- 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?
The only way to have agi or any ai is to throw away all ethics then. So why are ai companies shredding books instead of using Anna's archive? Depending on your stance, one is more ethical than the other, but not both. And not neither of them.
> why are ai companies shredding books instead of using Anna's archive?
I'm pretty sure they've already consumed everything on Anna's Archive, The Pirate Bay etc., and they are now buying books to fill the gaps and to legally launder the corpus they already had. It has little to do with ethics (one could also question the ethics of buying rare, second-hand books and then destroying them).
I'm sure they're using whatever they can get their hands on, including Anna's archive. The business process of buying books to scan offers the opportunity to ingest media that hasn't yet been digitized, but also provides plausible legal deniability against copyright holders bringing litigation.
I want to believe most of what they're missing is material held in national and public university libraries and is material specific to the country the books or papers come from. Most of their collections are not digitized and that's what I keep seeing, and then some books that are profession-specific.
They're basically rebuilding Google books, and keeping it private. That's privatizing all of humanity's knowledge. Then from what I see some other missing books are just rephrasings of other books, which can already be done with synthetic data using another LLM to generate it. I would assume a lot of those books are school text books as well, which are almost never digitized and are rephrasings of university text books. Maybe they are not able to generate synthetic data of sufficient quality and are resorting to human books that rephrase information instead
there is an amazing subplot in the book "service model" that describes a set of robot librarians doing exactly this kind of thing, plus sorting every bit.
Abandoning ethics doesn't mean you actively seek out unethical acts, it just means you only care about pragmatics. Limiting how overtly you break the law, copyright law in this case, is often pragmatic regardless of ethics.
Especially government of a small, homogenous country with massive oil wealth in a peaceful part of the world. It's very much "easy mode" as far as governments go.
This is widely misunderstood about modern Norway. Twenty years ago, yes, it may have been true. Today, the population is about 17.5% foreign born. As a point of comparison, the United States is about 15% foreign born.
This must require a shocking cultural adaptation. In the US, we have many social bonding customs. You'll hear often about how Americans strike up conversations at random, often say "how are you?" as a default greeting, and smile a suspicious amount. There are dozens of examples, but that's because it's baked into the culture of USA as a foundational aspect. I can't imagine trying to shift from essentially Japan to America++ in two decades.
right but the entire norwegian society and its welfare state was built upon that homogeneity, where everyone and their neighbor looked "familiar" and could be implicitly trusted to share the same customs. As the foreign born population grows, Norway has taken many steps to restrict immigration, asylum claims, and benefits to immigrants. public opinion has shifted (though not dramatically) as well. parent poster's claim of "easy mode" is receding, so it's not like norway has found a solution to "being a generous welfare state while also openly welcoming foreigners".
What is wild to me: The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Norway took very different paths. For those unaware, the UK shares the North Sea with Norway and there is plenty of oil and gas extract in the UK area of the North Sea. And, the Netherlands has an enormous gas field in the northern part of its country. The UK and Netherlands left it up to private industry and (mostly) taxed it as regular business profits. They didn't create a national petro fund from these profits. However, Norway took a very different path. They created a state-run oil and gas company (Statoil/Equinor) that operate many of the oil and gas extraction sites, and famously created a national petro fund to manage most of the profits. I always wonder why... Was this a missed opportunity for UK and Netherlands?
I wonder the same thing about high taxes and state run energy companies.
I don't think the UK ever really had an option to create a fund though. Deficit was too high. Doubt there would have been anything left to invest even with an increased cut for the state. UK had an IMF bailout in the 70s and was in a mess. Norway was in much better shape I think.
In the Netherlands it was surely a wasted opportunity. They used the money mostly to prop up some services and fill short-term gaps in the budget. Should have saved it like Norwy. It's awful
You're missing what happened in the Netherlands when the gas reserves were found. The social-democratic government headed by Joop den Uyl - who thought the reserves should be extracted and sold within 30 years - used the proceeds to increase social benefits while lowering the acceptance rules to get government benefits. This had a large pull effect which ended up with more than 10% of the labour force getting benefits under the 'WAO' (an acronym for 'Wet op de ArbeidsOngeschiktheidsverzekering' or 'law governing insurance for those not fit for employment'). This way of spending temporarily available resources on expanding the welfare state got a name: The Dutch Disease. It was an example for Norway on how not to squander income from the oil reserves and a deciding factor in creating the oil fund.
>...This way of spending temporarily available resources on expanding the welfare state got a name: The Dutch Disease.
The term "Dutch Disease" is a bit more general than that:
>...The term was coined in 1977 by The Economist to describe the decline of the manufacturing sector in the Netherlands after the discovery of the large Groningen gas field in 1959.[1][2]
>The presumed mechanism is that while revenues increase in a growing sector (or inflows of foreign aid), the given economy's currency becomes stronger ("appreciates") compared to foreign currencies (manifested in the exchange rate). This results in the country's other exports becoming more expensive for other countries to buy, while imports become cheaper, rendering those sectors less competitive.
Ideally a temporary windfall should be used to invest in the future. Taking a temporary windfall and spending it on basically buying votes should have a name, but that isn't generally what the term Dutch Disease refers too.
This isn't an accident. Yes, there has been a oil-and-gas boom (fracking, mostly), but it is a great place to do business, so many other non-petro industries have been furiously expanding there in the last 25 years.
Well, they're also terrible at spending state resources despite high taxes (outside of income tax). One of, if not the worst, public education systems in the country. Pretty bad urban planning, too. Decent food and music tho
This. I think people in California (like me) have trouble seeing the things Texas does well because of partisanship. It's bad for California not to see when another state does a thing better.
California's biggest problems are mostly along the lines of "too many people want to live here."
I have plenty of complaints about California governance, many of them conservative coded. But if California is a failed state, it's a failed state that much of the world aspires to be.
I have family in California so I've visited often. It's got beautiful geography, and very pleasant weather most of the time (at least in the areas people have chosen to live: few people voluntarily choose to live in the desert areas). I don't have much personal experience with California's government other than second-hand reports, usually from people leaving the state so you can imagine those reports tend negative. But I suspect that if California's government were better, there would be even more overcrowding problems, i.e. that bad government is actually helping the state (in a small, entirely backwards, way) by keeping many more people from wanting to move there.
Norway is pretty much the only country with oil wealth that can reasonably be considered well run (unless you count Canada or the US, which, while resource-rich, have a lot of other things going on and aren't dependent on their petroleum resources).
Of the other countries where petroleum is >10% of the national economy, I think Norway might be the only one that isn't a brutal dictatorship, a failed state, or both?
> Of the other countries where petroleum is >10% of the national economy, I think Norway might be the only one that isn't a brutal dictatorship, a failed state, or both?
You raise a great point. I wracked my brain trying to think of counterexamples: It is tough!
One thing I want to point out: Kuwait is the most dependent upon oil and gas of any nation in the world (about 50% of its GDP). However, I think it would be a stretch to call them "a brutal dictatorship, a failed state, or both". Sure, it isn't a Western liberal democracy, but people live pretty good lives and the state does not have a strong reputation for suppressing its people. (I'm not here to apologize for their gov't... but I think it would be a bit harsh to put in your categories.) UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Brunei, and Qatar: I would put in the same category: Non-democracy or flawed democracy, but life is pretty good for the locals. I guess that we can call all of the countries that I mentioned before: "benevolent dictator" gov't model. Interestingly, Ecuador is about 20% of GDP, but I would call them a developing/emerging democracy. The rest of the list... sheesh: It does not look good!
