alt Hacker NewsIt's unfair, because we are talking in the hindsight about everything but Project Stargate, and it's also just your list (and I don't know what others could add to it) but it got me thinking. Manhattan Project goal is to make a powerful bomb. Apollo is to get to the Moon before soviets do (so, because of hubris, but still there is a concrete goal). South-North Water Transfer is pretty much terraforming, and others are mostly roads. I mean, it's all kinda understandable.
And Stargate Project is... what exactly? What is the goal? To make Altman richer, or is there any more or less concrete goal to achieve?
Also, few items for comparison, that I googled while thinking about it:
- Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository: $96B
- ITER: $65B
- Hubble Space Telescope: $16B
- JWST: $11B
- LHC: $10B
Sources:
https://jameswebbtracker.com/jwst/budget
Replies
>What is the goal?
Be the definitive first past the post in the budding "AI" industry.
Why? He who wins first writes the rules.
For an obvious example: The aviation industry uses feets and knots instead of metres because the US invented and commercialized aviation.
Another obvious example: Computers all speak ASCII (read: English) and even Unicode is based on ASCII because the US and UK commercialized computers.
If you want to write the rules you must win first, it is an absolute requirement. Runner-ups and below only get to obey the rules.
The goal is Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), based on short clips of the press conference.
It has been quite clear for a while we'll shoot past human-level intelligence since we learned how to do test-time compute effectively with RL on LMMs (Large Multimodal Models).
AI race is arguably just as, and maybe even more important, than the space race.
From a national security PoV, surpassing other countries’ work in the field is paramount to maintaining US hegemony.
We know China performs a ton of corporate espionage, and likely research in this field is being copied, then extended, in other parts of the world. China has been more intentional in putting money towards AI over the last 4 years.
We had the chips act, which is tangentially related, but nothing as complete as this. For i think a couple years, the climate impact of data centers caused active political slowdown from the previous administration.
Part of this is selling the project politically, so my belief is much of the talk of AGI and super intelligence is more marketing speak aimed at a general audience vs a niche tech community.
I’d be willing to predict that we’ll get some ancillary benefits to this level of investment. Maybe more efficient power generation? Cheaper electricity via more investment in nuclear power? Just spitballing, but this is an incredible amount of money, with $100 billion “instantly” deployed.