OpenAI's hunger for computing power

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-sam-altman-asia-middle-east-7b660809

by doener • 10 months ago

120 90 10 months ago

wsj.com

neonate• 10 months ago

https://archive.md/OnsLK

vineyardmike• 10 months ago

What is their angle with this?

Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years? I’m sure the researchers there would love to do more research, with more compute, faster, but 20+x growth is not a practical expectation.

Is the goal here to create a mad rush to build data centers, which should decrease their costs with more supply? Do they just want governments to step in and to help somehow? Is it part of marketing/hype? Is this trying to project confidence to investors on future revenue expectations?

refulgentis• 10 months ago

Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years?

He does, or at least, he believes if its plausible they should attempt to.

We live in odd times. It sort of reminds me of Feb 2020. All you really needed to know was the Rt and rest was just math. Who knows if it'll matter or pencil out in a decade, but, it's completely reasonable at these growth rates and with the iron laws known to keep scaling.

p1esk• 10 months ago

Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years?

If their goal is to train say, a 100T model on the whole youtube dataset they will need 20000x more compute. And that would be my goal if I were him.

bix6• 10 months ago

Why 20000x more compute? I thought they were at approx 1T with current compute?

Edit: looked it up. 10k+ times more for training compute. Sheesh. Get the Dyson sphere ready lol.

Drblessing3• 10 months ago

That would be awesome.

zingerlio• 10 months ago

The AI bubble bursts when he stumbles to get that money.

indolering2• 10 months ago

In the early days of Bitcoin, we would argue security models and laugh about Bitcoin mining taking some significant percentage of global power supply. It's been giving around 1% for a while now despite the supply falling off.

I wouldn't put bets on what the outer limits for AI are going to be. However, it's a huge productivity boost across a huge range of workflows. Models are still making large gains as they become more sophisticated.

If I had Sam Altman's access to other people's capital, I would be making large bets that it will keep growing.

skywhopper• 10 months ago

He needs 11 figures of cash injected as soon as possible. The people who can give it want a big return. Given the current losses, the only way to make the math right is to lie outrageously about what’s possible.

karmakurtisaani• 10 months ago

He's been kicking this can for years now. Looking forward to the day he's forced to stop.

pram• 10 months ago

Perceptually, it helps to take scrutiny off the current spend? It isn't a bubble if you can just scoff at $100 billion and say like" "thats pocket change, this will actually require 10 quadrillion dollars!!"

ants_everywhere• 10 months ago

If they want to survive they need to outrun Google and have a differentiated service. Which as of now it's not clear that OpenAI will have a reason to exist in the near future with Anthropic and Google.

They're likely betting on either training a model so big they can't be ignored or possibly focusing more B2B which means lots of compute to resell.

CuriouslyC• 10 months ago

If their plan was to go toe to toe with Google as a foundation model/inference provider they would 100% be getting ground to dust, that's not a winnable fight. There's a reason they've pivoted to product and retained Jony Ive.

Anthropic gets a TON of hate on social media, their models are fragile, their infra is poorly managed, they're 100% going to end up in Jeff's pocket. OpenAI is a survivor.

arthurofbabylon• 10 months ago

The phrase you are looking for is “commodifying the periphery.” As adjacent bottlenecks open up, the bottleneck you control becomes more valuable.

tim333• 10 months ago

My guess:

Altman figures AI will be a big deal and constrained by avaiable compute.

If he locks in all the available compute and related finance before the competition then he's locked in as the #1 AI company.

I'm not sure 20x or 5x or 40x matters, nor revenue expectations, so much as being ahead of the competition.

commodore646464• 10 months ago

Sounds like the commodore playbook from the 80s

jgalt212• 10 months ago

What is their angle with this?

My pet theory: Sam makes more money when OpenAI spends than when OpenAI earns.

Szpadel• 10 months ago

I believe it is because of RL you are no longer limited by training data as you generate it during learning on the fly so benchmark driven learning could scale with compute

they also seem to assume that everyone will use AI from them in the future, especially with new "pulse" combined with ads. scaling this will need much more compute.

is this reasonable? I'm not convinced, but this is how I believe it's their reasoning

Tubelord• 10 months ago

Pascal’s wager applied to tech cycles. The fervent adherence to the hype is akin to religious zealots in many ways

matt-p5• 10 months ago

I think they could probably 'use' 10X. There are rumours that one of the reasons they're not shipping the new Jonny Ive device is that they haven't got the compute for it. If you need 10X probably better to ask for 20x and have a glut than ask for 10x and have a shortage.