What do you think about my analysis? Do you agree?
?? Russia, the US, half the damn gulf states seem to be doing just fine (maybe excluding Bahrain and Iraq). Very much including Iran, despite our efforts to strangle it to death for fifty years straight.
> I think Norway might be the only one that isn't a brutal dictatorship
Just because you don't like a government doesn't mean it's doing a bad job at, well, holding a state together.
Not eligible for the reason I stated: the US economy is much less than 10% petroleum. We have a lot of oil, but we have a lot more of everything else.
> gulf states
Mostly brutal, repressive dictatorships (especially Saudi Arabia and Iran) - some are better than others, but the trend is poor.
> Just because you don't like a government doesn't mean it's doing a bad job at, well, holding a state together
You're moving the goalposts a fair amount here. The thread started with "good governance", and I said "well run" - it's hard to say that the bar for either of those is simply maintaining superficial order. But even if you set that aside, consider the famous quote from the Shiekh of Dubai about the fragility of the petrostates that haven't figured out how to build strong civil societies with their wealth: "my grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel."
I think the resource curse didn't apply to Norway because they had an established post-industrial economy for hundreds of years before they got into oil exporting (they didn't even start drilling until the 1960s, 50 years after Venezuela or the Arab states).
While being an established post-industrial economy is part of it, Norway was also keenly aware of the resource curse at that point. The "Dutch disease" comes from what happened when the Dutch, a liberal democracy, found oil in the 1950s — just a little before Norway did.
A lot is thanks to Farouk Al-Kasim [1], who helped develop the fundamental plan for Norway's petroleum industry. As far I know, his task group's plan, developed while at the Department of Industry, was essentially accepted wholesale by the government. Part of it was ensuring the government retained control, and another part of it was ensuring oil revenue was carefully managed rather than flooding every level of society and government.
Or even the USA historically. Pre 1900s, America was a country of continual economic crises, and fractured politics.
It was sitting at the time in the latest supply of easily exploited natural resources in the world, yet somehow could not pay its troops pensions lost Civil war, could not keep its strategic oil supply from being raided by the executive branch corruption, and could not keep it plutocrats from directing military action for the sake of bananas of all things.
My first job was at a design firm that worked for Samarec Riyadh Refinery. We were design an interactive exhibit based on the refining process.
Our principal was Jewish and we needed special permission for him to enter the country for presentations.
During one of the presentations one of our team took a photo of a fountain and it initially ended up in our presentation to be used to set the tone. While previewing our slideshow to our handlers we were told to remove the slide of the fountain. The fountain belonged to the king and could not be photographed without permission from the king.
Admittedly there was no violence but we were warned that it was very bad. This was the early 1990’s so I’m sure this are much looser now.
Ah, good old "ethical confines" the thing that holds all sorts of things back.. back from what ?
Mostly back from exploiting the easily exploited and not paying for externalities.
I think Norway would have too much sense to entertain buying this, of course it would be fun because you'd hope they would remove Sam Altman and you might have an AI company not run by someone who spouts the absolute rubbish that current AI leaders do, they are all completely cringeworthy.
> 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).
Behind in what? You write as if it is a univariate concern. I haven't read the post but why couldn't Norway force OpenAI to be more alignment-conscious? Then it would be ahead in safety, especially if competitors don't pay attention to that.
“Behind” = less capable, less used, less resourced. Safety and alignment don’t necessarily correlate with market dominance. If they did, no safety regulations would be needed.
We have to stop pretending that the market automatically arrives at socially optimal solutions. We don't say car safety regulations need to be weakened to compete with China, but when it comes to AI, safety magically goes out the window.
It is like a running joke that Norway can buy anything. The oil fund makes more money than the oil for the state btw. So don't underestimate their financial skills.
On the other hand, move to the EU and market to customers who don't want to worry about trade wars disrupting their business or the US government subpoena-ing data. Probably not a big enough market to justify that move yet, but it's not obvious to this American that my government is going to reverse its current self-destructive course.
The US government would never allow a sale. Frontier intelligence given away? It is the ASML story all over again. I would hope we have learned our lesson.
What about this sentiment is specific to HN or engineers, that non-HN-types would so vigorously disagree with? How many countries in the world would have the average respondent in a survey describe their government as competent?
> This is such a ridiculous, preposterously self-confident claim. Claims like this give HN (and engineers in general) a bad reputation.
all you've done is use some fancy words to discredit OP's claim.
what makes you think people who have built all the extremely complex and robust technical infrastructure are unable to comprehend of this amazingly complex government that you seem to be putting on a pedestal, let alone design a better one?
how about even a simpler question: why are almost all governments inefficient (except may be few like tax department) and are full of red-carpet paper pushers?
>> how about even a simpler question: why are almost all governments inefficient (except may be few like tax department) and are full of red-carpet paper pushers?
That you can just assert that as though it is a fact universally known says a lot where your head is at. If the private sector is so efficient, how come US health care is so much more expensive than some public health systems with better outcomes? How come public utilities are sometimes cheaper than private ones? Why do public fire departments exist at all, why not have contractors? Etc.
I agree government is often inefficient. The world is just obviously more complicated then you are considering.
Efficiency is not the aim of government, except in constrained ways. Efficiency would generally run contrary to governance, transparency, innovation, responsiveness, general applicability, justice, rule following, considering the long term and not just the short term, recognition of human dignity, security etc.
All those things have a cost that takes away from maximum delivery efficiency, but generally societies decide that the cost is worth it.
us-east-1 goes down and half of the "extremely complex and robust technical infrastructure" that Silicon Valley types have built stops working.
The average computer toucher with delusions of grandeur would kill themselves if they had to moderate a public assembly or do a public facing job in a municipal office. Of course you believe that's peon work and your superior intellect with unlimited power as leader would build something better, cue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project
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.
That's a really unfortunate framing. The cat isn't out of the bag; otherwise, there wouldn't be efforts to scale up data centers to support forecasted demand.
The inevitability narrative is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it ends if we decide not to keep telling it.
"The cat is out of the bag" doesn't mean the cat is gone, it means the cat has freedom. I read the GP as meaning "no single company can currently control the trajectory of AI." That's not unfortunate -- that's great!
Thanks for the correction. In my own words, to commit to memory: once "the cat is out of the bag", the point is not that it's difficult to put the cat back in, the point is that we now know it's a cat and putting it back is not relevant.
I've seen two expressions referring to "it's difficult to put the (thing) back in" that are in more-or-less common use in English. The slightly more common one is "You can't put the genie back into the bottle", and the slightly less common one (in my experience, at least) is "You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube." (Which actually inspired me to try, and it is actually possible to put the toothpaste back into the tube with careful application of suction, by squeezing the tube gently, touching the end to the excess toothpaste, then releasing the tube and letting some of the excess get sucked back in. But I digress.)
I've actually seen the "genie back into the bottle" phrase used in contexts that refer to secrets, e.g. where "the cat is out of the bag" would actually be more appropriate, so there's definitely some overlap there. For example, I've seen people talking about nuclear proliferation say "you can't put the nuclear genie back into the bottle", meaning that the secret of how to build a nuclear weapon is well-known, and it's not really possible to make it secret again. But I've also seen people use the same "you can't put the nuclear genie back into the bottle" expression referring to a nuclear weapon exploding: once the radioactive material in the bomb has gone critical, there's nothing anybody can do to stop the explosion that's about to happen.
