It's All a Joke

The Stargate Project

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AI For All
January 24, 2025

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Hello readers,

Welcome to the AI For All newsletter! President Trump announced The Stargate Project, a $500 billion investment in AI data centers, Elon Musk undermined the whole project, and Sam Altman decried the AGI hype that he created. Is this a joke? Let’s find out!

It’s All a Joke

(from left to right) President Trump, Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son, Sam Altman

OpenAI and SoftBank are forming a new company called The Stargate Project with the intention of investing $500 billion over the next four years to build data centers for OpenAI exclusively. In a White House press conference, President Trump and the league of not-so-extraordinary gentlemen (Ellison, Son, Altman) had a competition to see who could give the least substantive justification for such a colossal waste of money.

The justification for Stargate is, of course, all of the amazing things that AI might do — a hypothetical AI that no one has built or knows how to build, the promised capabilities of which will not arrive via more data centers. As I’ve explained before, hardware is not what’s holding AI back. So who won the competition? Despite Son saying unironically that AGI is “coming very soon,” Altman still takes the Inauguration cake.

Trump, perhaps accidentally, asked a good question. How will AI do all of these amazing things (like curing diseases)? After taking a deep breath, Altman proceeded to dig an even deeper grave for himself by professing his mere belief that AI will cure diseases at an “unprecedented rate” while clearly not knowing how, when, or what — that is, what kind of AI would be capable of this? Certainly not the LLMs motivating Stargate.

The other justification for Stargate is, of course, China. In fact, Alexandr Wang published an open letter to Trump urging continued investment in AI so as to remain ahead of China. Wang is the CEO of Scale AI, which runs Remotasks and Outlier AI, companies that exploit and traumatize underpaid (or not paid at all) clickworkers in developing nations. What’s funny is that China is just going to build the same infrastructure as Stargate, and everyone will lose (except chip manufacturers).

Elon Musk, sworn enemy of Sam Altman, had to put aside his Trump sycophancy to undermine Stargate, writing on X that, “They don’t actually have the money” and “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.” Altman retorted in a passive aggressive way while still singing Elon’s praises. Musk would go on to call Altman a “swindler” (finally, something we agree on).

Sam Altman took to X to decry the hype around AGI that he created, writing that “twitter hype is out of control again. we are not gonna deploy AGI next month, nor have we built it. we have some very cool stuff for you but pls chill and cut your expectations 100x!” When does sending mixed messages become emotional abuse? To all of Altman’s fanboys, please get help. The hype was around o3, which is facing new controversy because FrontierMath, one of the benchmarks that o3 performed well on, turned out to be funded by OpenAI this whole time and this was never disclosed.

The 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai is about the absurdity of war wherein each man is driven to betray his own nature. The culture war has a similar effect on people, causing them to dig their heels into positions they don’t even really believe. Big Tech’s pivot to the right is entirely disingenuous and self-serving, a craven act of desperation as the late stages of what tech writer Ed Zitron calls The Rot Economy take their toll. Trump and the broligarchy advising him add a new layer of unseriousness to the whole generative AI thing that could be the industry’s undoing.

🔥 Rapid Fire

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Source: The Verge

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