'I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff': professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI

[dalton99a]

4. +1. Altman wants to be the next Elon Musk

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-dollars-to-reshape-business-of-chips-and-ai-89ab3db0

Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI
OpenAI chief pursues investors including the U.A.E. for a project possibly requiring up to $7 trillion
By Keach Hagey and Asa Fitch
Feb. 8, 2024 9:00 pm ET

The OpenAI chief executive officer is in talks with investors including the United Arab Emirates government to raise funds for a wildly ambitious tech initiative that would boost the world's chip-building capacity, expand its ability to power AI, among other things, and cost several trillion dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. The project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion, one of the people said.

The fundraising plans, which face significant obstacles, are aimed at solving constraints to OpenAI's growth, including the scarcity of the pricey AI chips required to train large language models behind AI systems such as ChatGPT. Altman has often complained that there aren't enough of these kinds of chips -- known as graphics processing units, or GPUs -- to power OpenAI's quest for artificial general intelligence, which it defines as systems that are broadly smarter than humans. Such a sum of investment would dwarf the current size of the global semiconductor industry. Global sales of chips were $527 billion last year and are expected to rise to $1 trillion annually by 2030. Global sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment -- the costly machinery needed to run chip factories -- last year were $100 billion, according to an estimate by the industry group SEMI.

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