Personally, I like the "genie back into the bottle" phrase better. But some people like more grounded-in-reality phrases rather than fantasy-based phrases, and they prefer "toothpaste back into the tube". Either one works well, though.
That's wishful thinking, what are you saying, labs/people across the world will selflessly decide they're not going to pursue further research if we on HN stop saying it?
In the history of the world, one company can absolutely have world changing impact. From the British East India company to Kodak to Google, one company can have that much of an impact. Whether OpenAI is such a company is a different question for future history books to decide, but that part of their thesis at least is borne out by history.
I'm not against Norway controlling OpenAI, I think it would actually be pretty cool and prevent some of the most obvious vectors (mining personal data etc.)
I just think AI is so much bigger than one company. We already have 3 major frontier labs + Chinese labs releasing at near-frontier levels.
My thesis is that someone will solve the high inference hardware cost problem and another paradigm shift will come where AI becomes even more decentralized and democratized. Obviously that is a hunch but that is what my gut tells me.
Yudkowsky's solution of detecting and physically shutting down non complying datacenter, including bombing if the country doesn't cooperate, isn't too much out of the question.
We would have done the same if it is about virus or nuclear weapons, and AI could become serious existential threat in the next 5 years.
More or less of an existential threat than a conflict between nuclear powers because one of them decided to launch a unilateral strike against a datacentre located outside one of their cities just in case it hosted a particularly dangerous chatbot?
Trolley problem. What's worse than all of humanity dead from ASI?
Sam Altman: "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could."
Do you think it's possible to bomb China's AI datacenters? They are already here, and they are progressing AI at their will. What will others do about it?
It is possible for US to bomb anything. Just the retaliation could be huge.
Would you had said the same thing if a country like was developing and testing deadly virus on live population. I think in 5 years, it is possible that the AI will become that topic(if we assume AI becomes good and start hacking and controlling everything).
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?
Were you not paying attention? Modern LLMs are incredibly general AIs, and nearing human or superhuman performance in many areas. And the tech just keeps advancing.
If you don't see "AGI is possible", you aren't looking.
Modern LLMs show empirically that the "difference" is fuzzy at best. You can try to draw a distinction. You can try to draw the lines in the sand and define "true intelligence" in a way that would include humans but exclude "false intelligence" of Mythos 5. An exercise in vanity, in my eyes.
Or you can go with "any sufficiently advanced language generation is indistinguishable from intelligence" and drop the matter. My advice is to do exactly that.
We used to think that if a computer could play chess, it would be intelligent. Maybe back then they were also people saying "stop trying to draw lines, just admit it's intelligent!!" Good thing we didn't listen to them.
The act of distinguishing between human intelligence and LLMs is what allows us to figure out how to make it better. There are still some deep limitations, and to ignore them is a mistake. That doesn't take away from how crazy good they are.
Right. It's actually amazing that large language models can be as effective as they are, given that at their core they are simply matching up word-frequency patterns. But with a large enough context and enough parameters, those word-frequency patterns actually do a decent job of simulating intelligence: I'm able to give rather ambiguous instructions to Claude Code (like "go back to the suggestion you made a while back about (foo) and explain in more detail what the benefits and drawbacks of that approach would be"), and it is able to look through its context, find the part where it suggested (foo), and expand on its suggestion. This is a qualitative difference in human-computer interaction: I can type instructions that are very similar to what I would say to another human being, rather than having to be utterly unambiguous the way you have to be in writing code. It's also good at synthesizing information faster than I could: these days instead of searching MSDN for some obscure API method, I ask Claude "what's the syntax to create a foo from a bar?" and it finds me the MakeBarIntoFoo method faster than I would have (especially because I would have started with CreateFooFromBar and not found it).
But I never forget that it's a simulation of intelligence. I use it for the things it's trained on (generating code) and I don't expect the model to be good at writing poetry, or fiction. Nor do I expect it to have any actual understanding of the things it is actually trained on. Modern models are pretty good at simulating understanding, but even so they will still produce things that a human being would immediately know is wrong, e.g. image-generation models producing hands with the wrong number of fingers, or a person with three arms, or whatever. Those happen less and less often as models have been better trained (and I bet that verification steps are happening behind the scenes to catch and discard some of the classic mistakes), but they still happen.
It's the dancing bear, except this bear is actually managing some really spectacular dance moves. Some of the time. Other times it falls flat on its face. But it's really, really impressive that the bear is actually managing to dance so well.
When I think of Norway, the first thing that comes to mind is its willingness to commit to huge future capex spending. Not to mention, selling more than half its equities in order to buy one risky asset totally aligns with its investment strategy and, you know, having to pay pensions, other minor concerns like that.
In all seriousness though it is pretty interesting to consider if it really happened, a sovereign wealth fund pivots to the crazy high risk strategy, writes a blank check and tries to actually win. If it works does that country just become the rulers of the world?
I don't think it works that way for AI. Comms networks are extensive physical infrastructure that, by definition, has to cover ground. AIs cover the ground by riding the existing comms lines.
In telecomms, the late mover has the advantage of not having legacy networks to maintain, and having better technologies available at rollout time. What is the "late mover advantage" in AI? Being able to distill from every bleeding edge frontier lab? That gets you near parity at best.
That assumes they release their models publicly. The future is leaning towards these labs air gapping their best stuff (Model 2, etc) and using it internally to snipe their competitors and charge insane amounts for monitored use in consulting environments.
You can't distill or catch up if you can't access the models. You'll basically have a situation where nation-states will need to try and steal the models Oceans 11 style.
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.
OpenAI is worth the discounted value of their future free cash flow. It's not clear at this point how much free cash flow they will ever generate, if any.
OpenAI is worth whatever someone will pay for them. Overpriced and underpriced are just words. If someone's willing to pay an amount for something, that's what it's worth.
On the contrary, you would be demonstrating that, to at least one buyer, it was worth that. By definition.
I think the argument you’re really looking to contradict is this: if 1% of a company is worth $1B to somebody, then somebody would pay $100B for the whole company. That does not follow (and indeed the acquisition price of a company is almost never exactly its “market valuation”).
> and indeed the acquisition price of a company is almost never exactly its “market valuation”
The acquisition price is almost always significantly more than its market value. The reason is that if you start buying shares on the open market each transaction of yours will raise the stock price, and eventually you will price yourself out of the purchase.
So what buyers do is negotiate directly with the board and propose an inflated price that >50% of shareholders are okay with.
You are assuming that the money that I buy the sweet shop for is what I evaluate the value of the sweet shop to be worth. That's not necessarily true.
You're also assuming I'm not insane.
If I offer to buy an apple from you for 1 trillion dollars because I believe consuming that specific apple will make me a god, that apple is not actually worth 1 trillion dollars.
It was actually, because value is defined as such. Why do you think buying something for the memes is worth less? Like what mechanism exactly makes it worth less? Seems like that's the fundamental misunderstanding you're having in your comments with others in this thread.
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.
Yes, and I think you would get much more effect by going for much smaller and cheaper firms.
Cerebras is only 700 people. I wouldn't buy it, but since it's only 700 people, you can probably build something like it with 1400 people in a couple of years if you set the goals right and hire the right people to lead it.
Euclyd, VSORA etc. exist. If they were buying American, why not Groq.
Then once one has good hardware without an enormous markup, then one can start thinking about building LLMs with it.
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.
