[HN Gopher] Announcing The Stargate Project
___________________________________________________________________
Announcing The Stargate Project
Author : tedsanders
Score : 107 points
Date : 2025-01-21 22:29 UTC (31 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| whalesalad wrote:
| I'm watching the announcement live from the white house and
| something about this just feels so strange and dystopian.
| Willingham wrote:
| Agreed, and whats the story behind the art chosen for the
| landing page?
| tux3 wrote:
| Well, the silver lining is the incredible human capacity to get
| used to almost any situation given enough time
|
| It will get weirder, but only relatively so, the concept of
| normalcy always trailing just a little bit behind as we slide
| bcye wrote:
| Reference for others: https://youtube.com/watch?v=L1ff0HhNMso
| angoragoats wrote:
| No thanks. Can we (the US) instead deploy $500bn to help feed the
| hungry, get people employed, and guarantee everyone health care?
| eterpstra wrote:
| According to the business plan, solving world hunger and ending
| disease comes AFTER the 1/2 trillion dollar AGI buildout.
| angoragoats wrote:
| I weep for our country.
| redeux wrote:
| I feel like Poe's Law is in effect here.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
| bagels wrote:
| I will be shocked if AGI happens and hunger decreases.
| xienze wrote:
| OK, that would cover about a year of expenses. Then what?
| CreepGin wrote:
| Much less than a year, TBH. US spending on health care in
| 2023 was ~$5 trillion.
| redeux wrote:
| Unfortunately that figure wouldn't get everyone healthcare in
| the US. I agree though, it could be deployed for better use but
| someone needs to think of those poor desperate shareholders.
| patmcc wrote:
| >>>get people employed
|
| It'll do this one, certainly. Maybe not the most cost-effective
| jobs program, but I expect there will be many construction and
| data centre jobs in the next few years.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Build houses, not data centers.
| newfocogi wrote:
| > "OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as
| OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft"
|
| Not sure why, but the word choice of "consumption" feels like a
| reverse Freudian slip to me.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| Industry standard word, e.g. "consumption pricing" etc
|
| But yeah if you're in the industry it's easy to forget how
| certain jargon sounds based on its dictionary definition
| hinkley wrote:
| But the good news is when the Trough of Disillusionment
| starts we can make a bunch of tuberculosis jokes.
| hinkley wrote:
| Sometimes the person writing the copy is writing it because
| they talk good, not because they are the biggest proponent of
| the idea.
|
| Give a clever, articulate person a task to write about
| something they don't believe in and they will include the
| subtlest of barbs, weak praise, or both.
| SvenL wrote:
| Meh, why did they choose this name. Stargate does not deserve
| this...
| non- wrote:
| Any clues to how they plan to invest $500 billion dollars? What
| infrastructure are they planning that will cost that much?
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| data center + gpu server farm (?)
| mrandish wrote:
| Plus power plants to drive the massive data centers. At large
| enough scale, power availability and cost is a constraint.
| burnte wrote:
| That was literally my question. Is this basically just for more
| datacenters, NVidia chips, and electricity with a sprinkling of
| engineers to run it all? If so, then that $500bn should NOT be
| invested in today's tech, but instead in making more powerful
| and power efficient chips, IMO.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| I don't know if $500bn could put anyone ahead of nvidia/tmc.
| patall wrote:
| He wanted to do that, but would have needed 5T for that. Only
| got 100 bn so far, so this is what you get (only slightly /s)
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| I'll make a wild guess that they will be building data centers
| and maybe robotic labs. They are starting with 100B of
| committed by mostly Softbank, but probably not transacted yet,
| money.
|
| > building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United
| States
|
| The carrot is probably something like - we will build enough
| compute to make a supper intelligence that will solve all the
| problems, ???, profit.
| lukeplato wrote:
| hopefully nuclear power plants
| croddin wrote:
| This could be a clue
|
| https://x.com/sama/status/1756090136935416039
| barbazoo wrote:
| > This project will [...] support the re-industrialization of the
| United States
|
| How?
| amarcheschi wrote:
| By aggregating the means of production even more in the hands
| of a handful of people
|
| Wait, was it supposed to re industrialize the USA?
| openplatypus wrote:
| Hush. Don't ask questions. It is going to be great.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Didn't you see the impressionist art of construction cranes?
| DoubleGlazing wrote:
| That's a ridiculous sum of money that could be better spent on
| much more worthy things.
| newfocogi wrote:
| Who/what is MGX? Google returns a few hits, none of which are
| clearly who is referred to here.
| rfw300 wrote:
| MGX is an arm of the United Arab Emirates' sovereign wealth
| operation: https://www.mgx.ae/en
| segasaturn wrote:
| I feel like that, along with SoftBank's investment, tell me
| everything about how serious this project is.
