Frankly, the economics of this seem complex (the article mentions it’s cheaper to build data centres slowly, if you can), so I’m not super sure how to interpret this, beyond that this probably rules out the most aggressive timelines. I’m thinking about it like this:
Sam Altman and other AI leaders are talking about AGI 2027, at which point every dollar spent on compute yields more than a dollar of revenue, with essentially no limits
Their models are requiring exponentially more compute for training (ex. Grok 3, GPT-5) and inference (ex. o3), but producing… idk, models that don’t seem to be exponentially better?
Regardless of the breakdown in relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, OpenAI can’t lie about their short- and medium-term compute projections, because Microsoft have to fulfil that demand
Even in the long term, Microsoft are on Stargate, so still have to be privy to OpenAI’s projections even if they’re not exclusively fulfilling them
Until a few days ago, Microsoft’s investors were spectacularly rewarding them for going all in on AI, so there’s little investor pressure to be cautious
So if Microsoft, who should know the trajectory of AI compute better than anyone, are ruling out the most aggressive scaling scenarios, what do/did they know that contradicts AGI by 2027?
Microsoft continue to pull back on their data centre plans, in a trend that’s been going on for the past few months, since before the tariff crash (Archive).
Frankly, the economics of this seem complex (the article mentions it’s cheaper to build data centres slowly, if you can), so I’m not super sure how to interpret this, beyond that this probably rules out the most aggressive timelines. I’m thinking about it like this:
Sam Altman and other AI leaders are talking about AGI 2027, at which point every dollar spent on compute yields more than a dollar of revenue, with essentially no limits
Their models are requiring exponentially more compute for training (ex. Grok 3, GPT-5) and inference (ex. o3), but producing… idk, models that don’t seem to be exponentially better?
Regardless of the breakdown in relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, OpenAI can’t lie about their short- and medium-term compute projections, because Microsoft have to fulfil that demand
Even in the long term, Microsoft are on Stargate, so still have to be privy to OpenAI’s projections even if they’re not exclusively fulfilling them
Until a few days ago, Microsoft’s investors were spectacularly rewarding them for going all in on AI, so there’s little investor pressure to be cautious
So if Microsoft, who should know the trajectory of AI compute better than anyone, are ruling out the most aggressive scaling scenarios, what do/did they know that contradicts AGI by 2027?