[wujerry2000]

For 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.

[krick]

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

https://blogfusion.tech/worlds-most-expensive-experiments/

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/overview/faqs/

[spacephysics]

AI race is arguably just as, and maybe even more important, than the space race.

From a national security PoV, surpassing other countries’ work in the field is paramount to maintaining US hegemony.

We know China performs a ton of corporate espionage, and likely research in this field is being copied, then extended, in other parts of the world. China has been more intentional in putting money towards AI over the last 4 years.

We had the chips act, which is tangentially related, but nothing as complete as this. For i think a couple years, the climate impact of data centers caused active political slowdown from the previous administration.

Part of this is selling the project politically, so my belief is much of the talk of AGI and super intelligence is more marketing speak aimed at a general audience vs a niche tech community.

I’d be willing to predict that we’ll get some ancillary benefits to this level of investment. Maybe more efficient power generation? Cheaper electricity via more investment in nuclear power? Just spitballing, but this is an incredible amount of money, with $100 billion “instantly” deployed.

[philipwhiuk]

AI is important but are LLMs even the right answer?

We're not spending money on AI as a field, we're spending a lot of money on one, quite possibly doomed, approach.

[0x000xca0xfe]

The hardware is likely flexible enough to run other approaches too if they get discovered.

[Dalewyn]

>What is the goal?

Be the definitive first past the post in the budding "AI" industry.

Why? He who wins first writes the rules.

For an obvious example: The aviation industry uses feets and knots instead of metres because the US invented and commercialized aviation.

Another obvious example: Computers all speak ASCII (read: English) and even Unicode is based on ASCII because the US and UK commercialized computers.

If you want to write the rules you must win first, it is an absolute requirement. Runner-ups and below only get to obey the rules.

[trillic]

The aviation and maritime industries use knots because the nautical mile is closely tied to longitude/latitude.

A vessel traveling at 1 knot along a meridian travels one minute of geographic latitude per hour.

[frontalier]

okay, but what advantages do these rules bring to the winner? what would these look like in this context?

i guess what i'm asking is: what was the practical advantage of ascii or feet and knots that made them so important?

[trillic]

Nautical miles are minutes of latitude and are useful for navigation on the sphere we live on. It’s not some conspiracy for English hegemony despite the previous posters insistence.

[Dalewyn]

>what advantages do these rules bring to the winner?

An almost absolute incumbency advantage.

>what was the practical advantage of ascii or feet and knots

Familiarity. Americans and Britons speak English, and they wrote the rules in English. Everyone else after the fact needs to read English or GTFO.

Alternatively, think of it like this: Nvidia was the first to commercialize "AI" with CUDA. Now everyone in "AI" must speak CUDA or be irrelevant.

He who wins first writes the rules, runner-ups and below obey the rules.

This is why America and China are fiercely competing to be the first past the post so one of them will write the rules. This is why Japan and Europe insist they will write the rules, nevermind the fact they aren't even in the race (read: they won't write the rules).

[frontalier]

okay, i think i get the cuda situation, but that is only for nvidia. amd is out of luck on that too, just like all companies from asia and europe.

on the previous examples i can see language gave native speakers and advantage in becoming familiar with the technology but on ai i'm not seeing an advantage that would give americans an advantage over everyone else, besides controlling access to the tech.

the reason i'm insisting on this is because i feel as if that argument has merit but i have yet to grasp how it applies to these technologies.

[Dalewyn]

In this case the race is to win and secure the supply chains.

The microprocessors concerned are very high value goods, manufacturing and R&D for them can't be easily and quickly spun up on a whim. The country and companies first to start them up and win will secure the supply chains, and once secured it will take monumental money and effort to reconfigure them. A lot of money is at stake, in other words.

Geopolitically, it also means that the country who secures the supply chain also gets to quite literally write the rules regarding who and where the microprocessors can be sold to and exported. Either the US or China gets to decide who can buy the microprocessors depending on who wins the supply chain.

