improved architectures with more data on larger clusters of better GPUs) and not an overnight explosion just from one researcher somewhere letting an LLM modify its own code.
> can humanity trust the power hungry billionaire CEOs to understand the danger and choose a path for maximum safety
Those power-hunger billionaire CEOs who shall remain nameless, such as Altman and Musk, are fear-mongering about such a doomsday. Goal seems to be regulatory capture and diverting attention away from the more realistic issues like use for employee surveillance[0].
Allegedly almost half of their defense budget since the war began was funded through private forced loans issues by banks directly to (effectively state owned?) military contractors. So that's not reflected in their military budget.
Also I doubt Russia could borrow a lot on the international markets even if they wanted to. Certainly not cheaply (like the US or especially Eurozone countries)
> And PPP is the number that matters - its one of the big factors which governs quality of life
Again... Russia's GDP per capita is still quite low (even if significantly higher than nominal).
Also if your nominal GDP is inflated by defence spending and energy exports and you multiply it with PPP (i.e. consumer price index) what exactly do you get?
> PPP is the number
Metrics adjusted by PPP might. What do you mean by PPP as such? The multiplier itself? https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PPPC.RF?most_rec...
Generally low prices indicate that the country is poor overall.
> its one of the big factors which governs quality of life,
PPP adjusted GDP per capita? Really? That's certainly not the best indicator of those things (even if there is strong correlation overall).
Do you think a median person in Ireland is 30% better off than the average Swiss or 2x better off than the average German?
Anyway, going back to Russia. If e.g. $100 comes in into the country through energy exports and is spent making bombs and other equipment what fraction do you think trickles down to the local economy?
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Uyghur_unrest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_2013_Bachu_unrest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict#1990s_to_200...