Baby boomers will remember the TV series the six million dollar man It was broadcast on ABC from 1974 to 1978. (Younger viewers may watch reruns on Peacock or YouTube.) It was an expensive, high-tech show for its time that imagined the main character having “bionic” limbs and new eyes.
Since then, there has been inflation in both money and technology. His $6 million is now worth about $41 million. Machinery has also improved. Today, instead of superhuman eyes, we have AI. And now, riding on this ever-rising technology trend, 7 trillion dollar man.
That person is Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who shot to fame with ChatGPT in late 2022. Just in February wall street journal report Mr. Altman says he hopes to raise between $5 trillion and $7 trillion for his next venture. The dollar number is not a typo. “t” is added to “trillion”. Does that seem like a lot of money? That’s one-quarter of the annual GDP of the United States. But in 2023 report Goldman Sachs’ puts the issue in perspective, claiming that AI will add $7 trillion to the global economy over the next 10 years. After that, the projection effectively reaches infinity.
Indeed, with Google Gemini’s recent folly, politically correct imagery, AI has now become something of a punchline. Google’s AI rollout is the worst new product debut since Edsel and New Coke, or even the Titanic.
Google Gemini Black George Washington (Google Gemini)
But underlying the ridicule lies a real technology shift. Soon, the global economy will be interwoven with AI, just as electricity and the internet provide the warp and weft. All of these new technologies add up to something like $1 trillion spent over the remaining lifetimes of baby boomers alone. To run all this AI, you need a graphics processing unit (GPU), also known as a computer chip. A lot of them.
But is Altman the right person to make these chips? Showing good timing, he once again demonstrated his technical prowess when his company released it. sky“An AI model that can create realistic, imaginative scenes from text instructions.” Several sample heading Recognizing Sora’s incredible impact: “New OpenAI product wows users with its ultra-realistic videos” “Sam Altman reminded everyone why OpenAI is leading the way” ” “A very powerful text-to-video model “Sora” has arrived. ” as daily beast Observe:
Technologies like Sora have the potential to not just disrupt industries like art and film, but wipe them out entirely. Production companies no longer need to rely on actors, camera operators, directors, and the hundreds of other people who make the movies and TV shows we love. Instead, you can just type a few words into the prompt and get the complete video.
there is many More than $7 trillion worth of business activity takes place here, including the suspension of film production projects. Investors know that they can make money by either “shorting” a stock (betting that the stock price will go down) or by using the more familiar “going long” approach (betting that the stock price will go up). .
Therefore, for various reasons, Investors are paying close attention to Altman. In fact, in a sign that this trend is already underway, the stock price of another company, California-based chipmaker NVIDIA, has risen more than 1,700% over the past five years.Its market capitalization is close to $2 trillion (which, by the way, is Overall Chinese stock market). most are not strange Analysts say the following about the stock: strong buy.
Others are moving into the same space. SoftBank, led by Masayoshi Son, also wants to become big in chip manufacturing, although that’s all it needs. 100 dollars a billion.
To be sure, Altman, Sola, and AI leave much room for debate. For the opener, some AIs are woke enough to be a joke. And sometimes Altman’s ChatGPT simply ends up working. Calf Roy. others they all Rip-off Existing content providers and their copyrights. stillThey believe that A.I. “Skynet”-type humanity killer.
(AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)
So how can we manage these issues and risks? In other places, this author He offered one tip. At least in the United States, AI must comply with the Constitution. This document has served us well for 235 years. There’s no reason it can’t guide us for the next 235 years. Such monitoring and regulation The introduction of AI from text to video is inevitable. The challenge, of course, is to balance safety with not destroying technology, and the Constitution is good at striking just that kind of balance.
President Joe Biden during an event in the East Room of the White House on October 30, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
But in the meantime, there are new questions to ponder. For example, we are entering a new era of capitalist power. Baby boomers in particular remembered that the left had long proclaimed that socialism and communism were the “wave of the future,” and therefore argued that they needed to be on the politically correct side of history. In other words, praise Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Castro. You don’t hear much about it anymore, because the few remaining communist countries like Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela are hellholes that even Ivy League professors have to notice.
As a side note, awakening means do not have Communist. It’s actually quite capitalistic. why? Because it woke up the corporations and richly endowed foundations that provide funding and media to DEI programs and ideology. Even leftists will not bite the hand that feeds them.
So now is a pretty good time to be a capitalist, whether it’s Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or the heads of Apple and Microsoft, each with a market capitalization of about $3 trillion. Furthermore, everyone invested in S&P500 It went well. His valuation has doubled in the past five years.
And you haven’t seen anything yet. Musk has long said that his mission in life is to help humanity make society a reality. interplanetary species, That is, they have settled on Mars and other locations outside of Earth.
Elon Musk (Patrick Pleul/Pool via AP, File)
If “expansion into the galaxy” were to be realized, the results would be huge beyond comparison. One similarity, of course, is Columbus’s landing in the Americas back in 1492. Those who discover new worlds will be well remembered.
But you can see an important difference. As bold and brave an explorer as he was, Columbus was dependent on other people’s money, namely funds from the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. Therefore, it was the crown, not Columbus, who received the greatest reward from the New World.
However, in our time, the initiative has shifted from governments to entrepreneurs – public organizations like NASA. Regardless of the rivals of the Soviet Union in the 20th century, Kosmicheskaya program—They ceded the turf to Musk and his company, SpaceX. as well as other private operators, such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. So it’s entirely possible that the big players will end up with a larger share of the space spoils.
On October 13, 2023, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the Psyche spacecraft will lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. (CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP, Getty Images)
To get some perspective on the universe where the big guys are based, you might recall the writings of libertarian science fiction writer Robert Heinlein. His 1940 short story, “Requiem” Heinlein later introduced the character of DD Harriman, a “space entrepreneur.” The man who sold the moon. (Heinlein also worked on a 1950 Hollywood film. destination moon, where free enterprise gets the job done. )
Certainly, the US government will always remain involved in space. NASA has a $27 billion budget, and the Pentagon’s Space Force has an even larger budget, about $30 billion, some of which will be spent tracking what Russia is doing.
However, the total annual market value for satellites is much larger. 200 billion dollarsIt is growing rapidly, in part because it covers accelerating global AI traffic.
The Six Million Dollar Man (FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images)
So back to Sam Altman. He needs $7 trillion to manufacture chips. Given the enormity of opportunities in cyberspace and outer space, perhaps that is not enough. In fact, on February 15th, Altman tweeted“Well, why not 8?” So he’s raising the deposit by $1 billion. Is this just bravado? Or will he be able to do it? We’ll have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, especially red states should have hawkish AI. Encouragingly, on February 2, Utah’s Republican Attorney General Sean Reyes, along with 19 other Republicans, issued the following statement: letter He warned Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, the Biden administration’s AI czar, against over-centralization of AI by the federal government. With proper follow-up in the courts and Congress, red states could defeat the abusive power of blue dot AI. Even if its potential power is being exploited.in report Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt announced in January that he sees AI as a major cost savings for the Sooner State government.
Oh, one last thing: Hollywood actor Mark Wahlberg reportedly I want to remake it six million dollar man. There’s no word on whether the title or associated technology amounts will be updated. Sure, this project looks pretty retro, but Hollywood loves reboots. It saves you the trouble of coming up with new ideas.
In the meantime, the truly imaginative can visit Altman’s Sora and create their own version.
