Thinking about AI training runs scaling to the $100b/1T range. It seems really hard to do this as an independent AGI company (not owned by tech giants, governments, etc.). It seems difficult to raise that much money, especially if you’re not bringing in substantial revenue or it’s not predicted that you’ll be making a bunch of money in the near future.
What happens to OpenAI if GPT-5 or the ~5b training run isn’t much better than GPT-4? Who would be willing to invest the money to continue? It seems like OpenAI either dissolves or gets acquired. Were Anthropic founders pricing in that they’re likely not going to be independent by the time they hit AGI — does this still justify the existence of a separate safety-oriented org?
This is not a new idea, but I feel like I’m just now taking some of it seriously. Here’s Dario talking about it recently,
I basically do agree with you. I think it’s the intellectually honest thing to say that building the big, large scale models, the core foundation model engineering, it is getting more and more expensive. And anyone who wants to build one is going to need to find some way to finance it. And you’ve named most of the ways, right? You can be a large company. You can have some kind of partnership of various kinds with a large company. Or governments would be the other source.
Now, maybe the corporate partnerships can be structured so that AGI companies are still largely independent but, idk man, the more money invested the harder that seems to make happen. Insofar as I’m allocating probability mass between ‘acquired by big tech company’, ‘partnership with big tech company’, ‘government partnership’, and ‘government control’, acquired by big tech seems most likely, but predicting the future is hard.
Thinking about AI training runs scaling to the $100b/1T range. It seems really hard to do this as an independent AGI company (not owned by tech giants, governments, etc.). It seems difficult to raise that much money, especially if you’re not bringing in substantial revenue or it’s not predicted that you’ll be making a bunch of money in the near future.
What happens to OpenAI if GPT-5 or the ~5b training run isn’t much better than GPT-4? Who would be willing to invest the money to continue? It seems like OpenAI either dissolves or gets acquired. Were Anthropic founders pricing in that they’re likely not going to be independent by the time they hit AGI — does this still justify the existence of a separate safety-oriented org?
This is not a new idea, but I feel like I’m just now taking some of it seriously. Here’s Dario talking about it recently,
Now, maybe the corporate partnerships can be structured so that AGI companies are still largely independent but, idk man, the more money invested the harder that seems to make happen. Insofar as I’m allocating probability mass between ‘acquired by big tech company’, ‘partnership with big tech company’, ‘government partnership’, and ‘government control’, acquired by big tech seems most likely, but predicting the future is hard.