The 7 Trillion Dollar Man

Anyone who has an interest in AI has probably come across Sam Altman, if you don't know who he is Google him. He is the guy behind chatGPT. Well, this week the news is that he is trying to raise money to overhaul the world's semiconductor industry.

I think this is a great idea, I don't think we can have enough computer chips, a decent GPU for a gaming machine still costs a small fortune. The type of GPU used in LLM work, something like the H100 cost upwards of $30,000 at the time of writing.

If we can make lots and lots and lots of chips then hopefully the prices will come tumbling down and a chip like the H100 might end up costing less than $100, which would be an absolute game changer for AI.

You may be thinking that I am kidding myself with the idea of a chip as powerful as a H100 going for less than $100 but this is not as insane as you may think. I have been in the web business a long time and I can remember the days when 16GB RAM cost a fortune, the average PC had 32 MB of RAM. In London, thieves would break into buildings to steal RAM from server machines. Not the server, just the RAM! Today you can get 32GB of RAM for less than $100.

If H100s or the equivalent were coming in at less than a few hundred dollars, and there was an almost inexhaustible supply, it would make sense to put one in every PC, laptop, tablet, and mobile device. 20, 40 or 80 billion devices each with serious computing power capable of running LLMs or the equivalent. It would be an incredible game changer on levels currently beyond our imagination.

I have no idea what Sam's pitch is to try and raise $7 trillion, but he had me at "AI chip fabrication", I'm easily sold.

For those breadheads of the world, Sam Altman reckons that we now live in an age where a single person, using AI effectively could build a billion-dollar company. Imagine finding out that your teenage son who rarely leaves his small bedroom in your semidetached in Dudley is actually responsible for a "global" corporation and is worth billions. Could that really happen? Possibly, sooner than we think it seems.

There are so many things in this life that are currently impossible simply because they require AI, Autonomous vehicles and predictive healthcare diagnosis are two huge examples. Imagine your fully self-drive car that also performs a full health check on you while driving you from A to B. During that trip you could be talking to someone speaking a foreign language that is translated in real-time, the Douglas Adams bable fish experience. These things and many others are almost within reach now.

One of the big stumbling blocks though is computer power, we need those chips and so I find myself thinking that while $7 Trillion may sound a lot, what it promises humanity could be worth far more in ways that we can't even imagine just yet.

I am sure there are a fair amount of people who are concerned about AI, the rise of the machine and so on. Let's be honest, if you have ever watched any of the Terminator movies you are going to have to stop and think about it. Why? because someone, somewhere, is bound to be trying to build a terminator. It may not look like big Arnie, but it could and will be just as deadly. Imagine Terminator drones, Kargu-2 anyone?

I grew up in the 1980s when the threat of nuclear annihilation was real and became nothing out of the ordinary, if you are too young to remember those days, try Googling "Stanislav Petrov" you'll get the idea.

For now let's put aside the worry about the Internet becoming self-aware, launching a nuclear holocaust against humanity, and unleashing the terminators to finish us off and let's think about all those wonderful toys we can make. To build those toys we need chips, lots and lots of chips, if I had the $7T I'd hand it over today, maybe we should try GoFundMe or something similar. Either way, let's get fabricating.

That is enough for this week. Next time I am going to start a series of posts on what AI can do for businesses today, there is a shit load of hype out there and much of it is just nonsense, Sora-AI does not signify the end of Hollywood just yet. More on that next time.

Bryan
ps. This post was written by a human, me. If it is shit then that is on me and not the AI. At some point I will get the AI to write something, but not today.