This is a linkpost for https://www.c-span.org/program/white-house-event/president-trump-delivers-remarks-at-the-white-house/654740
Quotes from the Stargate press conference
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Manifold traders typically give a 27% chance of 500B actually being deployed in 4 years. There's also a more interesting market of more precisely how much will be.
I get the impression that Trump really likes launching things with big numbers, and cares much less about the details or correctness.
That said, it's possible that the government's involvement still increases spending by 20%+, which would still be significant.
On Stargate as a whole:
This is a restatement with a somewhat different org structure of the prior OpenAI/Microsoft data center investment/partnership, announced early last year (admittedly for $100b).
Elon Musk states they do not have anywhere near the 500 billion pledged actually secured:
I do take this as somewhat reasonable, given the partners involved just barely have $125 billion available to invest like this on a short timeline.
Microsoft has around 78 billion cash on hand at a market cap of around 3.2 trillion.
Softbank has 32 billion dollars cash on hand, with a total market cap of 87 billion.
Oracle has around 12 billion cash on hand, with a market cap of around 500 billion.
OpenAI has raised a total of 18 billion, at a valuation of 160 billion.
Further, OpenAI and Microsoft seem to be distancing themselves somewhat - initially this was just an OpenAI/Microsoft project, and now it involves two others and Microsoft just put out a release saying "This new agreement also includes changes to the exclusivity on new capacity, moving to a model where Microsoft has a right of first refusal (ROFR)."
Overall, I think that the new Stargate numbers published may (call it 40%) be true, but I also think there is a decent chance this is new administration trump-esque propoganda/bluster (call it 45%), and little change from the prior expected path of datacenter investment (which I do believe is unintentional AINotKillEveryone-ism in the near future).
Edit: Satya Nadella was just asked about how funding looks for stargate, and said "Microsoft is good for investing 80b". This 80b number is the same number Microsoft has been saying repeatedly.
As far as I understand what Satya, was saying that 80 billion is what Microsoft wants to invest per year into Azure infrastructure.
That does not seem to be a part of the money that goes to Stargate.
Agreed - that's what I was trying to say with the link under "80b number is the same number Microsoft has been saying repeatedly."
All of the plans I know of for aligning superintelligence are timeline-sensitive, either because they involve research strategies that haven't paid off yet, or because they involve using non-superintelligent AI to help with alignment of subsequent AIs. Acceleration specifically in the supply of compute makes all those plans harder. If you buy the argument that misaligned superintelligence is a risk at all, Stargate is a bad thing.
The one silver lining is that this is all legible. The current administration's stance seems to be that we should build AI quickly in order to outrace China; the previous administration's stance was to say that the real existential risk is minorities being denied on loan applications. I prefer the "race with China" position because at least there exists a set of factual beliefs that would make that correct, implying it may be possible to course-correct when additional information becomes available.
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