alt Hacker NewsNorway Should Buy OpenAI
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Would Norway be prepared to commit to huge future capex spending? Like the pitch that OpenAI is going to achieve AGI seems to rely on vast investments in more compute over the coming years. If you just pay the $800B and then take your foot off the gas, do you still have a frontier lab or have you just paid a lot of money to remove a competitor from the market?
I would agree with this, except it sits on the thesis that one company really has that much of an impact. I don't think it actually does. AI is here and it will continue to progress. Norway controlling OpenAI is not going to change it's trajectory -- the cat is already out of the bag.
OpenAI is worth $800B because that’s what the last funding round valued it at. It does not mean that >50% of existing shareholders will agree to sell for that amount. If a serious buyer does emerge they will likely hold out for 2x that, maybe more.
Why on earth would Norway do a charity to the world? The oil fund while it has some moral guidelines, profit making is still the primary goal. There is no guarantee OpenAI will be profitable ever.
As someone who is a citizen of Norway and does follow our local politics.
I can say with a high sense of certainty, that this is not going to happen. There is no political appetite to do anything this radical, and anyone trying to get this done. Would run into a problems with an electorate that would view this a playing games with its money, and a political establishment, that could easily be even more horrified over this idea.
As near as I can tell, their logic is basically:
1. Imagine AI replaces all jobs.
2. Since AI is controlled by a very small number of people, they will be the ones that get all the money, since they are doing all the work.
3. Since there are no jobs, everyone else will die because they won't have money to buy anything.
But this causal chain makes no sense.
Imagine that I find a Magic Lamp that grants me unlimited wishes. Suddenly, I don't have to work! I wish for a sandwich, I get a sandwich. I wish for a car, I get a car. Etc.
Does the economy collapse? Of course not, because everyone else still has to work for a living (the poor fools). The fact that I don't need a job has effectively removed me from the economy.
One day I discover that I can wish for another Magic Lamp! I give the new Magic Lamp to another family and now they remove themselves from the economy. After a few weeks, 10,000 people have their own Magic Lamp. Has the economy collapsed? No, because the remaining 8 billion people still form a robust economy.
In this scenario, the economy won't suffer until a significant percent--maybe 50% or maybe 90%--have Magic Lamps. But at that point, it's no longer controlled by a "small number of people."
One argument is that once I have a Magic Lamp, I can disrupt the economy by (e.g.) creating cars for free and selling them for cheap. There's no incentive for me to do this--I don't need money--but let's pretend I'm doing it just to help people. Now a lot of people have cars but also a lot of car builders are out of a job. That sucks.
But wait! More cars also means more jobs. If you don't have to pay for a car, then you can use the money to pay for a driver. You have more cars, so you're paying more for insurance, so now there are more insurance jobs. There are more accidents, which sadly require more hospitals. And we need to hire people to dispose of all these cars at end-of-life.
If I use the Magic Lamp to get rid of part of the economy, the other parts get bigger because (a) there is more money to spend on it, and (b) there is often more need.[1]
The only way I can really destroy the economy with a Magic Lamp is to give everyone a Magic Lamp. But that's not a dystopia--that would be paradise!
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[1] If you don't believe this, just consider farming. Farming used to be 90% of the economy. Now the revenue from farming is concentrated in less than 5% of the people of the US. Did everyone else starve? Are we all out of jobs? No--the rest of the economy grew.
I care about this issue, and Norway of course has built an incredible social democracy. However, Norway is also able to do this because it's just a much smaller country. The U.S. is absolutely massive, both in terms of population and in terms of land area, and it is incredibly diverse. A lot of the problems in the U.S. just go away if you don't have to worry about the same scale or diversity of people. I absolutely want the U.S. to rise up to the AI crisis, and we're having major issues, but in the grand scheme of things, the U.S. still does a good job given the scale of its challenges, and I'm not sure Norway would do better.
Nei. Please don't. Enough money wasted already.
If you want to jump on the bandwagon just build a semi fab. Lots of clean water, lots of electricity, lots of geologically stable ground, lots of money that can't be invested locally - can't see why that haven't been done already. And it will still be useful after the fad is over.
I doubt that if Norway buys OpenAI, it will be the company that captures the value.
There is no inherent property to those model makers that they will capture the value of the AI boom. The model companies have a lot of competition from chinese models. Of course the US government will likely still keep some model makers alive (just alone for DOD supply chain reasons), but the chinese models will certainly compress margins.