I think OpenAI’s does not have ANY moat. They are currently a leader but lack the piles of cash required to stay a leader in the medium/long-term. (They can not in anyway compete with AWS/Alphabet on that front, and they know that too.)
Researchers and engineer will want big comp, as they can get it elsewhere, if you stop paying that, then you loose the knowledge necessary to stay a leader, even though it’s a losing race in the long-term anyway.
The company will become a growing pile of non-SOTA techniques and models + old hardware in no time.
Maybe at a bankruptcy sale; otherwise, it's a bad investment that only relieves current investors of their problem by passing the hand grenade to someone else.
If Norway, or any other country, wanted to, for far less money than buying a problematic company, they could fund a public cloud and rent it out at below-market rates to citizens, universities, and small businesses.
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!
---------------
[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.
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]:
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.
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.
Massachusetts, the small state in the US, has a population 25% larger than Norway. The New Jersey suburbs of NYC, not even the whole state, has a population comparable to Norway.
Norway is cool, but it's not very useful as a guide for managing a country.
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.
There’s already a solid case that AI profits or revenue should be significantly taxed for public goods whether or not there are employment impacts. The models simply do not exist without vast amounts of training data much of it acquired by murky or clearly problematic methods (even before you start to get into how technical developments mean the letter of the law doesn’t cover the spirit of the situation). The source of that data is more or less everyone. Some benefit should go to everyone.
>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.
If AI really becomes effective enough to displace so many white collar jobs then it'd be far more efficient to fund free AI tutoring for everyone that wants it. A system where you get at best an hour daily of discussion with a human expert is grossly inferior to one where you can have 24/7 discussion with an AI expert that has infinite patience for dumb questions. There'd be no reason for college to exist in a future where AI professors are at least as smart as human professors but far far cheaper.
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.
This is great use of AI and Fellesferie :: The model is unavailable in July. This is not a bug. It is arguably the most effective capability control anyone has proposed.
I think OpenAI's opportunity is ai first hardware; I mean, the consumer is Google, simply because the distribution and the product are perfect. Enterprise is much better with AI; I do not see any AI-first enterprise companies succeeding in the long run.
If they want to throw away a lot of money, they should indeed. Qwen 3.8 has the level of Luna and runs on my laptop. Are their a bit more frontier models worth a trillion in a couple of years..?
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.
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.
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.
Great technology, but $20-$200 a month technology, with a lot of people going for free options. Like the telecom industry. Average is probably going to be like a phone bill. Basically: you can become Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile. $450 billion a year in revenue. A superb business, but merely a superb business.
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.
The incentives in north america favor software-esque plays where the players are racing towards % of marketshare based on usage.
China on the other hand is driving towards winning of manufacturing and % of hardware produced by them. China is competing with Nvidia, OpenAi and Anthropic are collateral damage.
Don't worry, AI companies and the companies around them have ensured that so much of the US economy is tied into AI that they've become Too Big to Fail, so that when things eventually collapse the US government will give them trillions of dollars without asking anything in return. That will allow them to socialize their irresponsible spending and wipe the red out of their ledgers so that they can focus on destroying the environment at massive scale.
FUD that they might be bought and controlled by foreigners, then offer a good slice to the US government (maybe they put you as part of the Army), and you become non-bankruptable.
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.
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 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.
100% the US government would maintain that AI is the key to the success of the US economy over China, and that it can only happen as long as it's run by profiteering billionaires aiming to extract money from society at the fastest rate possible. Only by accelerating ecological collapse for profit can private US capitalism maintain its edge over freely shared Chinese open-weight models.
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?
A guest post by
Zachary Jones
“My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”
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.
Can we fastforward to that point so I can buy some GPUs at non-inflated prices? It is insane how fast they are going up. I bought some stuff last week and it is already up $1K compared to then. And I thought it was overpriced when I got it.
Unfortunately the deflation of OpenAI would not lower your GPU prices. People will still require the hardware to run LLMs, it's just that it will probably be commodity models.
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.
More importantly, openly shared public-weight models limits the scale of the success that closed-weight private AI services can manage. Eventually it'll become cheaper and easier to pay some AI data centre to use their capacity plus an open-source harness rather than to pay Anthropic to pay an AI data centre etc. etc.
IOW China almost definitely sees their own open-weight models as a pressure release valve to ensure the US AI companies, and by extension the US economy, doesn't get too big, and to ensure that these companies don't become the dominant global force (the way that e.g. US cloud companies did originally).
100% this. I would assume if any government purchased an ai company and wasn't completely hands off (which from the sound of this post, it wouldn't be), I would assume that company would fail.
They're responsible for the Norwegian people's retirement savings, and burning $800 billion of it just to render an American AI company uncompetitive is not that.
Pretty sure this is satire. Maybe it alludes to recent concerns that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund could be exposed to an AI-driven investment bubble or valuation correction.
Yeah I can’t say either. I cannot imagine what the current political machine in Norway would do with it but nothing good and they would run it into the ground. When it comes to Ethics maybe read up on Telenor and Burma.
Didn't Norway just invest 1 billion in SpaceX via their sovereign wealth fund?
Nice reminder that even the most successful socialist societies still depend on someone somewhere being productive to generate wealth to redistribute. North Sea oil money doesn't hurt.
"Teacher, teacher! I think that Norway should buy all the weapons in the world and then we wouldn't have any more wars."
How can somebody put their own name on something so infantile as this article? What influence does this author or any of you think you have over the Norwegian sovereign fund?
Wow, this is the dumbest thing I've read in the whole year, but I love that the internet should give a voice to anybody and everybody and would defend this right to (perhaps) death.
Author seems to have read on a magazine or something that Norway's Pension Fund assets amount to ~2 trillion US, which he confuses for having 2 trillion US cash but you cannot really expect much from room temperature IQ.
Then, just because 2,000B US > 800B US, he goes on to propose that Norway should buy it ... that's it, that's the whole argument.
Then he elaborates with some of the most deranged ideas I've read like (taken verbatim):
"Such an intervention would clearly be blocked by the United States government, though if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awards Trump the bauble then perhaps there will be an opening of political possibility."
As if Norway would even be remotely interested in acquiring that company anyway.
according to my understanding, this would (necessarily) include relocation of all OAI stuff to .. somewhere in Europa?
(regardless if this "somewhere" is FR or UK or IT or DE or CH))
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?
The only way to have agi or any ai is to throw away all ethics then. So why are ai companies shredding books instead of using Anna's archive? Depending on your stance, one is more ethical than the other, but not both. And not neither of them.
> why are ai companies shredding books instead of using Anna's archive?
I'm pretty sure they've already consumed everything on Anna's Archive, The Pirate Bay etc., and they are now buying books to fill the gaps and to legally launder the corpus they already had. It has little to do with ethics (one could also question the ethics of buying rare, second-hand books and then destroying them).
> one could also question the ethics of buying rare, second-hand books and then destroying them
I believe that is exactly what the parent post is doing
> So why are ai companies shredding books
Because a cartoon mouse's parent company used regulatory capture to extend copyright for decades.
I'm sure they're using whatever they can get their hands on, including Anna's archive. The business process of buying books to scan offers the opportunity to ingest media that hasn't yet been digitized, but also provides plausible legal deniability against copyright holders bringing litigation.
Anna's archive is missing books and papers.
I want to believe most of what they're missing is material held in national and public university libraries and is material specific to the country the books or papers come from. Most of their collections are not digitized and that's what I keep seeing, and then some books that are profession-specific.
