Wouldn't 500bn into quantum computing show better returns for civilization? Assuming it's about progress and ... not money.
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Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
421–430 of 1001 posts
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#422Wasn’t this announced months ago? I feel like it was. https://www.techradar.com/pro/could-amd-be-the-key-to-micros...
yeah, it sounds like they're just relabeling an existing plan
> Ellison noted that the data centers are already under construction with 10 being built so far.
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#423Any clues to how they plan to invest $500 billion dollars? What infrastructure are they planning that will cost that much?
That was literally my question. Is this basically just for more datacenters, NVidia chips, and electricity with a sprinkling of engineers to run it all? If so, then that $500bn should NOT be invested in today's tech, but instead in making more powerful and power efficient chips, IMO.
Nvidia and TSMC are already working on more powerful and efficient chips, but the physical limits to scaling mean lots more power is going to be used in each new generation of chips. They might improve by offering specific features such as FP4, but Moore's law is still dead.
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#424"create hundreds of thousands of American jobs"... Given the current educational system in the US, this should be fun to watch. Oh yeah, Musk and his H-1B Visa thing. Now it's making sense.
Data centers are nearly all blue collar work.
If you're familiar with this kind of work, please elaborate!
Do you mean building the centers or maintenance or both?
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#425I'm confused and a bit disturbed; honestly having a very difficult time internalizing and processing this information. This announcement is making me wonder if I'm poorly calibrated on the current progress of AI development and the potential path forward. Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure…
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
My sense anecdotally from within the space is yes people are feeling like we most likely have a "straight shot" to AGI now. Progress has been insane over the last few years but there's been this lurking worry around signs that the pre-training scaling paradigm has diminishing returns.
What recent outputs like o1, o3, DeepSeek-R1 are showing is that that's fine, we now have a new paradigm around test-time compute. For various reasons people think this is going to be more scalable and not run into the kind of data issues you'd get with a pre-training paradigm.
You can definitely debate on whether that's true or not but this is the first time I've been really seeing people think we've cracked "it", and the rest is scaling, better training etc.
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way I think about this project, along with all of Trump's plans, is that he wants to maximize the US's economic output to ensure we are competitive with China in the future. Yes, it would make money for stockholders. But it's much more than that: it's an empire-scale psychological game for leverage in the future.
> he wants to maximize the US's economic output to ensure we are competitive with China in the future. LOL Under Trump policies, China will win "in the future" on energy and protein production alone. Once we've speedrunned our petro supply and exhausted our agricultural inputs with unfathomably inefficient protein production, China can sit back and watch us crumble under our own starvation. No conflict necessary unde…
> Once we've speedrunned our petro supply and exhausted our agricultural inputs with unfathomably inefficient protein production, China can sit back and watch us crumble under our own starvation.
China is the largest importer of crude oil in the world. China imports 59% of its oil consumptions, and 80% of food products. Meanwhile, US is fully self sufficient on both food and oil.
> They're playing the game on a scale of centuries
Is that why they are completely broke, having built enough ghost buildings that house entire population of France - 65 million vacant units? Is that why they are now isolated in geopolitics, having allied with Russia and pissed off all their neighbors and Europe?
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#427How likely is success when 4 or more other massive companies work together on a project? Seems like a lot of chefs in the kitchen..
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me avoid the use of the word AGI here because the term is a little too loaded for me these days. 1) reasoning capabilities in latest models are rapidly approaching superhuman levels and continue to scale with compute. 2) intelligence at a certain level is easier to achieve algorithmically when the hardware improves. There's also a larger path to intelligence and often simpler mechanisms 3) most current generation…
You can't block AGI on a whim and then deploy 'superhuman' without justification. A calculator is superhuman if you're prepared to put up with it's foibles.
It is superhuman in a very specific domain. I didn't use AGI because its definitions are one of two flavors.
One, capable of replacing some large proportion of global gdp (this definition has a lot of obstructions: organizational, bureaucratic, robotic)...
two, difficult to find problems in which average human can solve but model cannot. The problem with this definition is that the distinct nature of intelligence of AI and the broadness of tasks is such that this metric is probably only achievable after AI is already in reality massively superhuman intelligence in aggregate. Compare this with Go AIs which were massively superhuman and often still failing to count ladders correctly--which was also fixed by more scaling.
All in all I avoid the term AGI because for me AGI is comparing average intelligence on broad tasks rel humans and I'm already not sure if it's achieved by current models whereas superhuman research math is clearly not achieved because humans are still making all of progress of new results.
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#429It appears this basically locks out Google, Amazon and Meta. Why are we declaring OpenAI as the winner? This is like declaring Netscape the winner before the dust settled. Having the govt involved in this manner can’t be a good thing.
How involved is the government at all? I’m still having a hard time seeing how Trump or anyone in the government is involved except to do the announcement. These are private companies coming together to do a deal.
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#430~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country. If the electric grid — particularly the interconnection queue — is already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something on this scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized policy framework (big if!), I would guess there's some major permitting reform announcement coming soon.
watching the press conference and Onsite power production were mentioned. I assume this means SMRs and solar.
Hasn't the US decided to prefer nuclear and fossil fuels (most expensive generation methods) over renewables (least expensive generation methods)?[1][2]
I doubt the US choice of energy generation is ideological as much a practicality. China absolutely dominates renewables with 80% of solar PV modules manufactured in China and 95% of wafers manufactured in China.[3] China installed a world record 277GW of new solar PV generation in 2024 which was a 45% year-on-year increase.[4] By contract, the US only installed ~1/10th this capacity in 2024 with only 14GW of solar PV generation installed in the first half of 2024.[5]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
[2] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lcoe-and-valu...
[3] https://www.iea.org/reports/advancing-clean-technology-manuf...
[4] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/01/21/china-hits-277-17-gw-...
[5] https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/quarterly-solar-industry-u...