Couple things that aren’t accounted for:

A) this is a pledge by companies they may or may not even have the cash required to back it up. Certainly they aren’t spending it all at once, but to be completely honest it’s nothing more than a PR stunt right now that seems to be an exercise in courting favor

B) that so called private capital is going to get incentives from subsidies, like tax breaks, grants etc. It’s inevitable if this proceeds to an actual investment stage. What’s that about it being pure private capital again?

C) do to the aforementioned circumstances in A it seems whatever government support systems are stood up to support this - and if this isn’t ending in hot air, there will be - it still means it’s not pure private capital and worse yet, they’ll likely end up bilking tax payers and the initiative falls apart with companies spending far less then the pledge but keeping all the upside.

I’ll bet a years salary it plays out like this.

If this ends up being 100% private capital with no government subsidies of any kind, I’ll be shocked and elated. Look at anything like this in the last 40 years and you’ll find scant few examples that actually hold up under scrutiny that they didn’t play out this way.

Which brings me to my second part. So we are going to - in some form - end up handing out subsidies to these companies, either at the local state or federal level, but by the logic of not paying off student debt, why are we going to do this? It’s only propping up an unhealthy economic policy no?

Why is it so bad for us to cancel student debt but it’s fine to have the same cost equivalent as subsidies for businesses? Is it under the “creates jobs” smoke screen? Despite the fact the overwhelming majority of money made will not go to the workers but back to the wealthy and ultra wealthy.

There's no sense of equity here. If the government is truly unequivocally hands off - no subsidies, no incentives etc - than fine, the profits go where they go, and thats the end of it.

However, it won't be, and that opens up a perfectly legitimate ask about how this money is going to get used and who it benefits

Student loans are the only loan type which you cannot bankrupt out of. I'm sure that many students would accept bankruptcy rather than bailouts if that is preferable. It doesn't make sense to saddle 20 year olds with insurmountable debt.

This sort of folksy take always ignores that the same issue happens with the trades as does with the professional classes. No one class is immune to a crash due to unnatural promotion. You've let your moral view overcome that reality

It's a fair comparison. Stargate is fundamentally about two things - America's industry needs a cash injection, and we're choosing a completely hype-dominated vein to push the needle into.

Problem is, the parent comment is right. Even if you think student loan mitigation has washy economics behind it, the outcome is predictable and even desirable if you're playing the long-game in politics. If not that, spend $500,000,000,000 towards onshoring Apple and Microsoft's manufacturing jobs. Spend it re-invigorating America's mothballed motor industry and let Elon spec it out like a kid in a candy shop. Relative to AI, even student loan forgiveness and dumping money into trades looks attractive (not that Trump would consider either).

Nobody on HN should be confused by this. We know Sam Altman is a scammer (Worldcoin, anyone?) and we know OpenAI is a terrible business. This money is being deliberately wasted to keep OpenAI's lights on and preserve the Weekend At Bernie's-esque corpse that is America's "lead" in software technology. That's it. It's blatantly simple.

> not all students get the benefit, some already paid off their debts or a large part of it.

I'm one of the people who paid off a large portion of debt and probably don't need this assistance. However, this argument is so offensive. People were encouraged to take out debt for a number of reasons, and by a number of institutions, without first being educated about the implications of that. This argument states that we shouldn't help people because other people didn't have help. Following this logic, we shouldn't seek to help anyone ever, unless everyone else has also received the exact same help.

- slaves shouldn't be freed because other slaves weren't freed - we shouldn't give food to the starving, because those not starving aren't getting free food - we shouldn't care about others because they don't care about me

These arguments are all the greedy option in game theory, and all contribute to the worst outcomes across the board, except for those who can scam others in this system.

The right way to think about programs that help others is to consider cooperating - some people don't get the maximum possible, but they do get some! And when the game is played over and over, all parties get the maximum benefit possible.

In the case of student debt, paying it off and fixing the broken system, by allowing bankruptcy or some other fix, would benefit far more people than it would hurt; it would also benefit some people who paid their loans off completely: parents of children who can't pay off their loans now.

In the end the argument that some already paid off their debts is inherently a selfish argument in the style of "I don't want them to get help because I didn't get help." Society would be better if we didn't think in such greedy terms.

All that said - there are real concerns about debt repayment. The point about emboldening universities to ask for higher tuition highlights the underlying issue with the student loan system. Why bring up the most selfish possible argument when there are valid, useful arguments for your position?

Yes but every policy is unfair. It literally is choosing where to give a limited resource, it can never be fully fair.

And there could be a change in the law that allows people to forgive student debt in personal bankruptcy, and that could make sure higher tuition doesnt happen.