They're basically rebuilding Google books, and keeping it private. That's privatizing all of humanity's knowledge. Then from what I see some other missing books are just rephrasings of other books, which can already be done with synthetic data using another LLM to generate it. I would assume a lot of those books are school text books as well, which are almost never digitized and are rephrasings of university text books. Maybe they are not able to generate synthetic data of sufficient quality and are resorting to human books that rephrase information instead
there is an amazing subplot in the book "service model" that describes a set of robot librarians doing exactly this kind of thing, plus sorting every bit.
Abandoning ethics doesn't mean you actively seek out unethical acts, it just means you only care about pragmatics. Limiting how overtly you break the law, copyright law in this case, is often pragmatic regardless of ethics.
Especially government of a small, homogenous country with massive oil wealth in a peaceful part of the world. It's very much "easy mode" as far as governments go.
This must require a shocking cultural adaptation. In the US, we have many social bonding customs. You'll hear often about how Americans strike up conversations at random, often say "how are you?" as a default greeting, and smile a suspicious amount. There are dozens of examples, but that's because it's baked into the culture of USA as a foundational aspect. I can't imagine trying to shift from essentially Japan to America++ in two decades.
Where you happen to be born is the only criteria for population diversity?
right but the entire norwegian society and its welfare state was built upon that homogeneity, where everyone and their neighbor looked "familiar" and could be implicitly trusted to share the same customs. As the foreign born population grows, Norway has taken many steps to restrict immigration, asylum claims, and benefits to immigrants. public opinion has shifted (though not dramatically) as well. parent poster's claim of "easy mode" is receding, so it's not like norway has found a solution to "being a generous welfare state while also openly welcoming foreigners".
How much of that is from legal migration from developed first world countries for both countries?
I know I will be downvoted for this.
Just came back from traveling through Norway, and from my perspective as a Chicagoan, Oslo and Bergen definitely did not look or feel homogeneous.
>homogenous country
must you whistle so loud, i'm deaf now
Ah yes, massive oil wealth, that famously strong predictor of good governance.
What is wild to me: The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Norway took very different paths. For those unaware, the UK shares the North Sea with Norway and there is plenty of oil and gas extract in the UK area of the North Sea. And, the Netherlands has an enormous gas field in the northern part of its country. The UK and Netherlands left it up to private industry and (mostly) taxed it as regular business profits. They didn't create a national petro fund from these profits. However, Norway took a very different path. They created a state-run oil and gas company (Statoil/Equinor) that operate many of the oil and gas extraction sites, and famously created a national petro fund to manage most of the profits. I always wonder why... Was this a missed opportunity for UK and Netherlands?
I wonder the same thing about high taxes and state run energy companies.
I don't think the UK ever really had an option to create a fund though. Deficit was too high. Doubt there would have been anything left to invest even with an increased cut for the state. UK had an IMF bailout in the 70s and was in a mess. Norway was in much better shape I think.
In the Netherlands it was surely a wasted opportunity. They used the money mostly to prop up some services and fill short-term gaps in the budget. Should have saved it like Norwy. It's awful
You're missing what happened in the Netherlands when the gas reserves were found. The social-democratic government headed by Joop den Uyl - who thought the reserves should be extracted and sold within 30 years - used the proceeds to increase social benefits while lowering the acceptance rules to get government benefits. This had a large pull effect which ended up with more than 10% of the labour force getting benefits under the 'WAO' (an acronym for 'Wet op de ArbeidsOngeschiktheidsverzekering' or 'law governing insurance for those not fit for employment'). This way of spending temporarily available resources on expanding the welfare state got a name: The Dutch Disease. It was an example for Norway on how not to squander income from the oil reserves and a deciding factor in creating the oil fund.
>...This way of spending temporarily available resources on expanding the welfare state got a name: The Dutch Disease.
The term "Dutch Disease" is a bit more general than that:
>...The term was coined in 1977 by The Economist to describe the decline of the manufacturing sector in the Netherlands after the discovery of the large Groningen gas field in 1959.[1][2]
>The presumed mechanism is that while revenues increase in a growing sector (or inflows of foreign aid), the given economy's currency becomes stronger ("appreciates") compared to foreign currencies (manifested in the exchange rate). This results in the country's other exports becoming more expensive for other countries to buy, while imports become cheaper, rendering those sectors less competitive.
Ideally a temporary windfall should be used to invest in the future. Taking a temporary windfall and spending it on basically buying votes should have a name, but that isn't generally what the term Dutch Disease refers too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
It usually is when western countries don't continuously interfere with your government.
Texas is well known for good government and long term planning.
Civil liberties aside, yes, Texas has good governance.
One thing that many people don't know: Texas has one of the best performing state economies in the last twenty five years -- number 3 in the US. Ref: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/gdp-growth-by-u-s-state-map...
This isn't an accident. Yes, there has been a oil-and-gas boom (fracking, mostly), but it is a great place to do business, so many other non-petro industries have been furiously expanding there in the last 25 years.
Well, they're also terrible at spending state resources despite high taxes (outside of income tax). One of, if not the worst, public education systems in the country. Pretty bad urban planning, too. Decent food and music tho
By one (seemingly pretty reasonable) measure Texas has the 4th-best state education system!
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/naep-test-scores-mississippi-m...
I mean, compared to a lot of other states Texas is fairly well run for its budget.
This. I think people in California (like me) have trouble seeing the things Texas does well because of partisanship. It's bad for California not to see when another state does a thing better.
And the terrible thing is a huge number of folks from California are moving to Texas and brining their failed policies with them.
As the voting bloc shifts left, you can expect more and more insane fiscal policy that will eventually drive Texas into the ground. Like California.
California's biggest problems are mostly along the lines of "too many people want to live here."
I have plenty of complaints about California governance, many of them conservative coded. But if California is a failed state, it's a failed state that much of the world aspires to be.
I have family in California so I've visited often. It's got beautiful geography, and very pleasant weather most of the time (at least in the areas people have chosen to live: few people voluntarily choose to live in the desert areas). I don't have much personal experience with California's government other than second-hand reports, usually from people leaving the state so you can imagine those reports tend negative. But I suspect that if California's government were better, there would be even more overcrowding problems, i.e. that bad government is actually helping the state (in a small, entirely backwards, way) by keeping many more people from wanting to move there.
What are the counterexamples? Maybe Nigeria?
EDIT: yes, also Iraq and Venezuela
Norway is pretty much the only country with oil wealth that can reasonably be considered well run (unless you count Canada or the US, which, while resource-rich, have a lot of other things going on and aren't dependent on their petroleum resources).
Of the other countries where petroleum is >10% of the national economy, I think Norway might be the only one that isn't a brutal dictatorship, a failed state, or both?
I found this graphic from CNBC that summarises data from the World Bank: https://assets.weforum.org/editor/0GAQbN2nVTxgIqOLjWpWSZYh-9...
One thing I want to point out: Kuwait is the most dependent upon oil and gas of any nation in the world (about 50% of its GDP). However, I think it would be a stretch to call them "a brutal dictatorship, a failed state, or both". Sure, it isn't a Western liberal democracy, but people live pretty good lives and the state does not have a strong reputation for suppressing its people. (I'm not here to apologize for their gov't... but I think it would be a bit harsh to put in your categories.) UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Brunei, and Qatar: I would put in the same category: Non-democracy or flawed democracy, but life is pretty good for the locals. I guess that we can call all of the countries that I mentioned before: "benevolent dictator" gov't model. Interestingly, Ecuador is about 20% of GDP, but I would call them a developing/emerging democracy. The rest of the list... sheesh: It does not look good!
