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Interesting comparison! In inflation adjusted dollars, entirety of the Apollo program cost roughly $325 billion in total (2025 inflation adjusted). That was for 21 launches over 11 years, 11 crewed launches, 6 of which made it to the moon. We can divide that outa couple different ways and get either $17 billion per launch, or $32 billion per year, or if we want to get bigger numbers, $32 billion per crewed launch, or $59 per flight that landed on the moon (Apollo 11,12,14,15,16,17). Let's use either $17 billion per launch or $32 b per year. We could compare each launch to training a whole new model, though OpenAI hasn't released official numbers of that,
so any comparison would a bit specious. There are some public guesses so I'll reproduce them here and link to my source, but again, they're guesses. GPT-2 is estimated at costing roughly $100,000 to train. OpenAI did say it cost $257/hour of training, but hasn't said how many hours it took to train, and the assumption is that's just the compute cost, that's not fully loaded (eg researcher salary and office rent and etc not included) [1]. The guess is by Karpathy though, so I'd give it a lot of weight in being directionally accurate. GPT-4 is guessed at costing "more than $100 million" according to sama [2] and each run for a train of something GPT-5 size at $1 billion or more (according to sama)(of which you'd need to make several runs before getting it right, so to speak) [3]. Again though these numbers numbers should include copious amounts of NaCl. That's just for OpenAI, but we can assume the other labs are using roughly as much. It's a bit different than the $400 billion/year that the linked article we're posting on gives, but it's a differently shaped number. If the whole of the Apollo program cost $350 billion (2025 dollars) and we're doing $400 b per year, the comparison is an entire 21 launch Apollo space program in a year, or a single Apollo launch per
month. Which is still insane, mind you. The other stat to look at though, because these are unfathomably large numbers, is the how much Apple invested in China, according to Patrick McGee, author of the book Apple in China. according to his book, Apple invested $275 billion into China over 5 years, or $55 billion/year in workers training and infrastructure building. We're comparing years to months here, but Apple is a singular company in the broader tech industry, and their $275 billion investment arguably paid off. Selling iPhone is a rather more proven area than LLMs though, so there's that. [1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1811488645175738409?s=46 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-4 [3] https://fortune.com/2025/02/25/what-happened-gpt-5-openai-or... |