[ashvardanian]

$500B is a huge headline number—even by the standards of the world’s largest lossy compression competition. But I don’t think anyone remotely familiar with the space ever expected the number to be accurate, or even cared that much about the total budget. It’s mainly a signal of political will, I assume. Mega-projects always take longer than expected and come with unpredictable costs. That said, OpenAI still has an edge over the competition, and I doubt there are many team better at raising capital than theirs.