OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors, including from the United Arab Emirates, to raise between $5 trillion to $7 trillion in funding. The goal, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is to increase the world’s chip manufacturing capacity and enhance AI capabilities.

The fundraising efforts are part of a broader strategy to address OpenAI’s growth constraints, particularly the scarcity of AI chips needed for training large language models like ChatGPT.

Altman’s proposal is said to include forming a partnership with investors, chip manufacturers, and power providers to finance the construction of chip foundries, which would then be operated by the chip manufacturers.

  • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    a company’s investment into research, development, expansion, etc is tax exempt. Hopefully even the most serious critics of our current capatalist economy would agree that these types of investments should be tax exempt

    That’s a bunch of nonsense. Taxes apply to INCOME, so any expenses are automatically tax exempt.

    it means paying more salaries or purchasing goods and services from other companies, which again means more salaries.

    Nope. Companies expanding AI in order to replace workers or at the very least increase productivity without increasing wages does not in any way, shape or form mean “more salaries”.

    Generally, these aren’t c-level salaries either because usually the c-suite is not producing the goods and services required.

    Bullshit. It’s true that the C-suite doesn’t produce anything, but they’re the first to get a raise when things go well and the last to be fired (and even then, usually with a golden parachute equivalent to several years’ pay of the average worker) when things go less well.

    • Brokkr@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Companies don’t have income, they have revenue and profits. Revenue minus Costs (which include salaries, investments, materials, etc) equals Profits. The costs get detailed into different buckets which tracks investments into the company itself versus expenses that the company needs to pay to continue operating. An important number is the return on investments (ROI). A high enough ROI means the company makes more from investing in itself than it would from using the money for any other purpose.

      I wasn’t talking specifically about an AI company, but companies in general. The investment in AI discussed in the original article is not about immediately developing additional AI programs, but rather about expanding the production of semiconductor manufacturing to meet the needs of chips for AI. A reasonable argument could be made that this will eventually eliminate jobs. Counter arguments would likely point out that the nature of jobs would change. Personally, I think that AI is going to become a larger part of our society and we need to think about the ways that we need to react to that. It likely means investing in better education, because some of the first jobs to go will be jobs which require low intellectual contributions. I don’t think it will replace jobs which require a great degree of physical manipulation however, because robotics are simply not at that level yet.

      Regarding your point about c-suite raises, I addressed this very point in the last paragraph of my prior comment.