What do you think about my analysis? Do you agree?
?? Russia, the US, half the damn gulf states seem to be doing just fine (maybe excluding Bahrain and Iraq). Very much including Iran, despite our efforts to strangle it to death for fifty years straight.
> I think Norway might be the only one that isn't a brutal dictatorship
Just because you don't like a government doesn't mean it's doing a bad job at, well, holding a state together.
> Russia
Totalitarian, and trending toward failed state.
> US
Not eligible for the reason I stated: the US economy is much less than 10% petroleum. We have a lot of oil, but we have a lot more of everything else.
> gulf states
Mostly brutal, repressive dictatorships (especially Saudi Arabia and Iran) - some are better than others, but the trend is poor.
> Just because you don't like a government doesn't mean it's doing a bad job at, well, holding a state together
You're moving the goalposts a fair amount here. The thread started with "good governance", and I said "well run" - it's hard to say that the bar for either of those is simply maintaining superficial order. But even if you set that aside, consider the famous quote from the Shiekh of Dubai about the fragility of the petrostates that haven't figured out how to build strong civil societies with their wealth: "my grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel."
“The resource curse” is what you’re looking for. There’s a lot of counter examples - Norway is the odd one out.
I think the resource curse didn't apply to Norway because they had an established post-industrial economy for hundreds of years before they got into oil exporting (they didn't even start drilling until the 1960s, 50 years after Venezuela or the Arab states).
While being an established post-industrial economy is part of it, Norway was also keenly aware of the resource curse at that point. The "Dutch disease" comes from what happened when the Dutch, a liberal democracy, found oil in the 1950s — just a little before Norway did.
A lot is thanks to Farouk Al-Kasim [1], who helped develop the fundamental plan for Norway's petroleum industry. As far I know, his task group's plan, developed while at the Department of Industry, was essentially accepted wholesale by the government. Part of it was ensuring the government retained control, and another part of it was ensuring oil revenue was carefully managed rather than flooding every level of society and government.
[1] https://archive.ph/lEYl7
Or even the USA historically. Pre 1900s, America was a country of continual economic crises, and fractured politics.
It was sitting at the time in the latest supply of easily exploited natural resources in the world, yet somehow could not pay its troops pensions lost Civil war, could not keep its strategic oil supply from being raided by the executive branch corruption, and could not keep it plutocrats from directing military action for the sake of bananas of all things.
Honestly, pretty much every other resource-rich country: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, ...
Norway is an outlier.
Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran seem to be doing just fine.
My first job was at a design firm that worked for Samarec Riyadh Refinery. We were design an interactive exhibit based on the refining process.
Our principal was Jewish and we needed special permission for him to enter the country for presentations.
During one of the presentations one of our team took a photo of a fountain and it initially ended up in our presentation to be used to set the tone. While previewing our slideshow to our handlers we were told to remove the slide of the fountain. The fountain belonged to the king and could not be photographed without permission from the king.
Admittedly there was no violence but we were warned that it was very bad. This was the early 1990’s so I’m sure this are much looser now.
In what universe is Russia "doing just fine"?
Ah, good old "ethical confines" the thing that holds all sorts of things back.. back from what ?
Mostly back from exploiting the easily exploited and not paying for externalities.
I think Norway would have too much sense to entertain buying this, of course it would be fun because you'd hope they would remove Sam Altman and you might have an AI company not run by someone who spouts the absolute rubbish that current AI leaders do, they are all completely cringeworthy.
> holds all sorts of things back.. back from what ?
Folding proteins and cure cancer?
Deciphering animal languages?
Revolutionizing accessibility technology?
> 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).
Behind in what? You write as if it is a univariate concern. I haven't read the post but why couldn't Norway force OpenAI to be more alignment-conscious? Then it would be ahead in safety, especially if competitors don't pay attention to that.
“Behind” = less capable, less used, less resourced. Safety and alignment don’t necessarily correlate with market dominance. If they did, no safety regulations would be needed.
We have to stop pretending that the market automatically arrives at socially optimal solutions. We don't say car safety regulations need to be weakened to compete with China, but when it comes to AI, safety magically goes out the window.
It is like a running joke that Norway can buy anything. The oil fund makes more money than the oil for the state btw. So don't underestimate their financial skills.
Haven't read the blog, but I can think of a good reason to sell. HQ moves to Norway, no more direct US government interference.
(they can still interfere, just not anywhere near the same scope)
You may think "but government ownership means more interference", and yes, but not radicalized, crazy assed, mercurial, emotional interference.
Yeah, move to EU to avoid government interference. Who wouldn't have thought that?
Norway is not part of EU (if by EU you meant European Union, not just a country in Europe)
Norway is participating in EU trade, but is not its member. They are part of Schengen (passport-free travel between 29 European countries).
On the other hand, move to the EU and market to customers who don't want to worry about trade wars disrupting their business or the US government subpoena-ing data. Probably not a big enough market to justify that move yet, but it's not obvious to this American that my government is going to reverse its current self-destructive course.
The US government would never allow a sale. Frontier intelligence given away? It is the ASML story all over again. I would hope we have learned our lesson.
> no more direct US government interference
Bro, c'mon.
If the US wants to interfere with something they will interfere with it.
To think otherwise is Euro-brain-maxxing.
You didn't even make it to the parent's third sentence "bro".
> they can still interfere, just not anywhere near the same scope
This sentence is fundamentally wrong. If the US government really wants to put Norwegian-owned OpenAI out of business they will do so.
OpenAI needs the support of the US to exist regardless of where they are headquartered.
> Not only is the bar for being a competent government not particularly high on the world scale
This is such a ridiculous, preposterously self-confident claim. Claims like this give HN (and engineers in general) a bad reputation.
Edit: relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/793/
What about this sentiment is specific to HN or engineers, that non-HN-types would so vigorously disagree with? How many countries in the world would have the average respondent in a survey describe their government as competent?
I don't disagree with the sentiment but I think obviously negativity bias would be a significant cofounder.
Oblig...
"Contra a bunch of idiots at Hacker News and elsewhere.."
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/follow-up_thoughts_on_wat...
> This is such a ridiculous, preposterously self-confident claim. Claims like this give HN (and engineers in general) a bad reputation.
all you've done is use some fancy words to discredit OP's claim.
what makes you think people who have built all the extremely complex and robust technical infrastructure are unable to comprehend of this amazingly complex government that you seem to be putting on a pedestal, let alone design a better one?
how about even a simpler question: why are almost all governments inefficient (except may be few like tax department) and are full of red-carpet paper pushers?
>> how about even a simpler question: why are almost all governments inefficient (except may be few like tax department) and are full of red-carpet paper pushers?
That you can just assert that as though it is a fact universally known says a lot where your head is at. If the private sector is so efficient, how come US health care is so much more expensive than some public health systems with better outcomes? How come public utilities are sometimes cheaper than private ones? Why do public fire departments exist at all, why not have contractors? Etc.
I agree government is often inefficient. The world is just obviously more complicated then you are considering.
> why are almost all governments inefficient
Efficiency is not the aim of government, except in constrained ways. Efficiency would generally run contrary to governance, transparency, innovation, responsiveness, general applicability, justice, rule following, considering the long term and not just the short term, recognition of human dignity, security etc.