Only the first of those is a real problem, but it really is a problem.

With half a trillion dollars you can also open a lot of universities. Increased supply would lower prices for everyone. One could even open public universities and offer education at very reduced or no tuition.

If we block on the basis that previous people didn't have something and that it would be unfair to them we would literally never make any progress in this world.

Instead of starting a new better world, we'll just stick with the old one that sucks because we don't want to be unfair. What an awful, awful way to look at the world.

we are vastly overspending and will either need to monetize the debt (disastrous) or massively cut spending and raise taxes in the future. already now, we need to massively raise taxes on the wealthy but even that will be insufficient with our current spend.

free college is just a giveaway to the wealthier third of our society and irresponsible with our current fiscal situation.

Free to the student sounds nice, but who pays for it in the end? And does an education lose a bit of its value when anyone can get it for free?

> There is no reason why tuition is going up at the pace it does.

There is and it's explained by Baumol's cost disease. Basically you can't sustain paying professors the same wage while productivity increases in other parts of the economy. Even if the actual labor of "professing" hasn't gotten more productive. You have to retain them by keeping up with the broader wage increases. And that cost increase gets passed down to students.

also just: “why invest it when we could spend it on consumption now” is a good argument against letting private wealth usage be socially determined if most people just always vote for consumption now

That and a lot of people do not have the means to convince current power centers ( unless they were to organize, which they either don't, can't or are dissuaded from ) to do their bidding, while few rich ones do. And so the old saying 'rich become richer' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One of the more destructive situations in capitalism is the fact that (financially) helping the many will increase inflation and lead to more problems.

When a few people get really rich it kind of slips through the gaps, the broader system isn't impacted too much. When most people get a little rich they spend that money and prices go up. Said differently, wealth is all relative so when most people get a little more rich their comparative wealth didn't really change.

Yes you don't want to destroy your food chain. If everyone is poor except you then you are now poor.

This site is way way way more capital friendly than worker friendly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

I’m willing to believe. It’s probably the closest we’ve come to actually having a real life god. I’m going to get pushback on this but I’ve used o1 and it’s pretty mind blowing to me. I would say something 10x as intelligent with sensors to perceive the world and some sort of continuously running self optimization algorithm would essentially be a viable artificial intelligence.

Exactly as you say. AI is imagined to be the wealthy nepotist's escape pod from an equal playing field and democratized access to information. Win at all cost soulless predators who find infinite sacrifice somehow righteous love games like the ones that macro-scale AI creates.

The average person's utility from AI is marginal. But to a psychopath like Elon Musk who is interested in deceiving the internet about Twitter engagement or juicing his crypto scam, it's a necessary tool to create seas of fake personas.

I think (big assumption) most here are from that same period/time. Most are in their late 30s, 40s. Kids, busy life etc. Not the young hacker mindsets, but the responsible maybe a bit stressed person.

Not envious of multi-billionaire's companies gathering capital, IP, knowledge and infrastructure for huge scale modern day private Stasi apparatuses. Just bitter.

California moves water the long way with aqueducts, pipes and pumps. It's an understood problem, but expensive.

I was in Egypt a while and there's no talk of them invading Sudan or Ethiopia. A lot of Egypt's economy is overseas aid from the US and similar.

The main military thing going on there - I was in Dahab where there are endless military checkpoints - is Hamas like guys trying to come over and overthrow the fairly moderate Egyptian government and replace it with a hardline Hamas type islamic dictatorship for the glorification of Allah etc. Again it's not about reducing scarcity - more about increasing scarcity in return for political control. Dahab and Cairo are both a few hours drive from Gaza.

> it's more of a logistics challenge

and a bureaucratic one as well. in Germany, they want to trim bureaucratic necessities while (not) expecting multiple millions of climate refugees.

lot's of undocumented STUFF (undocumented have nowhere to go so they don't get vaccines, proper help when sick, injured, mentally unstable, threatened, abused) incoming which means more disease, crime, theft, money for security firms and insurance companies, which means more smuggle, more fear-mongering via media, more polarization, more hard-coding of subservience into the young, more financial fascism overall, less art, zero authenticity, and a spawn of VR worlds where the old rules apply forever.

plus more STDs and micro-pandemics due to viral mutations because people will be even more careless when partying under second-semester light-shows in metropolitan city clubs and festivals and when selling out for an "adventurous" quick potent buck and bug, which of course means more money pouring into pharma who won't be able to test their drugs thoroughly (and won't have to, not requiring platforms to fact check will transfer somewhat into the pharma industry) because the population will be more diverse in terms of their bio-chemical reactions towards ingredients in context of their "fluid" habitats chemical and psycho-social make-ups.

but it's cool, let's not solve the biggest problems before pseudo-transcending into the AGI era. will make for a really great impression, especially those who had the means, brains, skills, (past) careers, opportunity and peace of mind.