lemonlearnings3• 10 months ago

https://archive.is/OnsLK

lemonlearnings3• 10 months ago

Too big to fail is the goal. If the world is powered by openai but it aint making a profit in 2028 they can just put their "were a utility like water" facemask on and get bailed out.

kortilla• 10 months ago

That’s a fun trope but it’s a terrible outcome for shareholders.

jacquesm• 10 months ago

Good.

avs733• 10 months ago

Which means it will be made into a terrible outcome for everyone.

throwaway290• 10 months ago

shareholders like a business that can never fail...

lemonlearnings3• 10 months ago

Less terrible than being allow to go bust though.

stevenwoo• 10 months ago

At least in the USA, I think if consumers realized their power bills going up every year are tied to these new data centers, there would be more opposition to data centers going up politically. https://apnews.com/article/electricity-prices-data-centers-a... I don't know if the electricity markets work differently in other countries.

MountDoom• 10 months ago

Taxpayers subsidize data centers in many other ways. These are prestige projects for politicians, so they often get long-term tax breaks and other preferential treatment.

I think it's part vanity, part a misunderstanding about the economic benefits of a datacenter (which are nearly nil, as they employ very few people and produce nothing for the local market), and part just a desire to score brownie points with wealthy corporations, which might mean donations, campaign support, or other perks for the politician who makes it happen.

noosphr3• 10 months ago

The power bill going up is because the US, and the West in general, bet on renewables and a low energy future.

Neither of those things turn out to be a good fit for the new economy. The only thing left for people who derided nuclear for the last 40 years is to hope this is a bubble that sends us back to the 17th century when it pops. Anything else means we have to invest trillions in nuclear right now.

omcnoe• 10 months ago

The US needs sufficient energy surplus to power industry. US energy production has been essentially flat for the past 25 years and the country has forgot how to bring new capacity online. Chinese energy production is up over 6x over the same period. China has more clean energy generation capacity today than their entire capacity a little over a decade ago.

Instead of panicking about data center electricity usage we need to be worrying about getting back to a state where we regularly bring new (clean) generation capacity online.

fooker2• 10 months ago

It's correlated to be data centers, not tied to. That's an important difference.

We could easily build ..say.. 10 nuclear reactors and halve the utility bills with amortization.

chermi• 10 months ago

That's not the main problem. That's the convenient scapegoat so we don't get mad about the real problem. Power bills have been going up for years. We're just not good at generating and serving sufficient energy. Our grid sucks, our utilities suck and can do whatever they want, and we can't build anything. And the grid problems get worse as we add renewables as they have to manage more complex generation profiles. (I'm all for renewables, love solar.)

nakamoto_damacy• 10 months ago

[flagged]

nebula8804• 10 months ago

Its cheap because you aren't paying the full cost, you are externalizing some of the costs onto others.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jNFemZpMadU

Drblessing3• 10 months ago

The AI-powered tiktok competitor is not going to be cheap on compute

banandys• 10 months ago

I mean yeah we all saw the video of him stealing gpus and getting arrested

bgwalter• 10 months ago

40% of global DRAM output:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

All for creating worthless TikTok videos with Sora 2, while we don't get graphics cards and DRAM and our electricity prices rise.

Trump will get another "win" for "his" Stargate project. The meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung was NOT arranged by Altman, he is the messenger boy:

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/samsung-sk-hy...

johnnienaked5• 10 months ago

And our water runs out, and we pollute and destroy the planet past the point of no return.

AI will fix it though?

logtempo• 10 months ago

Hey, at least you'll be able to add that exterminated tigre specie in your postcard from your last adventure trip. And more water to that river, with some greener trees etc.

All of that without leaving your home ofc.

panta• 10 months ago

Of course. According to Andreessen if you are not optimistic and worry about the environment are an "enemy" for the bright future ahead (while at the same time he puts Nick Land in the list of the "Saints"). These people are deranged psychopaths, why are we leaving them at the wheel?

mhh__• 10 months ago

I believe the latest project is to teleport the water to Mars, after all it must be disappearing

tejasvi883• 10 months ago

It is destruction from whose point of view? Life will find its way. If AI actually elevates humanity as promised, climate change would be just another adaptation challenge.

matt-p5• 10 months ago

It's even affecting raspberry Pis! Criminal.

