The Most Exciting Thing About Altman’s Chip Dream

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stole the show last week with a report that he is trying to raise trillions of dollars in capital to develop and manufacture AI chips. But let’s set aside our collective incredulity for a moment (we’ll come back to it!) and consider the implication of Altman’s fundraising: that unlimited computing power will lead to all-powerful AI. 

In other words, he believes the only thing standing in the way of artificial superintelligence—software that could help us colonize Mars or solve global warming on Earth—is a shortage of servers.

Altman is not alone in holding this view, but it’s far from universally accepted. Four years ago, OpenAI published a paper on “scaling laws” in the field of large language models. Those laws, or principles, state that training LLMs on more computing power and data improves their capabilities in predictable ways. Following those principles pushed LLM developers like OpenAI to spend over $100 million on training a single model.