The pursuit of a humanlike artificial intelligence does not come cheap. OpenAI, the company that sparked the tech industry’s AI race, recognises that its quest will need more capital than any investment project in corporate history. As a result, it has been forging new and unusual financial bonds with some of the biggest names in tech.
“We have decided that it is time to go make a very aggressive infrastructure bet,” chief executive Sam Altman said on a podcast with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz this week. “To make the bet at this scale, we kind of need the whole industry, or a big chunk of the industry, to support it.”
The size of that gamble has become clear in recent weeks as the company behind ChatGPT has lined up a series of deals that could lead to it spending more than $1tn on computing power.