Anecdotally, many people at OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, etc., sincerely believe their company's own hype.
They remind me of the story about the oil prospector in Warren Buffett's year-end 1985 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders:
> An oil prospector, moving to his heavenly reward, was met by St. Peter with bad news. “You’re qualified for residence”, said St. Peter, “but, as you can see, the compound reserved for oil men is packed. There’s no way to squeeze you in.” After thinking a moment, the prospector asked if he might say just four words to the present occupants. That seemed harmless to St. Peter, so the prospector cupped his hands and yelled, “Oil discovered in hell.” Immediately the gate to the compound opened and all of the oil men marched out to head for the nether regions. Impressed, St. Peter invited the prospector to move in and make himself comfortable. The prospector paused. “No,” he said, “I think I’ll go along with the rest of the boys. There might be some truth to that rumor after all.”
>And so, you really
want every person to be able to have
their own dedicated GPU, right? So,
you're talking order of 10 billion GPUs
we're going to need. This deal we're
talking about, it's for millions of GPUs. Like, we're still three orders of
magnitude off of where we need to be. So
we're doing our best to provide compute
availability, but we're heading to this
world where the whole economy is powered
by compute... (15 min in)
Rewatching the video it strikes me that there is no talk of how the compute will be paid for. Altman is saying there is so much demand for compute but a lot of that is because he's setting the price for users to zero in spite of the service costing a lot to provide.
I guess they figure once they have the users they'll monetize somehow but that bit's kind of iffy.
I agree, though it's not out of the question that there could one day be a single country whose economy relies entirely on data centers, similarly to petrostates. Maybe we'll call them datastates, or compustates.
If their compensation includes stock options, they have no choice but to believe. At Enron many employees went as far as to put 100% of their savings into buying the stock.
They remind me of the story about the oil prospector in Warren Buffett's year-end 1985 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders:
> An oil prospector, moving to his heavenly reward, was met by St. Peter with bad news. “You’re qualified for residence”, said St. Peter, “but, as you can see, the compound reserved for oil men is packed. There’s no way to squeeze you in.” After thinking a moment, the prospector asked if he might say just four words to the present occupants. That seemed harmless to St. Peter, so the prospector cupped his hands and yelled, “Oil discovered in hell.” Immediately the gate to the compound opened and all of the oil men marched out to head for the nether regions. Impressed, St. Peter invited the prospector to move in and make himself comfortable. The prospector paused. “No,” he said, “I think I’ll go along with the rest of the boys. There might be some truth to that rumor after all.”
Source: https://berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html