It might as well be a chipmaker, a power company or a cobalt mining company.
Ultimately, it's up to the US government to decide if OpenAI can capture the value provided by AI: if chinese models get banned from the F500, then maybe one of america's famous duopolies can establish themselves.
But this hinges on congress mostly to pass certain laws to put OpenAI into that position. But which value does congress have? If OpenAI is owned by a bunch of Forbes 400 people like right now, then of course those will lobby the hell out of congress and ensure their stakes in OpenAI make them extremely rich.
But Norway doesn't have that access to lawmakers, they would see it as external influence by an alien power. They can certainly benefit from this trend though by being a shareholder.
To give a concrete example of the US government making life hard for foreign investors, take the T-mobile and sprint merger. T-mobile is majority owned by Deutsche Telekom AG, whose biggest shareholder are various institutions of the german federal government.
In this case, the US government just had to _approve_ the purchase, something very standard that happens all the time, but they still dragged that approval out as long as possible, even though Germany is a fellow NATO country.
Nothing special about OpenAI to deserve a buyout.
Why buy the cow when the milk is free? They should back an open-source projects?
All countries should back open source projects with their combined funds and data centres.
This information to train the LLM's is already in their library resources, they stole it already from lib gen.
There are definitely some weird mass psychological movements on the internet right now and I basically view this post as a wishcasting outcropping of this, stories the disempowered tell themselves.
People on the internet have some weird fantasy. News at 6.
Seriously why would Norway do that? With a fraction of that amount of money they can build energy and computing facilities. They can distill OpenAI models. Why would that bet all on one single company?
The US won't let Norway do that anyway. Biden blocked Japan's Nippon Steel from buying US Steel[0]:
That would be really good news for Anthropic. Their main competitor owned by a government would be a dream come true.
It doesn't matter what the valuation is, they won't raise the money to meet their procurement commitments without circular financing. Why would a sovereign wealth fund step in to meet those commitments?
The financials of OpenAI make no sense at all unless you're a True Believer.
If AI has a negative impact on employment as some think then AI should be required to fund free college for everyone that wants it. Then the schools can have a strict rule that only limited AI can be used during your education.
Then set up a pipeline between the human generated content from the colleges back into future AI models. Everyone gets an education and there is ongoing non AI training data to advance AI without any model collapse.
Norway could just start a European AI company (or even just a Microsoft replacement).
OpenAI is a mess.
Start with a fresh slate, using open models and you can actually build a company that makes sense.
And what would they do with it. Lock it up like the oil and natural gas? As much as there’s praise here for their achievements in green tech adoption, if you’re an immigrant in Norway, you realise how hermetic this society really is. It’s not great for outsiders.
No I think OpenAI deserves a meaningful valuation reset, but they are in a better potential strategy then Anthropic - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-struggle-of-openai/
And Denmark should buy Anthropic.
“Invade Greenland and we switch it off!”
Whole country now part of bubble gum. Instead, get in touch with ASML and build chips. Lower level technology is getting more and important even look easy (it's not), nowadays limited companies achive.
The gematria[0] of Norway is 96, while it's 60 for OpenAI. The deal is never gonna work.
What a spectacularly terrible investment that would be.
And Greenland should buy Anthropic!
Canada can buy either Microsoft or Amazon, Europe buys the other.
The USA vs Rest Of World problem: solved.
"Breaking News: Sam Altman has installed himself as dictator of Norway"
j/k. I love the outside of the box thinking here, but that doesn't seem like what the annuity was setup for. Of course thats up to Norway.
Echoes of the Darian Scheme somehow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme
This must be satire? Makes no sense. OpenAI isn't worth anywhere close to $800B. The gap to open models is shrinking fast, and it seems that many companies will have models with around the same capabilities.
And have you guys seen the compression ratio of models capabilities? The new Qwen3.8 27B is insane. I can run it at 85-95 tokens per second on my personal PC, and it is, according to artificial analysis benchmarks, around the same level as GPT 5.4 xhigh from march, OpenAIs leading model at that time.
If things keep going this way, OpenAI and it's infrastructure is worth...very little.
Buy a failing, over-hyped, collateral-less company with pension money. F-no!
No it should not it would be better if it saves norweigan retirement funds for the future.
Yes, but wait for the dip.
