Stargate - The 100 billion dollar Hail Mary for AGI

Notes From the Desk: No. 31 - 2024.04.13

Notes From the Desk are periodic posts that summarize recent topics of interest or other brief notable commentary that might otherwise be a tweet or note.

OpenAI Stargate AI Supercomputer

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Stargate 2028 - OpenAI / Microsoft’s AI Supercomputer

OpenAI and Microsoft have indicated recently the intention of building a monstrous AI supercomputer, which they have named Stargate. The machine is planned to be operational by year 2028, at a staggering cost of 100 billion dollars.

It would require hundreds of acres of land and consume up to 5 gigawatts of power. Here are some perspectives to better contemplate the significance:

• 5 gigawatts of power consumption

  • The largest collection of data center capacity in the world is currently Northern Virginia at just 2.5 gigawatts. But that supplies power to 300 data centers, not just one.

  • It would likely require building new nuclear power just for the data center.

• $100 billion in cost

  • The entire US market value of data centers is currently estimated to be about $100 billion.

  • The largest data center campus ever built (Google’s Iowa campus as of 2022) cost $5 billion.

• 100x compute power

  • Estimate compute power will be orders of magnitude greater than what is currently supplied to OpenAI or at least 100x current.

The Oracle of Earth

This is the quest to build the “Oracle of Earth”, the wish-granting machine known as AGI. The scale of investment is massive. This isn’t to build a better LLM that writes better blogs, emails or is a little better at code completion. Those capabilities would never deliver a return on such massive investments.

This is the hope to finally build the machine that answers all questions, solves all problems and makes everything imaginable possible.

This project has been named “Stargate” inspired from the science fiction film and series about a device that opens a portal to distant worlds. However, that device also provided the means for many destructive forces to enter our realm, some of which were also AI.

What unforeseen consequences will OpenAI's gate bring to the world? Destruction by AI agents that we can not control? Or will it be a massive economic black hole that sucks civilization into a misguided attempt to reach beyond what we understand and delivers nothing in return, as we failed to recognize our own ignorance while blinded by utopian dreams?

There is mounting evidence that we might not be on the path toward AGI at all. However, what has become clear for those who are concerned about the abuse of ultimate power is that we have clearly demonstrated if we do find the path, no one is going to slow down to consider what might go wrong. It is full speed ahead either to glory, a brick wall, or oblivion.

“Quit OpenAI due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI. Not sure what I'll do next yet.”

— Daniel Kokatajlo

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No compass through the dark exists without hope of reaching the other side and the belief that it matters …