[xyzzy123]

I apologise if my response was a little snarky.

Even granted that OpenAI are not able to build a chip that is competitive with NVidia's latest GPUs for running LLMs right away (which is an opinion - not backed by any direct evidence, but I agree that it is plausible as they are going up against a lot of prior R&D) is it not possible that:

a) The unit economics could be so much better that the result is still a major win, e.g. 50% of the performance at 20% of the price.

b) OpenAI is decoupled from existing supply constraints and is able to grow faster and deliver more value. A "worse" chip that you can actually get (in insane volume) may be strategically better than a "superior" chip that is limiting your growth.

c) That the plan might include some elements you are not expecting - at the $trillions investment level they might be looking at doing some surprising things e.g. (I am just making this up but there are a lot of possibilities) buy a memory manufacturer and work directly on increasing memory bandwidth.

[LamaOfRuin]

From a lay observer point of view of the semiconductor industry of the last two decades, it seems entirely implausible they could do that quickly without just buying a company that was already working on it. And then, unless that company was big enough to already have a significant defensive patent portfolio, it's likely their efforts would be stymied in court for years if it was remotely successful.

The idea that even with expertise, the wins would be so much over what other companies that have hired/bought these companies have been designing for the last 10 years based on very similar requirements (the ones that wrote so much of the foundational research) also seems implausible.

c) It's not actually possible to plan investments at that level with anything more than a very vague direction you're aiming. If it is long term, then everything is changing in unpredictable ways before you get even 25% there, but if you throw so much money at the problem in order to try to solve it much more quickly you are disrupting global economic and geopolitical forces in ways that also can't be planned for.

[kevingadd]

"50% of the performance at 20% of the price" is wildly implausible even if you can somehow start fabbing perfect chips for openai's workloads tomorrow. Especially if they don't have access to the fabrication processes that nvidia, amd etc are using, since more modern (read: expensive) processes reduce power draw and enable higher clocks. 80% of nv's datacenter die space is not wasted, not close to that much.

It seems more likely to me they'd get 20% of the performance at 50% of the price, and that might still work out for them if it allows them to scale faster without being bottlenecked on supply of existing GPUs. But there's no magic bullet here.

They also still need to source a bunch of other stuff, like RAM, even if they can source their own processors.

[jacquesm]

Nobody is able to build a chip that is competitive with NVidia's latest GPUs, not even AMD who would be next in line. Look at Google's TPU for a glimpse at a likely outcome of such an endeavor.

What it tells me is that Altman seems to believe that OpenAI can only make the next step if they can throw even more compute at the problem but that that isn't feasible at today's prices.