Just like Nvidia was the first past the post and now enjoys absolute incumbency advantage, whichever country (namely US or China) is first past the post in the "AI" industry will enjoy absolute incumbency advantage.

[nopinsight]

The goal is Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), based on short clips of the press conference.

It has been quite clear for a while we'll shoot past human-level intelligence since we learned how to do test-time compute effectively with RL on LMMs (Large Multimodal Models).

[krick]

Here we go again... Ok, I'll bite. One last time.

Look, making up a three-letter acronym doesn't make whatever it stands for a real thing. Not even real in a sense "it exists", but real in a sense "it is meaningful". And assigning that acronym to a project doesn't make up a goal.

I'm not claiming that AGI, ASI, AXY or whatever is "impossible" or something. I claim that no one who uses these words has any fucking clue what they mean. A "bomb" is some stuff that explodes. A "road" is some flat enough surface to drive on. But "superintelligence"? There's no good enough definition of "intelligence", let alone "artifical superintelligence". I unironically always thought a calculator is intelligent in a sense, and if it is, then it's also unironically superintelligent, because I cannot multiply 20-digit numbers in my mind. Well, it wasn't exactly "general", but so aren't humans, and it's an outdated acronym anyway.

So it's fun and all when people are "just talking", because making up bullshit is a natural human activity and somebody's profession. But when we are talking about the goal of a project, it implies something specific, measurable… you know, that SMART acronym (since everybody loves acronyms so much).

[nopinsight]

Superintelligence (along with some definitions): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence

Also, "Dario Amodei says what he has seen inside Anthropic in the past few months leads him to believe that in the next 2 or 3 years we will see AI systems that are better than almost all humans at almost all tasks"

https://x.com/tsarnick/status/1881794265648615886

[hatefulmoron]

Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but "Anthropic CEO says that the work going on in Anthropic is super good and will produce fantastic results in 2 or 3 years" it not necessarily telling of anything.

[nopinsight]

Dario said in mid-2023 that his timeline for achieving "generally well-educated humans" was 2-3 years. o1 and Sonnet 3.5 (new) have already fulfilled that requirement in terms of Q&A, ahead of his earlier timeline.

[whiplash451]

Anthropic has to say this or Anthropic does not see their next funding round.

[pinot]

Those are all public projects except for one..

[alpb]

Yeah, I'm not sure why we're pretending this will benefit the public. The only benefit is that it will create employment, and datacenter jobs are among the lowest paid tech workers in the industry.

[maxglute]

Also note compute deprecates much faster than multi decade infra projects with chance of obsolecence. If deepseek keeps pace with releasing near SOTA models, those compute centres are going to have hard time recooping value / return on capital.

[fooker]

Is this inflation adjusted?

[boxed]

It says so at least

[gizmondo]

Building a lot of compute will likely end up more useful than Apollo & ISS, which were vanity projects.

[fastball]

Neom: $1.5T

[moralestapia]

But that one's imaginary.

[krick]

Maybe, but so is Stargate Project so far.

[fastball]

Is it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYimVfnGNGY

https://skift.com/2024/08/07/saudi-takes-2-million-photos-of...

[SeanAnderson]

"Unnamed sources told Bloomberg in April that The Line is scaling back from 170 kilometers long to just 2.4 kilometers, with the rest of the length to be completed after 2030. Neom expects The Line to be finished by 2045 now, 15 years later than initially planned."

It doesn't look great so far :)

[fastball]

The plan was never for 170km of The Line to be finished by 2030. The original plan was for 5km. And yes, recent reports are that they've scaled back their ambitions to half that by 2030.

However: 1. That has no bearing on how much they actually spend, which is what was being discussed and 2. Neom is much more than just The Line. As you can see from the YouTube link I posted, Sindalah seems to be on track to open this year, which is part of Neom.

So while Neom overall might be behind schedule (and The Line or other components may never open), it is clearly not an "imaginary" project given that parts of it will open soon.

[moralestapia]

Weak argument.

If that were the case then Stargate is already a thing because OpenAI must have a data center somewhere already.

And yes, the plan was for it to be 170km, since it was announced.