Your first link says "With a score under 5, Russian Federation has a level of hunger that is low."

The current situation with Russia and China seems caused by them becoming prosperous. In the 1960s in China and 1990s in Russia they were broke. Now they have money they can afford to put it into their militaries and try to attack the neighbours.

I'm reminded of the KAL cartoon on Russia https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8... That was from 2014. Already Russia is heading to the next panel in the cycle.

Russia is a massive grain producer and exporter. One of their biggest health issues right now is obesity (from those cheap grains) with 60% of the adult population overweight, and growing. Furthermore, obesity has actually been an issue for their recruiting effort (there's a lot of running in war).

Have you tried opening the links? They show Russia at developed country level in terms of food insecurity (score <5, they don't differentiate at those levels; this is a level mostly shown for EU countries); and a percentage of population below the international poverty line of 0.0% (vs, as an example, 1.8 % in Romania). This isn't great — being in the poverty briefs at all is not indicative of prosperity — but your terrification should probably come from elsewhere.

I would wager that states such as Russia and others misallocate resources, which in turn reduces productivity. Worse yet, some of the policy prescriptions stated above would further misallocate scarce resources and reduce productivity. Scarcity doom becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. This outcome is used to rationalize further economic intervention and the cycle compounds upon itself.

To be explicitly clear, the US granting largess to tech companies for datacenters also counts as a misallocation in my view.

Russia is run by the mob. The country has no real dominant industry beyond its natural resources. Are they really a good example?

I don't doubt that, but it's harder to connect that fact to a specific international conflict.

Gaza seems mostly to be about who controls Israel/Palestine politically. Gaza was reasonably ok for food and housing and is now predictably trashed as a result of Hamas wanting to control Palestine from the river to the sea as they say.

South Sudan is some ridiculous thing where two rival generals are fighting for control. Are there any wars which are mostly about scarcity at the moment?

On global scale if you have 100 people and 150 apples but apples are on the opposite side of the globe it is not like you can sustainably get those apples delivered all the time.

Getting 150 apples once is better than nothing but still doesn’t fix the problem.

> they aren’t even profitable

Depends on your definition of profitability, They are not recovering R&D and training costs, but they (and MS) are recouping inference costs from user subscription and API revenue with a healthy operating margin.

Today they will not survive if they stop investing in R&D, but they do have to slow down at some point. It looks like they and other big players are betting on a moat they hope to build with the $100B DCs and ASICs that open weight models or others cannot compete with.

This will be either because training will be too expensive (few entities have the budget for $10B+ on training and no need to monetize it) and even those kind of models where available may be impossible to run inference with off the shelf GPUs, i.e. these models can only run on ASICS, which only large players will have access to[1].

In this scenario corporations will have to pay them the money for the best models, when that happens OpenAI can slow down R&D and become profitable with capex considered.

[1] This is natural progression in a compute bottle-necked sector, we saw a similar evolution from CPU to ASICS and GPU in the crypto few years ago. It is slightly distorted comparison due to the switch from PoW to PoS and intentional design for GPU for some coins, even then you needed DC scale operations in a cheap power location to be profitable.

Given the release of the new DeepSeek R1 model [0], OpenAI’s future revenue stream is probably more at risk than it was a week ago.

[0] - https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/china-is-catching-up-with...

That's like saying I have a healthy revenue stream from my credit card.

They do get a lot of customers buying their stuff, but on top of that, a company with unique IP and mindshare can get investors to open their wallet easily enough; I keep thinking of AMD that was not or barely profitable for like 15 years in a row.

Why do you think datacenters have actually been built in Oregon?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

What about hurricanes? Extreme weather events which spew a lot of water, wind and debris around might potentially do a lot of damage to a data center.

Any downsides?

Any downsides?

:/

I'm not a subscriber so I can't read it, which startup are they referring to in the headline?

Because rich people inevitably don't like taxes? And maybe forest fires?

It is not. But this kind of money does have impact for society in any field. So, this a proper concern.

Absolutely. Look at how Sam Altman speaks.

If you've taken a couple of lectures about AI, you've probably been taught not to anthropomorphize your own algorithms, especially given how the masses think of AI (in terms of Skynet, Cortana, "Her", Ex Machina, etc). It encourages people to mistake the capabilities of the models and ascribe to them all of the traits of AI they've seen in TV and movies.

