OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman wants to spend trillions of dollars over time on the infrastructure re
quired to develop and run artificial intelligence services. He just needs to figure out a way to raise that kind of money.
“You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars” on data center construction in the “not very distant fu
ture,” Altman told a group of reporters on Thursday. “And you
should expect a bunch of economists to wring their hands and say, ‘Thi
s is so crazy, it’s so reckless, and whatever. And we’ll just be like, ‘You know what? Let us do our thing.'”
Altman said the startup is devising a novel way to bankroll that ou
tlay. “I suspect we can design a very interesting new kind of financial instr
ument for finance and compute that the world has not yet figured it out,” he said. “We’re working on it.”
In January, Altman joined SoftBank Group Corp.’s Masayoshi Son and Oracle Corp.’s Larry Ellison at the White
House to announce a $500 llion, four-year infrastructure ventu
re called Stargate. Still, Altman envisions spending far more than Stargate now entails.
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Altman’s remarks came during a rare and wide-ranging discussion with reporters over dinner. He spoke about Ch
atGPT’s rapid growth, the possibility of encrypting chats for better privacy and reiterated OpenAI’s interest in buying the Ch
rome browser if a federal court orders Alphabet Inc.’s Google to spin it out.
Altman also said he sees parallels between the current investment frenzy in artificial intelligence and the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s. In both cases, Altman sai
d, “smart people” became “overexcited” by a new technology. But in each instance, he said, that technology was “real” and
poised to eventually have lasting impacts on the business world and society.
“Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited by AI? In my opinion, yes,” Altman said in response to a question from Bloomberg News during the conversation. “Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes.”