Then Norway will be holding the multibillion dollar bag once AI flops
OpenAI will likely not IPO this year because their numbers are so poor compared to those of Anthropic's. However if they don't IPO, they cannot pay for all those datacenters they ordered.
Meanwhile, Chinese companies are creating SOTA models and make them available for free, strongly limiting the amount of money that OpenAI and Anthropic can demand for their similar models via API. Their sky high valuations are likely to suffer as chinese models are considered "good enough" and safe to use when hosted in the West. They even have fewer safeguards and are thus more suitable for cybersecurity tasks.
tl;dr: They're fucked. Don't buy them.
Wouldn't be needlessly expensive and risky before the bubble pops? Just buy the scraps after it pops and If it's not bubble, they can alternatively just buy a fab dedicate its output to build ridiculously large infrastructure in Norway and power it with their wast hydro and wind sources, then bring the talent by providing freedom and resource access.
FYI "Silicon Valley" is a bunch of of different ppl. Quite a few. Operating in some totally separate day-to-day environments. Flippant comments rise to top because they are clickbait.
It is much better to buy kimi or glm and provide them gpu...
Why Norway? Why not Saudi Arabia?
This is the entire purpose of the AGI society which is 19 years old and has an annual conference that had 300 in person attendees and 4000 online this year
I just took over as society executive director specifically focused on the issues from this article: bridging that gap
You can see our discussion here:
The announcement at AGI 26 a few weeks ago which starts at 19:00
https://www.youtube.com/live/qRA1DoMCCSc?si=a2DJeT1vi0JoaWnY
I disagree, that would open up OpenAI to all sorts of EU regulations, rules and laws that prevents something like OpenAI to even be possible. Also the consumer would get less for higher price as increased costs are passed to them.
Norway's fund would first have to definitively find out what it takes to actually run all of OpenAI's compute. Monetarily wise. We still don't know that number.
Isn't OpenAI running on investor money right now?
This would be an interesting way for Europe to maintain AI sovereignty. US would block it though.
assuming this is serious, I would eat a tire if the US government allowed that to happen
OpenAI marketing team's getting pretty innovative huh?
Nice try inflating the IPO valuation. :)
The entire EU and Norway could simply block all clankers and US propaganda and experience an intellectual renaissance. For $0.
OpenAI has a very limited amount of time before their value collapses in the face of cheap Chinese models. The price war is just getting started. It won't be pretty.
Fastest way to burn $800 billion. Even the Chinese government isn't nationalizing its AI companies, because there's no chance a cutting edge technology company can remain competitive when run by bureaucrats.
And everyone should just get along. And software should just work perfectly. And everything should be free.
What's the point of writing something like this? Surely the writer isn't delusional enough to actually expect this to affect state leadership decision-making?
I stopped reading when I saw "Social-Democracy" and Palestine in the article.
Why try to tank Norwegian pensions by having them buy OpenAI before the LLM capital expenditure bubble bursts? 8-\
This is a very "funny" post:
- OpenAI can easily not become anything of significance in the future, even if the OP's prediction of the future becomes reality. I'd argue that being bought by a government and controlled within the ethical confines of that government would be a great way for OpenAI to quickly fall behind its peers who aren't subject to such regulations (which is the entire point of this post in the first place).
- Norway may be a great country ran by a great government, but that doesn't mean they would be a great leader of some AI revolution. Not only is the bar for being a competent government not particularly high on the world scale, but the skills of a competent government don't necessarily translate to the skills of an AI revolution Sherpa. I don't see why the OP feels Norway wouldn't use an advanced AI to simply enrich itself while leaving other countries to fend for themselves. It's not like Norway's fund is designed to serve the rest of the world as it is, nor is it the case that Norwegians would allow their government to serve other countries at the cost of their own well being.
- Those at OpenAI would either (a) never entertain this offer or (b) would sell to Norway if this exact thesis wasn't true (i.e., they'd be happy to sell if they thought OpenAI was going to become worthless anyway). Using the logic that the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global can just buy OpenAI because it has more money than a given valuation for OpenAI is embarrassing. It lacks any understanding of how businesses and investments work, let alone how investments in these specific businesses work. I mean, the OP starts this post off explaining how they think OpenAI can effectively rule the world once their expectations for their technology is realized. Why would they sell their ticket to unlimited wealth for a relatively small offer?