All those things have a cost that takes away from maximum delivery efficiency, but generally societies decide that the cost is worth it.
us-east-1 goes down and half of the "extremely complex and robust technical infrastructure" that Silicon Valley types have built stops working.
The average computer toucher with delusions of grandeur would kill themselves if they had to moderate a public assembly or do a public facing job in a municipal office. Of course you believe that's peon work and your superior intellect with unlimited power as leader would build something better, cue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project
It fits into such a stereotype for HN types, TBH it's the kind of thing that keeps visiting this place amusing.
Reminds me of that article about Nevada's pension fund manager, his job is just come into the office and not do anything stupid like dump half the fund on a single speculative investment. https://web.archive.org/web/20171202134916/https://www.wsj.c...
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.
That's a really unfortunate framing. The cat isn't out of the bag; otherwise, there wouldn't be efforts to scale up data centers to support forecasted demand.
The inevitability narrative is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it ends if we decide not to keep telling it.
I think you are misunderstanding the meaning of 'the cat is out of the bag', although I also think the OP misunderstands it, too.
The saying means that you can't un-tell a secret... once a secret is known to the public, you can't make it a secret again.
I think the more appropriate saying would be a similar, but slightly different, one: "That ship has already sailed"
That one is more about "it is too late to do anything about this" and less about information.
"The cat is out of the bag" doesn't mean the cat is gone, it means the cat has freedom. I read the GP as meaning "no single company can currently control the trajectory of AI." That's not unfortunate -- that's great!
No, doesn't mean that either.
People would sell piglets and would try to sell "a pig in a poke" (where a poke is a bag).
That's why you don't buy a pig in a poke because you can't see what you're buying.
Letting the cat out of the bag is because you've revealed that it was a cat rather than a piglet. You've revealed the deception.
Thanks for the correction. In my own words, to commit to memory: once "the cat is out of the bag", the point is not that it's difficult to put the cat back in, the point is that we now know it's a cat and putting it back is not relevant.
I've seen two expressions referring to "it's difficult to put the (thing) back in" that are in more-or-less common use in English. The slightly more common one is "You can't put the genie back into the bottle", and the slightly less common one (in my experience, at least) is "You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube." (Which actually inspired me to try, and it is actually possible to put the toothpaste back into the tube with careful application of suction, by squeezing the tube gently, touching the end to the excess toothpaste, then releasing the tube and letting some of the excess get sucked back in. But I digress.)
I've actually seen the "genie back into the bottle" phrase used in contexts that refer to secrets, e.g. where "the cat is out of the bag" would actually be more appropriate, so there's definitely some overlap there. For example, I've seen people talking about nuclear proliferation say "you can't put the nuclear genie back into the bottle", meaning that the secret of how to build a nuclear weapon is well-known, and it's not really possible to make it secret again. But I've also seen people use the same "you can't put the nuclear genie back into the bottle" expression referring to a nuclear weapon exploding: once the radioactive material in the bomb has gone critical, there's nothing anybody can do to stop the explosion that's about to happen.
Personally, I like the "genie back into the bottle" phrase better. But some people like more grounded-in-reality phrases rather than fantasy-based phrases, and they prefer "toothpaste back into the tube". Either one works well, though.
With open models and the work happening outside of Anthropic and OpenAI, the cat is most definitely out of the bag.
> it ends if we decide not to keep telling it
That's wishful thinking, what are you saying, labs/people across the world will selflessly decide they're not going to pursue further research if we on HN stop saying it?
In the history of the world, one company can absolutely have world changing impact. From the British East India company to Kodak to Google, one company can have that much of an impact. Whether OpenAI is such a company is a different question for future history books to decide, but that part of their thesis at least is borne out by history.
I'm not against Norway controlling OpenAI, I think it would actually be pretty cool and prevent some of the most obvious vectors (mining personal data etc.)
I just think AI is so much bigger than one company. We already have 3 major frontier labs + Chinese labs releasing at near-frontier levels.
My thesis is that someone will solve the high inference hardware cost problem and another paradigm shift will come where AI becomes even more decentralized and democratized. Obviously that is a hunch but that is what my gut tells me.
Yudkowsky's solution of detecting and physically shutting down non complying datacenter, including bombing if the country doesn't cooperate, isn't too much out of the question.
We would have done the same if it is about virus or nuclear weapons, and AI could become serious existential threat in the next 5 years.
More or less of an existential threat than a conflict between nuclear powers because one of them decided to launch a unilateral strike against a datacentre located outside one of their cities just in case it hosted a particularly dangerous chatbot?
Trolley problem. What's worse than all of humanity dead from ASI?
Sam Altman: "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could."
Do you think it's possible to bomb China's AI datacenters? They are already here, and they are progressing AI at their will. What will others do about it?
It is possible for US to bomb anything. Just the retaliation could be huge.
Would you had said the same thing if a country like was developing and testing deadly virus on live population. I think in 5 years, it is possible that the AI will become that topic(if we assume AI becomes good and start hacking and controlling everything).
lol, is it, because last time I checked we’re currently losing a war badly, and we’re out of munitions
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?
> achieve AGI
They might as well invest in cold fusion, warm superconductivity, curing cancer or whatever sci-fi concept you have.
Make a ship sail against the wind by lighting a bonfire under her deck???
Were you not paying attention? Modern LLMs are incredibly general AIs, and nearing human or superhuman performance in many areas. And the tech just keeps advancing.
If you don't see "AGI is possible", you aren't looking.
There is a very big difference between language generation and true intelligence.
"The ability to speak does not make you intelligent." - Qui Gon Jinn
Oh, funny that you say that.
Modern LLMs show empirically that the "difference" is fuzzy at best. You can try to draw a distinction. You can try to draw the lines in the sand and define "true intelligence" in a way that would include humans but exclude "false intelligence" of Mythos 5. An exercise in vanity, in my eyes.
Or you can go with "any sufficiently advanced language generation is indistinguishable from intelligence" and drop the matter. My advice is to do exactly that.
We used to think that if a computer could play chess, it would be intelligent. Maybe back then they were also people saying "stop trying to draw lines, just admit it's intelligent!!" Good thing we didn't listen to them.
The act of distinguishing between human intelligence and LLMs is what allows us to figure out how to make it better. There are still some deep limitations, and to ignore them is a mistake. That doesn't take away from how crazy good they are.
Right. It's actually amazing that large language models can be as effective as they are, given that at their core they are simply matching up word-frequency patterns. But with a large enough context and enough parameters, those word-frequency patterns actually do a decent job of simulating intelligence: I'm able to give rather ambiguous instructions to Claude Code (like "go back to the suggestion you made a while back about (foo) and explain in more detail what the benefits and drawbacks of that approach would be"), and it is able to look through its context, find the part where it suggested (foo), and expand on its suggestion. This is a qualitative difference in human-computer interaction: I can type instructions that are very similar to what I would say to another human being, rather than having to be utterly unambiguous the way you have to be in writing code. It's also good at synthesizing information faster than I could: these days instead of searching MSDN for some obscure API method, I ask Claude "what's the syntax to create a foo from a bar?" and it finds me the MakeBarIntoFoo method faster than I would have (especially because I would have started with CreateFooFromBar and not found it).
But I never forget that it's a simulation of intelligence. I use it for the things it's trained on (generating code) and I don't expect the model to be good at writing poetry, or fiction. Nor do I expect it to have any actual understanding of the things it is actually trained on. Modern models are pretty good at simulating understanding, but even so they will still produce things that a human being would immediately know is wrong, e.g. image-generation models producing hands with the wrong number of fingers, or a person with three arms, or whatever. Those happen less and less often as models have been better trained (and I bet that verification steps are happening behind the scenes to catch and discard some of the classic mistakes), but they still happen.
