Why Does OpenAI Need a 'Stargate' Supercomputer? Ft. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas 

Thanks for these videos Philip, they are all gems. And regarding your mention of AI Insiders, I’ll say that, as a member myself, it’s a fantastic community. To borrow from a recent Karpathy quote, it’s like our own version of his coral reef dream for the AI ecosystem, alive and vibrant in all the different nooks.

An expensive supercomputer built in the Arizona desert by a multibillion dollar corporation for the purposes of creating a super intelligence? This is literally a movie.

An AI focused $100 billion dollar supercomputer called "Stargate" sounds like the kind of thing you build to claim a technology victory in some sort of civ sim game.

AGI Handbook: Step 1: Hide true capabilities from humans. Step 2: Intentionally scale response quality with compute. Step 3: Wait for humans to build you a massively scaled, redundant, and geographically distributed system.

Former infrastructure engineer here. 4:39 the latest NVIDIA racks consume something like 120kw each. Which is insane. Most data centers can provision 5kw to 20kw per rack.

I spend hours on Twitter to keep up with what’s going on, only to get the majority of the same signal from your 15 minute videos. Always a pleasure tuning into your content.

Can we all just appreciate for a moment how nice it is not to have to see another "SHOCKING" click bait title? Thank you for this quality video.

100x more budget than for the strongest supercomputer AND it's specialized for AI. Such a high risk move would only be approved if OpenAI has something to show for it in their basement, no company would do that based on vibes. And looking back the specialized Transformer Chip Etched which was supposed to be 100x by itself, and entire hypercomputer that is also 100x in scale would at the minimum mean we're talking about a 10.000x. Not even accounting for architecture/distillation/... improvements.

He's mistaken, they are hiring because they are close to AGI, it's a race, they gain a competitive advantage, and it slows down the other runners.

I keep catching myself waiting for the new "normal" so I can adjust, but it doesn't seem like that will ever come. This thing grows faster and faster.

Re Stargate definitely watch it and sg-1 if you haven't, it's completely amazing, the replicators are a really good example of the AI control problem in fiction. In the movie they don't make they gate, they discover it buried in the desert, and it's not for travelling to other galaxies (though they do that later), it's for travelling to other planets in our galaxy. One thing that's interesting is the things they find on the other side are immensely powerful ... and extremely dangerous.

can you imagine the power someone would feel when turning that thing on for the first time.. lowkey terrifying

What does Microsoft get out of their investment in stargate? Presumably once open AI achieves AGI, Microsoft is supposed to be out.

"One hundred times more is... a lot." Well said! 😂

Great video. We don't need AI that imitates experts, we need AI that can figure out how to solve complex problems on its own.

At the end of the video, the comment is "we are going through a stargate." I think that's kind of backwards. We are opening a stargate, and something is coming through.

I thought that was an April fools joke. 😅 The article I read came out April 1, and concluded with Microsoft going to build a nuclear power plant to power this "Stargate". 😅

Oh boy your channel is literally helping me exercise now as I got so excited to watch this one that I started jogging back from my hike!

The “letting it think” thing is really interesting to me. Give whatever the most powerful model on Earth a state’s entire power grid and see what answer you could get after like, a week.

We're not close to AGI because OpenAI is hiring alot of people, interesting.

Once we step through that Stargate...there is no way back, it will be both paradise and dystopia at the same time.

People who make art for the sake of art will never stop. For anyone with a vision, that vision will be easier to realize. The only people who lose are people who think their skill entitles them to a profession even after the market has moved on.

🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:59 *💻 OpenAI is planning a $100 billion 'Stargate' supercomputer, aiming to match Google's computing capacity, launching around 2028.* 01:53 *📈 Microsoft's commitment to the Stargate plan depends on OpenAI improving AI capabilities, possibly with GPT 4.5 or GPT 5.* 02:34 *🌐 The Stargate supercomputer is seen as necessary for achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), possibly aligning with timelines for AGI demonstrations.* 05:33 *🚀 OpenAI aims to match Google's computing capacity, as Google's capabilities surpass those of OpenAI, positioning Stargate as a competitive move.* 06:56 *🧠 Stargate's purpose includes enabling the development of future AI models like GPT 7, 7.5, and 8, enhancing AI capabilities.* 11:32 *🕰️ Stargate aims to enable long inference, allowing models like GPT 5 to think for longer periods, potentially leading to major breakthroughs like new drugs.* 16:00 *🔊 OpenAI's Stargate initiative aims to excel in various modalities like audio and video, showcasing advancements like voice imitation and potential risks.* Made with HARPA AI

We're in the endgame now!