Sam has ignored that advice, and exploited the hype that can be generated by doing so. He even tried to mimic the product in "Her", down to the voice [0]. The old board said his "outright lying" made it impossible to trust him [1]. That behavior raises eyebrows, even if he's got a legitimate product.

[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-gpt-4o-chatgpt-artificial...

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166713/openai-helen-ton...

NFTs couldn't pass the Turing test, something I didn't expect to witness in my lifetime.

The two are qualitatively different.

It's identical energy. A significant number of people are attaching their hopes and dreams to a piece of technology while deluding themselves about the technical limitations of that technology. It's all rooted in greed. Relatively few are in it to push humanity forward, most are just trying to "get theirs."

Yeah people don't rush to say "don't waste money on this dead end" but think about it for a moment.

A 500B dollar investment doesn't just fall into one's lap. It's not your run of the mill funding round. No, this is something you very actively work towards that your funders must be really damn convinced is worth the gamble. No one sane is going to look at what they genuinely believe to be a dead end and try to garner up Manhattan Project scales of investment. Careers have been nuked for far less.

You have hit on something that really bothers me about recent AGI discourse. It’s common to claim that “all” researchers agree that AGI is imminent, and yet when you dive into these claims “all” is a subset of researchers that excludes everyone in academia, people like Yann, and others.

So the statement becomes tautological “all researchers who believe that AGI is imminent believe that AGI is imminent”.

And of course, OpenAI and the other labs don’t perform actual science any longer (if science requires some sort of public sharing of information), so they win every disagreement by claiming that if you could only see what they have behind closed doors, you’d become a true believer.

It's obviously not taken to mean literally everybody.

Whatever LeCun says and really even he has said "AGI is possible in 5 to 10 years" as recently as 2 months ago (so if that's the 'skeptic' opinion, you can only imagine what a lot of people are thinking), Meta has and is pouring a whole lot of money into LLM development. "Put your money where your mouth is" as they say. People can say all sorts of things but what they choose to focus their money on tells a whole lot.

I'm inclined to agree with Yann about true AGI, but he works at Meta and they seem to think current LLM's are sufficiently useful to be dumping preposterous amounts of money at them as well.

It may be a distinction thats not worth making if the current approach is good enough to completely transform society and make infinite money

Who says they will stick to autoregressive LLMs?

How would this be a Ponzi scheme? Who are the leaf nodes ending up holding the bag?

My take on this is that, despite an ever-increasingly connected world, you still need an assistant like this to remain available at all times your device is. If I can’t rely on it when my signal is weak, or the network/service is down/saturated, its way of working itself into people’s core routines is minimal. So either the model runs locally, in which case I’d argue OpenAI have no moat, or they uncover some secret sauce they’re able to keep contained to their research labs and data centres that’s simply that much better than the rest, in perpetuity, and is so good people are willing to undergo the massive switching costs and tolerate the situations in which the service they’ve come to be so dependent on isn’t available to them. Let’s also not discount the fact that Apple are one of the largest manufacturers globally of smartphones, and that getting up to speed in the myriad industries required to compete with them, even when contracting out much of that work, is hard.

I still fail to see who desire that, how it benefits humanity, or why we need to invest 500b to get to this

Sorry, you live in a different world, google glasses were aggressively lame, the ray bans only slightly less so.

But pulling out your phone to talk to it like a friend...

Very insightful take on agents interacting with agents thanks for sharing.

Re H.E.R phone - I see people already trying to build this type of product, one example: https://www.aphoneafriend.com

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.

Well the contrived benchmarks the industry selling the models made up seem to be improving.

They plugged the hole for "how many 'r''s in 'strawberry'", but I just asked it how many "l"s in "lemolade" (spelling intentional) and it told me 1. If you make it close to, but not exactly a word it would be expecting it falls over.

Yeah obviously motivations are murky and all over the place, no one's free of bias. I'm not taking a strong stance on whether they're right or not or how much of it is motivated reasoning, I just think at least quite a bit is genuine (I'm mainly basing this off researchers I know who have a track record of being very sober and "boring" rather than the flashy Altman types)

To your point, yeah the models still suck in some surprising ways, but again it's that thing of they're the worst they're ever going to be, and I think in particular on the reasoning issue a lot of people are quite excited that RL over CoT is looking really really promising for this.

I agree with your broader point though that I'm not sure how close we are and there's an awful lot of noise right now

There's the servers and data center infrastructure (cooling, electricity) as well as the GPUs of course, but if we're talking $10B+ of GPUs in a single datacenter, it seems that would dominate. Electricity generation is also a big expense, and it seems nuclear is the most viable option although multi-GW solar plants are possible too in some locations. The 1GW ~ $10B number I suggested is in the right ballpark.

