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OpenAI boss Sam Altman wants $7tn. For all our sakes, pray he doesn’t get it

The man behind ChatGPT is wooing the UAE to invest in energy-hungry AI. But if it turns out his tech can’t fix the world, he’s got his escape plan

When someone examines a photo and says, ‘Oh, he’s feeling this and this and this,’ all these subtle emotions, I look on with alien intrigue.” Altman’s great strengths, concluded Friend, “are clarity of thought and an intuitive grasp of complex systems. Well, as the Register helpfully points out, it’s enough cash “to gobble up Nvidia, TSMC, Broadcom, ASML, Samsung, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and every other chipmaker, designer, intellectual property holder, and equipment vendor of consequence in their entirety – and still have trillions left over”. Our future, apparently, depends on infinite amounts of what the industry now calls “compute”, and Altman is lauded because only he has had the courage to say out loud how much of it is needed in order to save civilisation.

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