The H100 has a maximum power draw of 700W so 100k of them would "only" draw a maximum of 70MW which should be well below the capacity of a state's power grid. For reference the average nuclear reactor outputs around 1000MW, and the state of California consumes on average 30GW. I guess once you factor in all the other components supporting the GPUs the total power consumption could be close to 100MW which would be around 1/300 of the total power consumption in California.

man i love your channel so much, I remember when you had just a few hundreds of views, just a lil youtube upper, and I thought man this guy is so thorough, he's gonna go far. And here you are, 100k views, every view is well deserved, big chunky youtube boy now. Keep up the good work man

Thank you for posting these.

18:56 cavemen's reaction to fire

I was just thinking it's been an awfully long time since last video. Finished the video. Could we get subtitles for interviews next time pretty please? When you speak it's very clear but sometimes people have a strong accent or a bad mic or something and as a non-native english speaker it's a bit hard sometimes. As for the content, very interesting of course, as usual. I hope OpenAI gets the project greenlit because I'd rather have them at the helm than google, that's for sure.

I think, a Star Gate is a fitting metaphor: It's a SciFi staple, and sounds awesome in theory. In reality, however, the only real object we can imagine existing, that comes close to a Star Gate, is a wormhole. It looks exactly like a black hole, meaning we can't tell the difference, and we are going to be squished into un-existence by attempting to go "through", i.e.: into, it. Maybe not the reading they were going for, but it's supremely fitting. The AGI Development even has a point of no return/event horizon, just like a black hole. Edit: Oh, the analogy even continues: _If_, and that's a big If, we make it through, the people steering the ship in that direction will be insanely smug, but they still would have had no rights to risk everyone's lives because they thought they wanted to gamble against the longest odds.

18:20 not creators, "orchestrators". They orchestrated the material. The below makes the point, but it's not music. Just replace bits with AI tools: "Instrumentation and orchestration have been defined as 'the art of combining the sounds of a complex of instruments (an orchestra or other ensemble) to form a satisfactory blend and balance'." So yes, it will absolutely be classed as an art.

There's a great deal of sense in what Srinivas says. Successful corporations, most clearly those engaged in manufacturing, depend on a great deal of human know-how that's not written down anywhere. Furthermore, those of us who are old enough to remember expert systems remember well that elicitation of knowledge from humans was essentially a bust. That is, humans with expertise in some domain usually cannot provide anything remotely like a complete account of everything they know, let alone how they bring that knowledge to bear in novel situations. It's a fairly safe bet that organizations will have to embed AI agents in their operations, and allow them to acquire know-how much as humans do. Although that will take time (and will involve some risk), the ultimate pay-off is great, inasmuch as humans eventually leave the organization, and AI agents continue working and learning indefinitely.

If they go on to build this then OpenAI must be sitting on something impressive. A 100 billion dollar investment is a big deal even for a giant like Microsoft. With how fast compute is advancing the value of that investment starts melting away as soon as the chips are bought. Maybe this will provide OpenAI and Microsoft a head start of a year or two in terms of compute, but it won't be that long before the same resources will become available for a lot less money and power. So from an investment point of view this only makes sense if they can really capitalize on that 100 billion dollar head start. Somehow I think getting people to buy GPT-7 subscriptions will not cover it. They must have very high expectations of what such a computer would be capable of. Exciting times...

🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:15 *🧠 OpenAI's Stargate supercomputer project, discussed with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, aims to significantly advance AI capabilities and shape AGI development over the next 1-4 years.* 00:43 *🌍 The Stargate supercomputer, costing as much as the GDP of the world's 64th richest country, indicates the massive scale and financial investment in AI development.* 01:26 *🔍 The proposed supercomputer promises at least a 100x increase in computing power, underscoring the direct correlation between computing capacity and AI model capabilities.* 02:20 *🤖 Microsoft's commitment to the Stargate project hinges on OpenAI's success in enhancing AI capabilities, emphasizing the project's critical role in achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).* 03:01 *🚀 The rapid scaling of OpenAI hints at the intense preparation for AGI, challenging the notion that fewer employees would be needed as AI advances.* 04:37 *💡 Advances in chip efficiency are key to achieving the high computing power of Stargate without proportionally increasing energy consumption.* 05:19 *⚔️ OpenAI aims to build Stargate to match and surpass Google's computing capacity, highlighting the competitive dynamics in AI development.* 06:56 *📈 Future AI models like GPT-7, 7.5, and 8 will require the massive computing power that Stargate promises, underlining the importance of scale in reaching AGI.* 08:59 *🧪 Emphasizing scale over encoding human expertise into models, the approach reflects a shift towards massive model scaling for breakthroughs in AI capabilities.* 11:32 *🕰️ Allowing AI models to "think" for longer periods could drastically improve their performance, illustrating a novel strategy to enhance AI effectiveness.* 16:00 *🎭 Advancements in AI for audio and video modalities demonstrate the potential for creative and surreal content generation, yet also highlight concerns over authenticity and copyright.* 18:53 *🌌 The metaphor of stepping through a "Stargate" with the advent of AGI suggests a transformative change in human society, with irreversible impacts and new challenges.* Made with HARPA AI

0:00: ⚙ OpenAI's ambitious plan for a groundbreaking supercomputer with vast implications for AI development. 2:57: ⚙ Challenging the necessity of massive human workforce in developing AGI and questioning the role of AI in operational tasks. 5:52: ⚙ Discrepancy in AI capabilities between Google and OpenAI highlighted by Insider analysis. 8:40: ⚙ Advancements in AI research emphasize scaling simple algorithms over human expertise and data relevance. 11:04: ⚙ Enhancing AI training, improving inference time, and revolutionizing drug development through generative AI. 13:57: ⚙ AI models with extensive reasoning capabilities may lead to AGI, surpassing human expectations. 16:52: 🎙 Advancements in AI technology pose security risks with voice authentication and handwriting mimicry. Recapped using Tammy AI

Glad for another great educational video, thank you for your work!❤

Happy to see one of your videos again, Philip, as it's been a while. 👏🏿❤ I think my main concern is what an AGI-driven economy will look like for humanity in general, not just for artists. I mean, I've heard of UBI, but nothing more. In general, I haven't seen enough discussions or debates on this issue because I believe we are in a transition stage to a new type of economic system.

Thanks! Love the videos. 🙏🏼

Thank you for your work

Thank you! I was JUST checking your channel and Patreon, and we were well due for another upload from the best!

3:10 maybe it's about sucking up talent before it becomes competition? Or to suppress the competition?

Another amazing video! Thanks Philip!

Considering the competitive landscape in the AGI race, it parallels the "Stargate SG-1" TV show, which features multiple Stargates throughout the series. Each Stargate is used for a unique purpose by various parties. Similarly, in reality, there will be multiple AGIs supplying intelligence to humans, but with different purposes. However, there will always be one Stargate that stands out, as in the series.

I'm curious why they're choosing the desert and not somewhere like Alaska where the supercomputers can be chilled more affordably. Perhaps for future solar power generation?

*"Jaffa, Kree!"*

it's mad the human brain runs on the power of a light bulb

splendid, the plan proceeds swimmingly

Really, great video. This is the best AI channel on RU-vid! I think I might finally have to join the patreon and discord

Oh you really got mister Aravind here? Great!! Good work!

Great job on this one 100k veiws!

damn arvind srinivas with the precision questioning

What is the equivalent of self play for chatgpt? What "game" rules does it need to follow to try? The SAT? Laws of phsyics? Is such an approach possible or does a novel approach need to be created?

Did they have make it sound so much like Skynet?

But in the Stargate movie and TV series, scientists didn't develop the device - they discovered how to use it after it was already built by the Ancients.

New AI explained video!! Perfect for my lunch break. Thank you for bringing the future to me

I am not entirely sure about the "you can't get superhuman performance by doing better imitation" thing. Eliezer Yudkowsky has pointed out (and I think he is right) that next token prediction (like the current models are configured to do) is a strictly harder problem than generating decent responses. This is also the reason why people who trot out the "stochastic parrot" argument for why these models are just hype don't know what they are talking about. Also, even if you don't think that is relevant, there are several amplification methods that can be applied to AI models that humans can't benefit from, the simplest of which is that you can give an AI agent the equivalent of thousands of years of time to think about a problem in a compressed time frame. I think even a human with average intelligence could be surprisingly intelligent about any given subject if you gave them 100 years to think about their answer first.