Incipient• 10 months ago

Is it just me, or does this extreme demand for compute imply they've realised the core tech is mostly stagnant, and needs compute to possibly scale towards anything AGI-like? (however unlikely that is).

general1465• 10 months ago

I see it the same way. It is like automotive manufacturer who is using bigger engines with more and more pistons and wondering how much bigger engine next model iteration will need to make it go faster and how many iterations until they will finally break the sound barrier. However their product is looking like a school-bus box on wheels which is going to rip itself apart long before even reaching the sound barrier.

adventured• 10 months ago

They're substantially tied down by demand/usage right now.

How much more compute would they need to allow all of their paying users unlimited access to their best model? And to enable that setup in such a way that it's actually very fast.

The answer: they need resources far beyond what they have now. That's just to solve an existing problem.

Then throw in Sora 4 and whatever else will exist in a few years, and the need to feed that monster. They couldn't come close to allowing Sora 2 unlimited for all of their paying customers - I'd hate to see what that would require.

Then let the AI begin world building for every user (which is where this is going). It'll be decades before the resource demands actually flatten globally (at least 20-30 years, to get to global population saturation on usage; assuming the global population will begin to rapidly slow and then shrink).

Hint: the solution to Fermi's Paradox is that we go into the box and we never come back out, because it's a lot more interesting for 99.9%+ of humanity than a bunch of repeating rocks in space that take a zillion years to reach. The core purpose of AI will be to world build for us, mentally (relaxation, stimulation, entertainment, social) in we go: the end. The same thing happens to any advanced beings that get to our level, there's little to nothing out there that we can reach of interest (and no, it doesn't matter if the HN crowd disagrees, what matters for this outcome are the masses), we'll definitely figure that out, and there's infinite stimulation/experience in the machine world by contrast.

tejasvi883• 10 months ago

Or maybe our universe represents the dregs of what once was a vibrant dense universe teeming with life, working hard to maximize entropy. We are like the end stage bacteria relegated to do a deep clean.

Ultimately there appears to be no purpose of life apart from child rearing for the majority. There's subconscious hope that kids might eventually figure it out for the rest of us. The only thing constant is the increase in entropy. At least that is what bound to happen. Should the purpose be accelerating that process or joining the resistance?

buyucu4• 10 months ago

Why does OpenAI need so much more compute than everybody else? DeepSeek, Qwen and many others build competitive models that need much less capital.

credit_guy2• 10 months ago

Most likely OpenAI has models at least as efficient as DeepSeek or Qwen. Cerebras offers both GPT-OSS-120B and Qwen3-235B-Instruct. Obviously, the second has twice as many parameters as the first, but that's the closest comparison I can find. The Qwen model is twice as large, but twice as slow (1400 tokens/second vs 3000) and 50% more expensive ($1.2 per million tokens vs $0.75). Now, OpenAI is running a proprietary model, and most likely it is much optimized than the free version they release for public use.

[1] https://inference-docs.cerebras.ai/models/overview

buyucu4• 10 months ago

Inference is not the main cost driver, training and research is.

yorwba• 10 months ago

Chinese companies need to pay much higher prices for the same GPUs, so they would need to charge more to make a profit, but it's difficult to charge more unless they have a much better product. So building massive data centers to gain market share is riskier for them.

That said, Alibaba not releasing the weights for Qwen3-Max and announcing $53 billion in AI infrastructure spending https://www.reuters.com/world/china/alibaba-launches-qwen3-m... suggests that they think they're now at a point where it makes sense to scale up. (The Reuters article mentions data centers in several countries, which I assume also helps work around high GPU prices in China.)

Circling back to OpenAI: I don't think they're spending so much on infrastructure just because they want to train bigger models on more data, but moreso because they want to serve those bigger models to more customers using their services more intensively.

lvl155• 10 months ago

They’re trying to lock out competition from accessing compute.

matt-p5• 10 months ago

Because they have more distribution than anyone else? Pretty much everyone uses chat.com but almost no-body uses deepseek.

buyucu4• 10 months ago

my company runs on deepseek stack. we might move to qwen

halJordan• 10 months ago

They dont, your question is just as wrong as asking, "Why does LockheedMartin need so many material science engineers? Chengdu Aircraft makes fighters with 10x fewer"

selinkocalar• 10 months ago

The compute requirements for these models are getting wild!! We're already seeing costs become a real constraint for smaller companies trying to build AI features.

And if you're building anything serious with AI, you're basically dependent on a handful of cloud providers who control the GPU supply.

OpenAI's hunger for computing power

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