Last winter, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made an Asian tour, during which he met with the management of TSMC, Samsung and SK hynix, but he failed to leave a good impression of himself. He said it was necessary to build 36 semiconductor factories that would cost $7 trillion – as a result, TSMC senior management called Altman a “podcasting bro,” writes the New York Times.
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During his trip to Asia, Sam Altman presented his plans for the development of the artificial intelligence industry, which take into account the manufacturing power of Asian countries, the financial resources of the Middle East and the assistance of US regulators. The scale of investment in the project amounts to trillions of dollars and is comparable to a quarter of the annual turnover of the United States. Scaling AI systems to the level Altman talks about will require years of construction; although lately he has limited his speeches to “only” hundreds of billions of dollars.
It is possible that the head of OpenAI is right, because it took him only a few years to become one of the most influential people in the field of technology. But the stern management of TSMC did not inspire confidence in his plans. He told them that in the coming years the amount of investment could reach $7 billion – with this money it is necessary to build 36 factories for the production of semiconductor products, as well as data centers that will help promote the AI industry. The management of the world’s largest semiconductor contractor said that the implementation of even part of Altman’s plans seems incredibly risky – he himself was nicknamed a “chatterbox” or “windbag.” This disdain for the head of OpenAI is consistent with the statement that TSMC Chairman C.C. Wei made about him: “Sam Altman is aggressive, too aggressive for me to believe it.” At the same time, Altman visited South Korea with the intention of communicating with high-ranking representatives of Samsung and SK hynix, but the negotiations had to be interrupted for reasons of US national security.
OpenAI’s plans are indeed very ambitious, but their implementation is still vague – it is unknown who and how much is ready to invest in the project. So far, the MGX investment fund from the UAE, as well as tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple, are negotiating with the company. But OpenAI’s business model is rightfully untrustworthy: the company takes in $3 billion a year and spends $7 billion. Altman says that AI is like electricity: the more accessible it becomes, the more people use it. And not a single company has yet brought the technology to a purely practical level: Microsoft managed to make mistakes with Copilot, and the Apple Intelligence package has not yet become publicly available.