Comment from Elon Musk:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780
They don’t actually have the money
Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
541–550 of 1001 posts
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#542Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#543Feels so much like an announcement designed to trade favors.
Altman gets on Trump's good side by giving him credit for the deal.
Trump revoked Biden's AI regulations.
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#544For fun, I calculated how this stacks up against other humanity-scale mega projects. Mega Project Rankings (USD Inflation Adjusted) The New Deal: $1T, Interstate Highway System: $618B, OpenAI Stargate: $500B, The Apollo Project: $278B, International Space Station: $180B, South-North Water Transfer: $106B, The Channel Tunnel: $31B, Manhattan Project: $30B Insane Stuff.
It's unfair, because we are talking in the hindsight about everything but Project Stargate, and it's also just your list (and I don't know what others could add to it) but it got me thinking. Manhattan Project goal is to make a powerful bomb. Apollo is to get to the Moon before soviets do (so, because of hubris, but still there is a concrete goal). South-North Water Transfer is pretty much terraforming, and others are mostly roads. I mean, it's all kinda understandable.
And Stargate Project is... what exactly? What is the goal? To make Altman richer, or is there any more or less concrete goal to achieve?
Also, few items for comparison, that I googled while thinking about it:
- Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository: $96B
- ITER: $65B
- Hubble Space Telescope: $16B
- JWST: $11B
- LHC: $10B
Sources:
https://jameswebbtracker.com/jwst/budget
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#545I'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…
I agree with your take, and actually go a bit further. I think the idea of "diminishing returns" is a bit of a red herring, and it's instead a combination of saturated benchmarks (and testing in general) and expectations of "one llm to rule them all". This might not be the case.
We've seen with oAI and Anthropic, and rumoured with Google, that holding your "best" model and using it to generate datasets for smaller but almost as capable models is one way to go forward. I would say that this shows the "big models" are more capable than it would seem and that they also open up new avenues.
We know that Meta used L2 to filter and improve its training sets for L3. We are also seeing how "long form" content + filtering + RL leads to amazing things (what people call "reasoning" models). Semantics might be a bit ambitious, but this really opens up the path towards -> documentation + virtual environments + many rollouts + filtering by SotA models => new dataset for next gen models.
That, plus optimisations (early exit from meta, titans from google, distillation from everyone, etc) really makes me question the "we've hit a wall" rhetoric. I think there are enough tools on the table today to either jump the wall, or move around it.
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#546For fun, I calculated how this stacks up against other humanity-scale mega projects. Mega Project Rankings (USD Inflation Adjusted) The New Deal: $1T, Interstate Highway System: $618B, OpenAI Stargate: $500B, The Apollo Project: $278B, International Space Station: $180B, South-North Water Transfer: $106B, The Channel Tunnel: $31B, Manhattan Project: $30B Insane Stuff.
Neom: $1.5T
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Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#547Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#548How much of the supposed $500B will be US state budget money?
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#549I'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…
"There are maybe a few hundred people in the world who viscerally understand what's coming. Most are at DeepMind / OpenAI / Anthropic / X but some are on the outside. You have to be able to forecast the aggregate effect of rapid algorithmic improvement, aggressive investment in building RL environments for iterative self-improvement, and many tens of billions already committed to building data centers. Either we're a…
Motivated reasoning sings nicely to the tune of billions of dollars. None of these folks will ever say, "don't waste money on this dead end". However, it's clear that there is still a lot of productive value to extract from transformers and certainly there will be other useful things that appear along the way. It's not the worst investment I can imagine, even if it never leads to "AGI"
Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
#550I'm watching the announcement live from the white house and something about this just feels so strange and dystopian.
For me it's watching a gay man grovel at the feet of one of the most anti-LGBT politicians, a day after Trump signed multiple executive orders that dehumanized Altman and the LGBT community. Every token thinks they're special until they're spent.
>For me it's watching a gay man grovel at the feet of one of the most anti-LGBT politicians
Besides what ImJamal said, as a wealthy playboy man-about-town hanging out at Studio 54 in the '70s and '80s, I guarantee Trump has known and been friends with more gays than 95% of Americans. Certainly there has been no shortage of gay people among his top-level appointees in either his first or second administrations.