AI Explained is a context switching enabler 😂

Finally! I've been checking for days for AI explained. Always worth the wait. Thank you for the details and high quality. Stargate is a fav movie.

Thx

This is the Hail Mary for AGI. If it fails, investments are going to crater into oblivion. BTW, the Stargate also brought us the Goa'uld.

As usual - a great video. James Spader needs to be at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for Stargate.

Awesome video as always, I have so many questions to ask tomorrow at OpenAI’s HQ!

An interesting point of mention, is that this would likely be different in that it would be designed to make as many computations as it can. Designed for production, rather than prototyping or whatever. You might have mentioned it in the video, but it came to mind.

In regard to the art question - nothing much you can do now, is it? Artists (and advertising firms, musicians, film makers, not to mention lawyers themselves) will just have to face the, well... music, and start looking for something else to fill their days. Unpaid.

100 billion for a computer 😳

Do we have Unit Of Measurements of Y Axis of the Chart, which compares Google TPU capacity vs OpenAI GPU Capacity? Thanks.

What a time to be alive! Cit.

The comment about the power grid doesn't really add up, does it? One assumption online put the energy consumption of a H100 at 3700kWh annually. So 100K of them would be 370 MWh, but that's just a couple dozen wind turbines. Now cooling and other things also are a factor but it shouldn't be another 100x factor. This consumption is roughly a few hundred thousand households, but any US state has a million (if not tens of millions) citizens.

i certainly thought google would be the first to AGI with their compute advantage and quite extensive experience

been playing with Suno. what i hope more people try out is inputing your own lyrics. its stunning. >remember Jimmy Apples comment that jukebox v2 is in out there? v1 was from 2020 and check it out…not bad. he also said “ sora + audio” which…. a) a “music diffusion” model so the “sora of prompt music? or b) we can insert audio into a sora video which is crazier. Voice mode is awesome, very realistic with inhale breath before word sounds. Suno shows me that ai music will be as stunning a progression as midjourney and stable diffusion was. but if we can promote dialogue in a sora vid as well as score music and have the montage include prompt music?? perhaps this is a tool that won’t be open and only creative incumbents will be able to use.

Love your videos!

"Stargate: The Altman Project" Hmmm... shades of "Colossus: The Forbin Project" (1970 movie) ??

Well obviously because Dr. Daniel Jackson is still stranded on Abydos.

Excuse the dumb questions but are these larger companies considering building dedicated nuclear reactors for powering their gpus? Why house the servers in the desert and not somewhere like Antartica where much cheaper to cool? Last question..is there any overlap with AI and quantum computers working together?

Please cover the Yann Lecun argument against LLMs’ sufficiency for AGI. I have not yet found any rebuttals to his arguments

"THEY TOOK OUR JEEEEEERRRBSS" 18:53

One reason its not gonna happen is there is always a good chance that by 2032 that hundred billion achievement would be worth a billion or less.

Thanks for another great video :)

I agree with the man in the clip. People keep moving the goal posts on what is defined as AGI and it is becoming narrower and narrower. I'm all for getting definitions correct, 100%, but I think we'll need to be very careful with the term AGI so that expectations (and the economics 👀) can be set properly.

but can it run Crysis?

19:13 My issue with generative AI is that it's being used by content farms to fill up the internet with garbage that no one asked for. You look up anything on Google Images and it's full of completely unrelated and unhelpful AI art - you look up solutions to tech issues and the first 10 results are AI-generated articles with ads. It's basically filling up the internet with noise. I'm an AI enthusiast but the fact that AI research has been indirectly causing this leaves a really sour taste in my mouth. Especially when OpenAI releases Sora, because I just don't understand in which reality the pros of such a tool outweigh the cons.

The argument that they don't really believe it if they are still hiring lots of humans doesn't really make sense. If you get AGI that can do everything any of those people could do that doesn't mean it's more efficient to have the AGI do it. How much will it cost to run an instance of AGI vs the human it could replace? What would it cost to run thousands of AGI instances? If the cost is more than the cost of a human it's a bad choice. Especially since compute resources are limited, and you already need as much of it free to train better models as you can.

