How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

Will Sam Altman's fall be as legendary as Sam Bankman-Fried's?

They'll have to come in and redo all the work that people put onto LLMs as actual engineering software. The number of features I've worked on that could have been done with normal computing practices but instead shoehorned in bad AI to make decisions/routing logic is too high.

If it pops, some ai engineers will need to start doing some normal work again, and rest of us... we just continue doing what we were doing for past decades.

Or maybe not, nobody knows the future any more then next guy in line.

Here is a charitable perspective on what's happening:

- Nvidia has too much cash because of massive profits and has nowhere to reinvest them internally.

- Nvidia instead invests in other companies that use their gpus by providing them deals that must be spent on nvidia products.

- This accelerates the growth of these companies, drives further lock in to nvidia's platform, and gives nvidia an equity stake in these companies.

- Since growth for these companies is accelerated, future revenue will be brought forward for nvidia and since these investments must be spent on nvidia gpus it drives further lock in to their platform.

- Nvidia also benefits from growth due to the equity they own.

This is all dependent on token economics being or becoming profitable. Everything seems to indicate that once the models are trained, they are extremely profitable and that training is the big money drain. If these models become massively profitable (or at least break even) then I don't see how this doesn't benefit Nvidia massively.

This is such a strange article -- there's nothing particularly unusual going on here.

The first example basically stands in for all of them -- Microsoft invests $13B in OpenAI, and OpenAI spends $13B on Azure. This is literally just OpenAI purchasing Microsoft cloud usage with OpenAI's stock rather than its cash. There is nothing unusual, illicit, or deceptive about this. This is entirely normal. You can finance your spending through debt or equity. They're financing through equity, as most startups do, and they presumably get a better deal (better rates, more guaranteed access) via Microsoft than via other random investors and then buying the cloud compute retail from Microsoft.

This isn't deceiving any investors. This is all out in the open. And it's entirely normal business practice. Nothing of this is an indicator of a bubble or anything.

Or take the deal with Oracle -- Oracle is building data centers for OpenAI, with the guarantee that OpenAI will use them. That's just... a regular business deal. What is even newsworthy about this? NYT thinks these are "circular" deals, but by this logic every deal is a "circular" deal, because both sides benefit. This is just... normal capitalism.