How Did OpenAI's Compute Bet Pay Off?

Kevin Roose says the belief that led Sam Altman and his executives to bet, and maybe overbet, on compute last year is why OpenAI is in a better position than Google, Anthropic, Meta, or anyone else. OpenAI is the only major AI company that is not severely compute constrained.

A year ago, people asked how OpenAI would ever pay for spending so much money on compute and whether Sam Altman was overextending OpenAI. Belief in AGI is a double-edged sword. A chief executive who is super AGI-pilled struggles to care about profit margin on inference or where the next slate of enterprise customers comes from, because a profit margin feels boring next to building superhuman machine intelligence for a post-singularity future. Belief is also a key ingredient in AI success, because belief and the ability to act on it lead to bet-the-farm moves that have paid off.

Hard belief in AGI is not always a liability. It allows bets that pay off if scaling continues to work.