| rozap wrote:
| Don't worry, Oracle is also involved.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Skynet will be written in Java. I'm sorry, the verbose
| language wins
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Ellison discussed mRNA vaccines for cancer treatment at the
| presser, so my guess is metagenomi, MGX stock ticker. Kind of a
| glaring omission at the white house, to not mention the gene
| therapy investors.
|
| EDIT: ignore me, it's probably the Emirates
|
| https://metagenomi.co/
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MGX/
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > starting in Texas
|
| Maybe I just don't get it. Texas seems like an awful place to do
| business.
| avs733 wrote:
| When doing business is a bribe it's perfect
| nateglims wrote:
| The white house was touting this so it's probably to secure
| political patronage or will be part of pork barrel spending to
| get some other bill passed.
| jofzar wrote:
| It doesn't even have an electricity grid that works, maybe
| that's where the 500b is going, reconnecting it to the grid.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| No state income tax, fewer regulations (zoning, environmental
| regulations) than other parts of the country, relatively cheap
| power, large existing industrial base. For skilled labor that
| last bit is important. Also one of the cheapest states wrt
| minimum wage (same as federal, nothing added), which is
| important for unskilled labor.
|
| Depending on the part of the state, relatively low costs of
| living which is helpful if you don't like paying people much.
| Large areas that are relatively undeveloped or underdeveloped
| which can mean cheaper land.
| mandevil wrote:
| My guess would be it's all about electricity.
|
| Texas has a .... unique energy market (literally! They don't
| connect to the national grid so they can avoid US Government
| regulations- that way it's not interstate commerce). Because of
| that spot prices fluctuate very wildly up and down, depending
| on the weather, demand, and their large quantity of renewables
| (Texas is good for solar and wind energy). When the weather is
| good for renewables they have very cheap electricity (lots of
| production and can't sell to anyone outside the state), when
| the weather is bad they can have incredibly expensive
| electricity (less production, can't buy from anyone outside the
| state). Larger markets, able to pull from larger pools of
| producers and consumers, just fluctuate less.
|
| I know some bitcoin miners liked to be in Texas and basically
| worked as energy speculators: when electricity was cheap they
| would mine bitcoin, when it was expensive they shut down their
| plant- sometimes they even got paid by producers to shut-down
| their plant! I would bet that you could do a lot of that with
| AI training as well, given good checkpointing.
|
| You wouldn't want to do inference there (which needs to be
| responsive and doesn't like 'oh this plant is going to shut
| down in one minute because a storm just came up') but for
| training it should be fine?
| heydenberk wrote:
| ~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's
| similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country.
|
| If the electric grid -- particularly the interconnection queue --
| is already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something
| on this scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized
| policy framework (big if!), I would guess there's some major
| permitting reform announcement coming soon.
| dwnw wrote:
| Don't worry, they said they are doing it in Texas where the
| power grid is super reliable and able to handle the massive
| additional load.
| heydenberk wrote:
| Say what you will about Texas, but they are adding energy
| capacity, renewables especially, at a much faster rate than
| any comparable state.
| dwnw wrote:
| Probably the first state to power all those renewables down
| at the whim of the president too.
| CapcomGo wrote:
| Ok but their grid sure seems to fail a lot.
| segasaturn wrote:
| How much capacity does solar and wind add compared to
| nuclear, per square foot of land used? Also I thought the
| new administration was placing a ban on new renewable
| installations.
| hooli_gan wrote:
| Isn't there enough space in Texas? There are only 114
| people per square mile.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas
| itishappy wrote:
| Why does it matter? Is land at a premium in Texas?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The ban is on offshore wind and for government loans for
| renewables. Won't really affect Texas much, it's
| Massachusetts that'll have to deal with more expensive
| energy.
| cpursley wrote:
| Coastals here like to shit on Texas and Florida. But they
| are getting it done (Florida with new rail). And many of
| the other basket of deplorable states are also experiencing
| significant industrial expansion.
|
| Results are all that matter.
| jofzar wrote:
| Texas currently has snow again, so expect it's grid to
| catastrophically fail again because it doesn't have
| access to the rest of the USA grid.
|
| So expect a bad result again for like the 4 time in 5
| year.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Probably because they don't have to deal with energy-related
| regulations...
| ericcumbee wrote:
| watching the press conference and Onsite power production were
| mentioned. I assume this means SMRs and solar.
| constantcrying wrote:
| They say this will include hundreds of thousands of jobs. I
| have little doubt that dedicated power generation ans storage
| is included in their plans.
|
| Also I have no doubt that the timing is deliberate and that
| this is not happening without governments endorsement. If I had
| to guess the US military also is involved in this and sees this
| initiative as important for national security.
| impulser_ wrote:
| Trump already made it easier to build energy project of any
| kind in the US, and also declared an national energy emergency
| to improve and increase energy infrastructure in the US.
