Sam Altman: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, you meme. But misinformation may have a foundation of insight there. Look, I think compute is going to be the currency of the future. I think it will be maybe the most precious commodity in the world, and I think we should be investing heavily to make a lot more compute. Compute, I think it’s going to be an unusual market. People think about the market for chips for mobile phones or something like that. And you can say that, okay, there’s 8 billion people in the world, maybe 7 billion of them have phones, maybe 6 billion, let’s say. They upgrade every two years, so the market per year is 3 billion system-on-chip for smartphones. And if you make 30 billion, you will not sell 10 times as many phones, because most people have one phone. But compute is different. Intelligence is going to be more like energy or something like that, where the only thing that I think makes sense to talk about is, at price X, the world will use this much compute, and at price Y, the world will use this much compute. Because if it’s really cheap, I’ll have it reading my email all day, giving me suggestions about what I maybe should think about or work on, and trying to cure cancer, and if it’s really expensive, maybe I’ll only use it, or we’ll only use it, to try to cure cancer. So I think the world is going to want a tremendous amount of compute. And there’s a lot of parts of that that are hard. Energy is the hardest part, building data centers is also hard, the supply chain is hard, and then of course, fabricating enough chips is hard. But this seems to be where things are going. We’re going to want an amount of compute that’s just hard to reason about right now. How do you solve the energy puzzle? Nuclear-…

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