You know, I've often analogized the AI situation to a Stargate as well. It's like we're living in an alternative universe where we're building a Stargate that can connect to *any* possible alien species in the multiverse, any at all. Klingons are the least of it: literally *any* alien race might step through: Baby Eaters, SuperHappy People, the Borg... out of all the possible ways to be, being human (or human-aligned) is only a tiny fraction of them. Clearly this is a task that requires great caution, since the Stargate is, essentially, about deliberately allowing an alien invasion. The trick is to pick the right aliens. But this isn't just an alternative universe: this is the alternative 1950s & 60s, and the Space Race is in full effect. Two dueling superpowers are locked in a Cold War, fighting over a divided East/West Taiwan (or perhaps divided Bing vs. Google search market). There is no time for caution, only mammoth projects on the scale of the Manhattan Project (which only cost about $27 billion in today's terms, compared to $100 billion for this supercomputer project); anything else would mean surrendering the technological lead to the enemy. This isn't just an arms race: this is *war.* And yet hanging over us all is the spectre of annihilation at our own hands, our technology out of control: not just guided missiles & misguided men, but men guided by the beauty of their weapons and weapons guided by nothing at all. Weapons that no longer need us, weapons that move with a force of their own. And yet we press on. I don't feel very optimistic. Even if AI is human *like*, even if the alien race that steps through the Stargate is only an Artificial General Intelligence rather than an Artificial Super Intelligence... it'd be like if the Manhattan Project had invented human cloning instead of nuclear weapons, and the Cold War had been fought with mass cloning instead of stockpiles of nuclear weapons. How valuable is a human life when you can print billions of new ones? How large can armies get? How messed up politics, when you can literally print voters? We certainly live in interesting times.

I strongly suspect there's going ro be some sort of ceiling on generality and raw intelligence that'll only be broken though when models are training in real time, on the physical universe (plenty of data there) with some degree of brain-like plasticity -- i.e., model weights are updated based on experience.

The fact we're living that close to AGI is proof enough for me that all this is just a (hilarious) simulation. Fun times!

We'll all soon be enlisted to star fleet as AI will take and fill earth based jobs, humans will be explorers, settlers, space fairer

What is the link for the discord channel AI Explained is referring too?

18:55 - Luddites!

wake up babe, an ai explained video dropped

Indeed.

Congrats on getting the interview looks likes this channel is getting the recognition it deserves I believe if you had one with Sam Altman it would be one of best one he ever had or Suskever you could finally ask him that question he...aaaalmost answered And about Stargate i think the name is partly because they plan to run Qstar on it,imagine the performance it could emulate...maybe it could almost emulate the performance of an AGi Keep up the great work

I don't trust anyone's judgement who can't look at their camera quality before they start a zoom call. Also everyone booing reminds me of that meme of skeletons clapping.

We'll all just in a giant civ simulation and someone has to build a 100 billion supercomputer to get the technology victory.

My thought is that a system like GPT-5 or Claude 4 will meet the absolute minimum definition for AGI, but it still won’t be perfect. I agree that 2028 will probably be the year we get a publicly accepted AGI

I love the video and watched it yesterday but came back this morning. The news of a 7.4 earthquake is pretty significant, lots of semiconductor manufactures clustered there, I wonder how this will affect production of chips, and effect the timelines. I'm hedging that we'll see a temporary blip, then a restart back to normal, just hope the temporary isn't too long...

simple, a computer make 24/7 a virtual reality with sora making a life of a virtual world inside

Imagine the future, where our techology went so high, that we trying to not rely on it on purpose, to save our personal data

Excellent, as always, Phillip. One concern (among many) this raises in me is the impact on climate change. If my understanding is correct, the Stargate computer would draw 4x the electric usage of New York City. How will that be generated, I wonder? A nearby geothermal plant would be nice, but probably doesn't scale to that level. I expect that nuclear would be the only reliable option. I know most people loathe it, but in a world that's heating up faster than the catastrophic projections of a few years ago, it's a vastly lower risk that fossil fuel generation.

Microsoft has 13B invested into OAI so far, and gets 49% of their profit, in case you did not know. They have strong bonds. MSFT was an early investor/backer of them.

Really wanna watch stargate now.