OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors, including from the United Arab Emirates, to raise between $5 trillion to $7 trillion in funding. The goal, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is to increase the world’s chip manufacturing capacity and enhance AI capabilities.

The fundraising efforts are part of a broader strategy to address OpenAI’s growth constraints, particularly the scarcity of AI chips needed for training large language models like ChatGPT.

Altman’s proposal is said to include forming a partnership with investors, chip manufacturers, and power providers to finance the construction of chip foundries, which would then be operated by the chip manufacturers.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      It may not reflect some of the weirdness, but it illustrates the absurdity of the scale well.

      Some other comparisons: It’s about a third of all US economic activity

      It’s about fifteen times more than the total economic activity around all electronic chips.

      It’s five to seven times more money than all the nations’ military spending combined.

      Even adjusted for inflation, it’s about 20 to 30 times more money than spent on all the Apollo missions combined.

      Adjusted for inflation, it’s about six to nine times the amount spent on the new deal.

      This is a stupid amount of money no matter how you account with nothing close to compare.

    • smb@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      yeah, thats exactly what i am saying, most of the money ever printed sits in places it will never leave, so IMO there are no 5trillion available on the market and the cash flow does not allow to take out even a “little” bit (speaking in 1e12 terms) before things collapse for the majority.

      oh yes, printing money works exactly like that, it was just printed in the past and nowadays they just increase numbers in databases: plopp and the value of that currency and especially everything that is bound to it decreases, ripping you of what you have saved without even touching your bank account.

      • Unforeseen@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        Over 6 trillion USD alone gets exchanged everyday on the currency markets. Cash flow is not the only source of money either, its an interface when value needs to be exchanged.

        Open cash flow worldwide is about 35 trillion.

        This is just cash though, if you take all markets and derivitives, depending on how you measure it - if you want to be technical about represented value then that’s worth over a quadrillion USD.

        When you talk about reallocation of assets you are playing in the pool of a quadrillion dollars, not in the pool of free cash flow (the interface to it)

        • Twentytwodividedby7@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Exactly right, no one is going to show up with a fleet of cargo planes full of cash lol. It’s a huge amount of money, but if you have several nations investing, plus private business, it could happen - long shot, but it isn’t limited by the amount of cash that exists. He’s basically talking about starting a massive industry in the US that only exists in Japan and Taiwan.

        • smb@lemmy.ml
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          9 months ago

          quadrillion you say…

          yes, banksters like to create bubbles, inflate, trade with them until all value was extracted, let the bubble burst and then let all bus drivers and other low income people pay for the loss which is the gain of some parasites.

          quadrillion… bubble->add some time->burst

          if we have both two dollars, one for security and one for trading. we both “invest” in buying call orders from each other for a dollar and repeat it a billion times on the same day then we creates a “cash flow” of two billion dollars alone, yet the value behind it was less than 2 dollars.

          that is what high performance traders do, they sell/buy thousands of times per second, creating the illusion of cash flow and worth, yet their actions have negative value, destabilize the market on the long run to create illusion of worth. but that illusion is very welcome as it blinds people and let them believe and invest which then can again be harvested until the bubble bursts…

          lets remove two dollars from my above example… i have now only one dollar for trading so do you. but none for security. would you buy a call-option from someone without security? no. so wont i. thus remove 2 dollars (half of them) and 2 billion dollars of cash flow cease to exist on that day alone!! well, the next day looks the same then. lol. guess that would be called a collapse that 'nobody could have foreseen". lol.

          7 trillion usd is roundabout half of the worldwide existing usd in 2017 (cash and database money, no debts, no could-be-printed, no needs-to-equaled-later) that is if wikipedia is correct and i did not miscalculate the ‘trillion’ which is just a sloppy ‘billion’ here. And further more the “worth” of the really ‘existing’ usd looks to me like a huge bubble by itself waiting to burst some day, but that is not the point or discussion here.

          lets just hope that this “quadrillion bubble” you seem to be fond of does not burst too soon. there are still some resources to be ripped of from earth, some countries that could be enslavelaboured just to postpone the burst of that bubble, so the wave of destruction could carry that bubble for another generation maybe and we are sort of “safe”, but not sure. thus maybe lets hope it bursts rather sooner than later preserving some resources and preventing huge amount of hurt and damage from beeing done while leaving chance for a more stable bubble-free world without manmade intentionally created crisises just to let “others” pay for it.

          intentionally created illusions are in total the most costly “realities” ;-)