|
| https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/decl...
|
| https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unle...
| lvl155 wrote:
| It appears this basically locks out Google, Amazon and Meta. Why
| are we declaring OpenAI as the winner? This is like declaring
| Netscape the winner before the dust settled. Having the govt
| involved in this manner can't be a good thing.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Because it's free to play, pay to win, from now on.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| I am not sure if OpenAI will be the winner despite this
| investment. Currently, I see various DeepSeek AI models as
| offering much more bang for the buck at a vastly cheaper cost
| for small tasks, but not for large context tasks.
| impulser_ wrote:
| Because this is Oracle's and OpenAI's project with SoftBank and
| MGX as investors.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| It's who you know. Sam is buddies with Masa, simple as.
| moralestapia wrote:
| "No Sam, for obvious reasons we cannot give you 6 trillion ...
| but how about 500 billion?"
|
| Wow.
| redeux wrote:
| You gotta start small, you know?
| dekhn wrote:
| if it really worked that way, then it was a successful blue-sky
| negotiation tactic to maximize the actual final negotiation.
| cekanoni wrote:
| So its not the hype anymore?
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Softbank historically had been late to buy into the hype, but
| man do they buy big.
| sillywalk wrote:
| Not to be confused by the other (non-fictional) DoD Stargate
| Project[0], that involved "remote-viewing" and other psychic
| crap.
|
| The AI Stargate Project claims it will "create hundreds of
| thousands of American jobs". One has doubts.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
| jskrn wrote:
| Why Texas - is it an ideal location for AI infrastructure?
| dwnw wrote:
| It is an ideal location for bribing politicians. That was at
| the top of the reqs list, infrastructure was at the bottom.
| redeux wrote:
| Like dwnw said, anything goes in Texas if you have money and
| there's already a decent number of qualified tech workers.
| Corporate taxes are super low as well.
| rednafi wrote:
| What a waste of a great name. Why form a separate company for
| this?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| To get out from under OpenAI's considerable obligation to
| Microsoft.
|
| That is why there is the awkward "we'll continue to consume
| Azure" sentence in there. Will be interesting to see if it
| works or if MS starts revving up their lawyers.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _This project will ... also provide a strategic capability to
| protect the national security of America and its allies._
|
| > _All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop ...
| AGI for the benefit of all of humanity._
|
| Erm, so which one is it? It is amply demonstrable from the events
| post WW2 that the US+allies are quite far from benefiting _all_
| of humanity & in fact, in some cases, it assists an allied
| minority at an extreme cost to a condemned majority, for no
| discernable humanitarian reasons save for some perceived notion
| of "shared values".
| hooli_gan wrote:
| Maybe only Americans and their allies qualify as human,
| according to them
| etblg wrote:
| And only the americans the administration deems to qualify as
| human.
| pyrophoenix wrote:
| More confusion than anything else!
| jofzar wrote:
| > This project will not only support the re-industrialization of
| the United States but also provide a strategic capability to
| protect the national security of America and its allies.
|
| > The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI,
| Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for
| Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and
| OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be
| the chairman.
|
| I'm sorry, has SoftBank suddenly become an American company? I
| feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this.
|
| Edit: MGX is Saudi company? This is baffling....
|
| https://www.mgx.ae/en
| 9283409232 wrote:
| SoftBank having financial responsibility is insane. This is
| just a way to funnel money into people Trump owes.
| jofzar wrote:
| I don't get it, if this was government/American funded I
| could understand the marketing as "USA" secured
| infrastructure but like it's not?
| redeux wrote:
| Well the Saudis are one of the president's "personal
| shareholders" so I think that qualifies them as an American
| company now.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| I think the death of Suchir Balaji makes more sense now. Saudis
| don't mess around with their investments.
| padjo wrote:
| Watch the birdie
| newfocogi wrote:
| "SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX" seems like quite the lineup.
| Two groups who are good at frivolously throwing away investment
| money because they have so much capital to deploy, there really
| isn't anything reasonable to do with it, a tech "has-been" and
| OpenAI. You become who you surround yourself with I guess.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Some reports[0] paint this as something Trump announced and that
| the US Government is heavily involved with but the announcement
| only mentions private sector (and lead by Japan's Softbank at
| that). Is the US also putting in money? How much control of the
| venture is private vs public here?
|
| 0. https://www.thewrap.com/trump-open-ai-oracle-stargate-ai-
| inf...
|
| 1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-announces-private-
| sector-...
| apsec112 wrote:
| AFAIK this is a purely private project, and Trump is just doing
| the announcement as a form of bragging/ribbon-cutting
| nmca wrote:
| I for one am hugely supportive of compute that is red white and
| blue.
