Both Jim Keller and Jensen Huang said it would take less than $1T to do what Sam Alman claims to need $7T for.

[AIkonoklazt]

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/jim-keller-responds-to-sam-altmans-plan-to-raise-dollar7-billion-to-make-ai-chips

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Nvidia's Jensen Huang said that the architectural innovation of AI processors is more important than the quantity of these processors. Now, Jim Keller, a legendary CPU developer who now works at Tenstorrent developing AI and HPC processors, essentially claims the same thing.

"I can do it for less than $1 trillion," Keller wrote in a quote tweet in response to Altman's tweet that says "f* it why not 8" in an apparent reference to raising the fundraising amount to 8 trillion.

They are being very conservative, but more on that in a moment.

I had presented many figures of the current silicon EDA and manufacturing in another thread, feel free to look them up there. There are also some in the above article itself. None of them are anywhere near even $1T, much less then $7T.

There isn't a viable route to claiming ignorance on any sort of invisible plan, because what I presented was the ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM numbers.

Why?

Because the implementation of new technologies (software/hardware/design/manufacturing) bring cost REDUCTION, not INCREASE.

If you want to be somewhat technical about this on just one vector alone, you can look at something like Moore's Law, from one of Intel's founders:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/resources/moores-law.html#gs.6gfswq

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Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years with minimal rise in cost. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted a doubling of transistors every year for the next 10 years in his original paper published in 1965. Ten years later, in 1975, Moore revised this to doubling every two years. This extrapolation based on an emerging trend has been a guiding principle for the semiconductor industry for close to 60 years.

What started as an empirical observation became a motivating objective, a target for Intel and its competitors to deliver against time and again. Moore’s Law is not a scientific law (it’s not a natural phenomenon). Moore himself admitted he didn’t much care for the designation, which was not part of the original language in his paper. Rather, Moore’s Law is a projection for the future that relies on innovation and technological advancement for its continued truth.

What does that all mean?

The number of devices-on-chip increases at an exponential rate, combined with minimal rise in cost, produces much lower cost per unit of computing performance.

Let's compare a current example:

This was my first computer I owned when I was a kid, an IBM PC 4.77MHz powered by an Intel 8088. It had 256k of RAM, which made it an advanced model with its memory banks maxed out. My father paid about $3000 for it, and I remember taking off the cover to marvel at all the chips on the motherboard. The wh

ole thing was heavy as HECK, and the keyboard itself weighed almost as much as an actual typewriter. It displayed one color.

This is the Raspberry Pi 400. The actual motherboard is much smaller than the keyboard footprint. It's powered by a Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72(ARM v8) 64-bit SoC at 1.8GHz, with 2 HDMI ports capable of 4K resolution full color

The price? $77

"But what about R&D?" Sure, what about it? Look up a pure development house like Nvidia or AMD. They're not as big as Samsung, of which I've already given the numbers..........

My personal number? Actually less than $300B. I'm not making that up, I'm simply going by the numbers I've already listed- Go look at them again. If that's not enough, look at Microsoft's number and add it to Amazon's. It's not as if the current AI capacity of the world right now is running on NOTHING........