It seems you'd need to figure periodic updates into the operating cost of a large cluster, as well as replacing failed GPUs - they only last a few years if run continuously.

I've read that some datacenters run mixed generation GPUs - just updating some at a time, but not sure if they all do that.

It'd be interesting to read something about how updates are typically managed/scheduled.

this is an announcement not a cut check. Who knows how much they'll actually spend, plenty of projects never get started let alone massive inter-company endeavors.

because you put your own people on the receiving end too AND invite others to join your spending spree.

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1881258443669172470

  twitter hype is out of control again. 

  we are not gonna deploy AGI next month, nor have we built it.

  we have some very cool stuff for you but pls chill and cut your expectations 100x!

Do you think Sam Altman ever sits in front of a terminal trying to figure out just the right prompt incantation to get an answer that, unless you already know the answer, has to be verified? Serious question. I personally doubt he is using openai products day to day. Seems like all of this is very premature. But, if there are gains to be made from a 7T parameter model, or if there is huge adoption, maybe it will be worth it. I'm sure there will be use for increased compute in general, but that's a lot of capex to recover.

> but no real support on the government end outside of moral support

The venture was announced at the White House, by the President, who has committed to help it by using executive orders to speed things up.

It might not have been voted by congress or whatever, but just those things makes it pretty clear the government provides more than just "moral support".

I thought all the big corps had projects for the military already, if not DARPA directly, which is the org responsible for lots of university research (the counterpart to the NSF, which is the nice one that isn't funded by the military)?

It’s light on details, but from The Guardian’s reporting:

> The president indicated he would use emergency declarations to expedite the project’s development, particularly regarding energy infrastructure.

> “We have to get this stuff built,” Trump said. “They have to produce a lot of electricity and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily at their own plants.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/21/trump-ai-joi...

On the one hand the number is a political thumb-suck which sounds good. It's not based in any kind of actual reality.

Yes, the data center itself will create some permanent jobs (I have no real feel for this, but guessing less than 1000).

There'll be some work for construction folk of course. But again seems like a small number.

I presume though they're counting jobs related to the existence of a data center. As in, if I make use of it do I count that as a "job"?

What if we create a new post to leverage AI generally? Kinda like the way we have a marketing post, and a chunk of the daily work there is Adwords.

Once we start gustimamating the jobs created by the existence of an AI data center, we're in full speculation mode. Any number really can be justified.

Of course ultimately the number is meaningless. It won't create that many "local jobs" - indeed most of those jobs, to the degree they exist at all, will likely be outside the US.

So you don't need to wait for a post-mortem. The number is sucked out of thin air with no basis in reality for the point of making a good political sound bite.

> hundreds of thousands of jobs?

I'm sure this will easily be true if you count AI as entities capable of doing jobs. Actually, they don't really touch that (if AI develops too quickly, there will be a lot of unemployment to contend with!) but I get the national security aspect (China is full speed ahead on AI, and by some measurements, they are winning ATM).

only $5M/job

Well I currently pay to do this work for free. More than happy to __get__ paid doing it.

Edit: Hey we can solve the obesity crisis AND preserve jobs during the singularity!! Win win!

Damn, 6 hours too slow to make this comment

A hamster wheel would work better?

AWS GovCloud already exists FYI (as you hinted) and it is absolutely used by the DoD extensively already.

> Honestly, the biggest missed opportunity was supporting the Blount Island nuclear reactor mass production facility

Yes, a very interesting project; similar power output to an AP1000. Would have really changed the energy landscape to have such a deployable power station. https://econtent.unm.edu/digital/collection/nuceng/id/98/rec...

US domestic PV module manufacturing capacity is ~40GW/year.

could something of this magnitude be powered by renewables only?

There have been literally 0 production SMR deployments to date so there’s no possibility they’re basing any of their plans on the availability of them.

> Hasn't the US decided to prefer nuclear and fossil fuels (most expensive generation methods) over renewables (least expensive generation methods)?[1][2]

This completely ignores storage and the ability to control the output depending on needs. Instead of LCOE the LFSCOE number makes much more sense in practical terms.

Lol, how is it not possible?

> Small or modular reactors in the US are more than 10 years away, probably more like 15-20

Could be 5 to 10 with $20+ bn/year in scale and research spend.

Trump is screwing over his China hawks. The anti-China and pro-nuclear lobbies have significant overlap; this could be how Trump keeps e.g. Peter Thiel from going thermonuclear on him.