Rohit Questions Need for Sustained OpenAI Funding to Drive AI Progress
Reactions from ranked influencers
2 posts
I don't understand this take. If the money dries up that's an indication that this is no longer seen as a good investment. And if it isn't then yeah I don't want billions to pour into GPUs. We're not building trillion dollar data centers for fun, it's because it's useful.
All of these debates ultimately boil down to one point. If the money flowing into OpenAI and Anthropic dries up, this entire investment cycle will eventually grind to a halt. If OpenAI and Anthropic can no longer produce frontier, state-of-the-art models, the Chinese open-source models that distill them will stagnate as well. Do you see, then, how naive it is to claim that hyperscalers can simply take Chinese open-source LLMs and resell access to them through APIs? We have already boarded a train we cannot get off—one that leaves us no choice but to keep pouring money into OpenAI and Anthropic as it races forward. Ultimately, someone has to buy vast numbers of GPUs and build AI the expensive, inefficient way—not the Chinese way.
Look, if the argument is that it makes the big labs business model harder, then duh! That's the entire point. But that's a good thing, the labs ought to fight to get the best allocation of gpus in the marketplace, that's how you progress.
Dean Ball took a lot of heat this week for calling open source decelerationist. Many people read this as him being personally anti-open source. I don't think that's true. This was my interpretation of what he was saying: if open source is sufficiently capable and ubiquitous, it will eventually destroy the big labs business models. This means they would no longer have funding. To quote Ilya Sutskever from his testimony in the OpenAI vs. Elon Musk trial: 'If there is no funding, there is no big computer.' And without big computer, there can't be big model. In my opinion, what would happen next in this scenario is that the United States Government would step in, nationalize the leading labs, consolidate them into a single federal entity, and then fund it directly through the Department of War under national security. To put into perspective how easily they could do this, the proposed 2027 defense budget is $1.5 trillion. Most people who strongly support open source would probably not see that outcome as ideal, or this future as a pleasant one. This doesn't mean we should abandon open source or stop wishing for its success. It simply means we should take the middle path. There is fire on both sides of us now, and that will likely remain true for the foreseeable future.