OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion

I feel 5 trillion must be a misprint. This is like several years worth of American tax revenues. Conditional on this being true I would take this as significant evidence that what they have internally is unbelievably good. Perhaps even an AI with super-persuasion!

It is such a ridiculous figure, I suspect it must be off by at least an OOM. 

If not a misprint, sounds like door-in-the-face sales tactics. I'm sure everyone involved knows just fine that they're not going to raise >500B in any sane world. But perhaps they can raise 150B if they make 40B look small in comparison.

We can reason back from the quantity of money to how much Altman expects to do with it.  
Suppose we know for a fact that it’s will soon be possible to replace some percentage of labor with an AI that has negligible running cost.  How much should we be willing to pay for this? It gets rid of opex (operating expenses, i.e. wages) in exchange for capex (capital expenses, i.e. building chips and data centers).  The trade between opex and capex depends on the long term interest rate and the uncertainty of the project.  I will pull a reasonable number from the air, and say that the project should pay back in ten years.  In other words, the capex is ten times the avoided annual opex.  Seven trillion dollars in capex is enough to employ 10,000,000 people for ten years (to within an order of magnitude).  

That’s a surprisingly modest number of people, easily absorbed by the churn of the economy. When I first saw the number “seven trillion dollars,” I boggled and said “that can’t possibly make sense”.  But thinking about it, it actually seems reasonable.  Is my math wrong?
 

This analysis is so highly decoupled I would feel weird posting it most places.  But Less Wrong is comfy that way.

For all the reasons mentioned, this seems unlikely, but I was curious:

So yes it is possible.  Essentially this would be investing all of the capital investment - defined as physical goods acquisition - in China in 2022 all into AI hardware.

It is also, if all you care about is ROI and nothing else, probably the right decision.  Just a bad idea to invest it all into one company that may be inefficient/corrupt, this would be entire AI sector investment.  

I imagine it's a sales tactic. Ask for $7 trillion, people assume you believe you're worth that much, and if you've got such a high opinion of yourself, maybe you're right... 

In other news, I'm looking to sell a painting of mine for £2 million ;)

This approach appears to directly contradict Altman's blogpost from less than a year ago arguing for short timelines + slow takeoff because of less compute overhang. I wrote more on this here. [LW · GW]

So this is Sam Altman raising the 5-7 trillion, not OpenAI as an entity, right?

At this point, I'd rather spend $5-7 trillion on a Butlerian Jihad to stop OpenAI's reckless hubris.

They want to raise twice the market capitalization of Microsoft, which owns half of OpenAI?

My $300 against your $30 that OpenAI's next round of funding raises less than $40 billion of investor money. In case OpenAI raises no investment money in the next 36 months, the bet expires. Any takers?

I make the same offer with "OpenAI" replaced with "any startup with Sam Altman as a founder".

I'm retracting this comment and these 2 offers. I still think it is very unlikely, but realized that I would be betting against people who are vastly more efficient than I am at using the internet to access timely information and might even be betting against people with private information from Altman or OpenAI.

Someone should publicly bet like I did as an act of altruism to discourage this unprofitable line of inquiry, but I'm not feeling that altruistic today.