Sam Altman says OpenAI is preparing to strike headline-making infrastructure deals in the coming months, wagers built on the promise of future AI models still in development.
Earlier this week, reports estimated that the ChatGPT creator had struck $1 trillion in deals this year alone, including tie-ups with AI giants Nvidia (NVDA), Oracle (ORCL) and CoreWeave (CRWV).
In a new a16z interview, the OpenAI CEO says the next phase of OpenAI’s growth will require more funding and partnerships from industry players.
“We have decided that it is time to go make a very aggressive infrastructure bet. And we’re like, I’ve never been more confident in the research roadmap in front of us, and also the economic value that will come from using those models. But to make the bet at this scale, we kind of need the whole industry or a big chunk of the industry to support it. And this is like, from the level of like electrons to model distribution and all the stuff in between, which is a lot. And so we’re going to partner with a lot of people. You should expect much more from us in the coming months.”
He hints at the magnitude of the expansion, saying OpenAI’s growth is anchored not only in current demand but also in the capabilities of future models still in development.
“I mean, we would still expand because we can see how much demand there is we can’t serve with today’s model, but we would not be going this aggressive if all we had was today’s model. We get to see a year or two in advance, though.”
Altman also says OpenAI’s philosophy is to prioritize research over product growth when allocating compute power.
“When there’s a constraint, we almost like, which happens all the time, we almost always prioritize giving the GPUs to research over supporting the product. Part of the reason we run and build this capacity is so we don’t have to make such painful decisions.
There are weird times like a new feature launches and it’s going really viral or whatever, where research will temporarily sacrifice some GPUs. But on the whole, like we’re here to build AGI and research gets the priority.”
While Altman acknowledges the theoretical limits of AI’s reach, he believes the technology can reshape the global economy.
“There’s totally a limit. There’s some amount of global GDP. There’s some fraction of it that is knowledge work, and we don’t do robots yet. It feels like the limits are very far from where we are today… Like if we are right that the model capability is going to go where we think it’s going to go, then the economic value that sits there can go very, very far.”
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