Initially politicians were responsive. In Feb. 2024 he sought trillions of investment to ramp up "AI" [1]. Then he got the White House announcement with Trump and Softbank for the $500 billion Stargate deal. The project has flopped, only one data center will be built.
So I assume he thought hype would work again, but people are beginning to scrutinize the real capabilities of "AI".
I think the announcement was mostly a ploy to get OpenAI access to the White House and not much else (especially because Musk was already in there).
But they are clearly on their way to build 20 data centers[1]. OpenAI raising $500B over 10-15 years to build inference capacity isn’t really that hard to believe or that impressive at this point tbh. Like that could just be venture debt that is constantly serviced.
I'm starting to think he's playing the long game. To make OpenAI what Amazon and Google were in the dot com bubble. The last people standing.
And he's not the only one, a handful of companies are well aware that we're nearing the peak of a hype cycle and making sure they can survive the burst.
So I assume he thought hype would work again, but people are beginning to scrutinize the real capabilities of "AI".
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-do...