| islewis wrote:
| $500B is not $7T, but its surprisingly close.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Was Skynet project already taken? Wonder how many public
| infrastructure or resource programs will be cut to fund this.
| ErgoPlease wrote:
| There's a good amount of irony in the results that AI have
| achieved, particularly if we reach AGI - they have improved
| individual worker efficiency by removing other workers from the
| system. Naming it Stargate implies a reckoning with the actual
| series itself - an accomplishment by humanity. Instead, what this
| pushes, is accomplishing the removal of humans from humanity. I
| like cool shiny tech, but I like useful tech that really helps
| humans more. Work on 3D-printing sustainable food, or something
| actually useful like that. Jenson doesn't need another 1B gallons
| of water under his belt.
| pr337h4m wrote:
| Data centers are overrated, local AI is what's necessary for
| humanoid (and other) robots, which will be the most economically
| impactful use case.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| You probably still need to train the initial models in data
| centers, with local host mostly being used to run train models.
| At most we'd augment trained models with local data storage on
| local host.
|
| If compute continues to become cheaper, local training might be
| feasible in 20 years.
| patall wrote:
| Last year, sama goal was 5 to 7T. Now he is going with 100B, with
| option for another 400B. Huge numbers, but it still feels like a
| bit of a down turn.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| I think that coming down from 5T to 0.5T means that TSMC cannot
| be reproduced locally, but everything else is on the table.
| mempko wrote:
| SoftBank and MGX paying for all this, all foreign investment.
|
| Where is the US government in all this? Why aren't they leading
| the charge? They obviously have the money.
| apsec112 wrote:
| $500 billion is a lot of money even by US government standards.
| It's about the size of all the new spending in the 2021
| bipartisan infrastructure bill.
| mempko wrote:
| For the US government it's a matter of political will. Where
| is the political will?
| itishappy wrote:
| So about 10% of what Sam was asking the Saudis (and everyone
| else) for a year ago? That's still a helluva lot of money.
|
| Interesting that the Saudis (MGX) and Japan (Softbank) are
| bankrolling the re-industrialization of America.
| moffers wrote:
| After they build the Multivac or Deep Thought, or whatever it is
| they're trying to do, then what happens? It makes all the
| stockholders a lot of money?
| ErgoPlease wrote:
| The Silicon-Valley bubble universe continues to introduce entropy
| that it feeds off of itself... Naming this Stargate when some of
| the largest effects AI has had is removing humans from processes
| to make other, fewer humans more efficient is emblematic of this
| hollow naming ethos - continuing to use the portal to shunt more
| and more humans out of the process that is humanity, with fairly
| reckless abandon. Who is Ra, and who is sending the nuke where,
| in this naming scheme? You decide.
| thecrumb wrote:
| "create hundreds of thousands of American jobs"... Given the
| current educational system in the US, this should be fun to
| watch. Oh yeah, Musk and his H-1B Visa thing. Now it's making
| sense.
| tasuki wrote:
| > Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
|
| Not all rich people are out of their minds, but Masayoshi Son
| definitely is. The way he handled the WeWork situation was bad...
| michaelmrose wrote:
| > create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate
| massive economic benefit for the entire world. This project will
| not only support the re-industrialization of the United States
| but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national
| security of America and its allies.
|
| There is no reason to expect it to do any of that.
|
| > starting in Texas
|
| The traitor state that has repeatedly betrayed our country and
| threatened to succeed from the union which is if anything in
| danger of re-enacting the handmaid's tale. The state with fewest
| doctors per capita, with the least reliable grid, where the child
| rearing half of the pop don't want to live or bring their
| daughters.
| gigel82 wrote:
| I dislike associating a great fictional universe (Stargate
| series) with this disgusting affair...
| kerkeslager wrote:
| No amount of money invested in infrastructure is going to solve
| the "garbage in, garbage out" problem with AI, and it looks like
| the AI companies have already stolen the vast majority of content
| that is possible to steal. So this is basically a massive gamble
| that some innovation is going to make AI do something better than
| faultily regurgitate its training data. I'm not seeing a
| corresponding investment which actually attempts to solve the
| "garbage in, garbage out" problem.
|
| A fraction of this money invested in building homes would end the
| homelessness problem in the U.S.
|
| I guess the one silver lining here is that when the likely
| collapse happens, we'll have more clean energy infrastructure to
| use for more useful things.
| skepticATX wrote:
| [delayed]
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we
| are evaluating potential sites across the country for more
| campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
|
| For those interested, it looks like Albany, NY (upstate NY) is
| very likely one of the next growth sites.
|
| [0] https://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press-
| releases/schum...
| rcarmo wrote:
| I read the announcement and the first three words that came to my
| mind were...
|
| "Hammond, of Texas"
|
| (apologies to those who haven't watched SG-1)
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(page generated 2025-01-21 23:01 UTC)