I’m confused about your “pretend base world”. This isn’t a discussion about whether it’s good or bad that OAI exists. It’s a discussion about “Sam Altman’s chip ambitions”. So we should compare the world where OAI seems to be doing quite well and Sam Altman has no chip ambitions at all, to the world where OAI seems to be doing quite well and Sam Altman does have chip ambitions. Right?
I agree that if we’re worried about FOOM-from-a-paradigm-shifting-algorithmic-breakthrough (which as it turns out I am indeed worried about), then we would prefer be in a world where there is a low absolute number of chips that are flexible enough to run a wide variety of algorithms, than a world where there are a large number of such chips. But I disagree that this would be the effect of Sam Altman’s chip ambitions; rather, I think Sam Altman’s chip ambitions would clearly move things in the opposite, bad direction, on that metric. Don’t you think?
By analogy, suppose I say “(1) It’s very important to minimize the number of red cars in existence. (2) Hey, there’s a massively hot upcoming specialized market for blue cars, so let’s build 100 massive car factories all around the world.” You would agree that (2) is moving things in the wrong direction for accomplishing (1), right?
This seems obvious to me, but if not, I’ll spell out a couple reasons:
For one thing, who’s to say that the new car factories won’t sell into the red-car market too? Back to the case at hand: we should strongly presume that whatever fabs get built by this Sam Altman initiative will make not exclusively ultra-specialized AI chips, but rather they will make whatever kinds of chips are most profitable to make, and this might include some less-specialized chips. After all, whoever invests in the fab, once they build it, they will try to maximize revenue, to make back the insane amount of money they put in, right? And fabs are flexible enough to make more than one kind of chip, especially over the long term.
For another thing, even if the new car factories don’t directly produce red cars, they will still lower the price of red cars, compared to the factories not existing, because the old car factories will produce extra marginal red cars when they would otherwise be producing blue cars. Back to the case at hand: the non-Sam-Altman fabs will choose to pump out more non-ultra-specialized chips if Sam-Altman fabs are flooding the specialized-chips market. Also, in the longer term, fab suppliers will be able to lower costs across the industry (from both economies-of-scale and having more money for R&D towards process improvements) if they have more fabs to sell to, and this would make it economical for non-Sam-Altman fabs to produce and sell more non-ultra-specialized chips.
I’m confused about your “pretend base world”. This isn’t a discussion about whether it’s good or bad that OAI exists. It’s a discussion about “Sam Altman’s chip ambitions”. So we should compare the world where OAI seems to be doing quite well and Sam Altman has no chip ambitions at all, to the world where OAI seems to be doing quite well and Sam Altman does have chip ambitions. Right?
I agree that if we’re worried about FOOM-from-a-paradigm-shifting-algorithmic-breakthrough (which as it turns out I am indeed worried about), then we would prefer be in a world where there is a low absolute number of chips that are flexible enough to run a wide variety of algorithms, than a world where there are a large number of such chips. But I disagree that this would be the effect of Sam Altman’s chip ambitions; rather, I think Sam Altman’s chip ambitions would clearly move things in the opposite, bad direction, on that metric. Don’t you think?
By analogy, suppose I say “(1) It’s very important to minimize the number of red cars in existence. (2) Hey, there’s a massively hot upcoming specialized market for blue cars, so let’s build 100 massive car factories all around the world.” You would agree that (2) is moving things in the wrong direction for accomplishing (1), right?
This seems obvious to me, but if not, I’ll spell out a couple reasons:
For one thing, who’s to say that the new car factories won’t sell into the red-car market too? Back to the case at hand: we should strongly presume that whatever fabs get built by this Sam Altman initiative will make not exclusively ultra-specialized AI chips, but rather they will make whatever kinds of chips are most profitable to make, and this might include some less-specialized chips. After all, whoever invests in the fab, once they build it, they will try to maximize revenue, to make back the insane amount of money they put in, right? And fabs are flexible enough to make more than one kind of chip, especially over the long term.
For another thing, even if the new car factories don’t directly produce red cars, they will still lower the price of red cars, compared to the factories not existing, because the old car factories will produce extra marginal red cars when they would otherwise be producing blue cars. Back to the case at hand: the non-Sam-Altman fabs will choose to pump out more non-ultra-specialized chips if Sam-Altman fabs are flooding the specialized-chips market. Also, in the longer term, fab suppliers will be able to lower costs across the industry (from both economies-of-scale and having more money for R&D towards process improvements) if they have more fabs to sell to, and this would make it economical for non-Sam-Altman fabs to produce and sell more non-ultra-specialized chips.