It's the dancing bear, except this bear is actually managing some really spectacular dance moves. Some of the time. Other times it falls flat on its face. But it's really, really impressive that the bear is actually managing to dance so well.
Norway doesn't have to fund future capex just like OpenAI doesn't have to fund future capex. They both borrow the capital.
When I think of Norway, the first thing that comes to mind is its willingness to commit to huge future capex spending. Not to mention, selling more than half its equities in order to buy one risky asset totally aligns with its investment strategy and, you know, having to pay pensions, other minor concerns like that.
In all seriousness though it is pretty interesting to consider if it really happened, a sovereign wealth fund pivots to the crazy high risk strategy, writes a blank check and tries to actually win. If it works does that country just become the rulers of the world?
We see in practice that the last to adopt technology do in fact have newer tech than the ones who started it. IE 3G in Asia vs land lines in USA.
So all they have to do is wait a bit and build a frontier model of their own.
I don't think it works that way for AI. Comms networks are extensive physical infrastructure that, by definition, has to cover ground. AIs cover the ground by riding the existing comms lines.
In telecomms, the late mover has the advantage of not having legacy networks to maintain, and having better technologies available at rollout time. What is the "late mover advantage" in AI? Being able to distill from every bleeding edge frontier lab? That gets you near parity at best.
> That gets you near parity at best.
So they don't spend 20 trillion dollars to achieve AGI, and in the end they still end up at parity for a tiny fraction of the cost.
How can you claim that this isn't a win?
That assumes they release their models publicly. The future is leaning towards these labs air gapping their best stuff (Model 2, etc) and using it internally to snipe their competitors and charge insane amounts for monitored use in consulting environments.
You can't distill or catch up if you can't access the models. You'll basically have a situation where nation-states will need to try and steal the models Oceans 11 style.
Getting to parity with less money means that you can go further with the same amount of money.
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.
OpenAI is worth the discounted value of their future free cash flow. It's not clear at this point how much free cash flow they will ever generate, if any.
Might be negative.
OpenAI will have pretty good future free cash flow...until GDDR7 prices are no longer inflated by scarcity. Which could be 24-72 months.
OpenAI is worth whatever someone will pay for them. Overpriced and underpriced are just words. If someone's willing to pay an amount for something, that's what it's worth.
Well, yes but not really.
I could buy a local sweetshop for a 100 billion dollars, just because I might do that, that doesn't mean it's actually worth that.
On the contrary, you would be demonstrating that, to at least one buyer, it was worth that. By definition.
I think the argument you’re really looking to contradict is this: if 1% of a company is worth $1B to somebody, then somebody would pay $100B for the whole company. That does not follow (and indeed the acquisition price of a company is almost never exactly its “market valuation”).
> and indeed the acquisition price of a company is almost never exactly its “market valuation”
The acquisition price is almost always significantly more than its market value. The reason is that if you start buying shares on the open market each transaction of yours will raise the stock price, and eventually you will price yourself out of the purchase.
So what buyers do is negotiate directly with the board and propose an inflated price that >50% of shareholders are okay with.
No.
You are assuming that the money that I buy the sweet shop for is what I evaluate the value of the sweet shop to be worth. That's not necessarily true.
You're also assuming I'm not insane.
If I offer to buy an apple from you for 1 trillion dollars because I believe consuming that specific apple will make me a god, that apple is not actually worth 1 trillion dollars.
Items don’t have an inherent “worth”.
If I have an apple and you agree to buy it for $1T, then the apple is indeed worth $1T at that moment.
After the purchase is complete it is worth ~$0, or whatever the next person is willing to pay you for it.
Alternatively you can say “it is still worth $1T to me” and that would be true as well.
When we are specifically talking about companies, their value is where buyers meet sellers in the order book.
What if I say, "it's not worth $1T to me but I'm doing it for the memes"
Are you selling me just the apple?
Real world example: someone just bought the first Ferrari Luce EV for $40M. Obv $600K starting price for that model was low!
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ferrar...
Yes it's literally what it means. It was worth that to you (even if just to prove a point).
What else does worth mean?
Okay.
I buy a sweetshop for 1 billion dollars.
Now, immediately after I have bought it, what's it worth?
> Now, immediately after I have bought it, what's it worth?
Is a buyer asking to buy it? If yes, whatever you sell it for.
If no, then you really have no idea what it's worth now, all you know is it was worth 1B to you when you bought it.
What the next person would buy it for. Maybe you buy it for the memes but it doesn't mean another would afterwards.
So if I bought it for the memes, the shop itself wasn't worth $1 billion.
I could have bought bike shop, or an apple.
That value wasn't associated with that specific item. It's an arbitrary choice.
It was actually, because value is defined as such. Why do you think buying something for the memes is worth less? Like what mechanism exactly makes it worth less? Seems like that's the fundamental misunderstanding you're having in your comments with others in this thread.
I guess it depends on your definition.
The issue is that buying something for the memes isnt worth less, it's 'what you are actually buying'?.
If I arbitarily decide to buy an apple for $10 that I could have bought for $1, what did I actually buy with the $9.
Publicity? Goodwill?
I don't believe I only bought an apple, even from the person I bought it from.
and just what the fuck is ""worth"" anyway
"We're selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price."
Do you mean that there is no way to value OpenAI for a purchase so a sale is impossible?
At the least OpenAI is worth what the market is willing to pay for it.
Not to mention that the US would have to approve the sale to another country, which they are unlikely to do.
Possibly, they could also sell assets and cease operation.
Selling the assets would probably be liable to similar restrictions.
Or 2x less. 800B valued is not 800B invested. And it wouldn't be the first time investors sell at a loss if sentiment declines.
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.
Yes, and I think you would get much more effect by going for much smaller and cheaper firms.
Cerebras is only 700 people. I wouldn't buy it, but since it's only 700 people, you can probably build something like it with 1400 people in a couple of years if you set the goals right and hire the right people to lead it.
Euclyd, VSORA etc. exist. If they were buying American, why not Groq.
Then once one has good hardware without an enormous markup, then one can start thinking about building LLMs with it.
Wasn't Groq acqui-hired by NVIDIA?
Yes, I suppose I wrote this a year late. But again, Euclyd and VSORA. Probably basically the same thing but better.
> If they were buying American, why not Groq.
Because they're too stupid and stubborn to rename themselves.
Maybe, but Norway should still wait until the inevitable AI crash
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.
I think Norway should not waste money on this.
I think OpenAI’s does not have ANY moat. They are currently a leader but lack the piles of cash required to stay a leader in the medium/long-term. (They can not in anyway compete with AWS/Alphabet on that front, and they know that too.)
Researchers and engineer will want big comp, as they can get it elsewhere, if you stop paying that, then you loose the knowledge necessary to stay a leader, even though it’s a losing race in the long-term anyway. The company will become a growing pile of non-SOTA techniques and models + old hardware in no time.
Why waste that money…?
Nothing special about OpenAI to deserve a buyout.
Maybe at a bankruptcy sale; otherwise, it's a bad investment that only relieves current investors of their problem by passing the hand grenade to someone else.
If Norway, or any other country, wanted to, for far less money than buying a problematic company, they could fund a public cloud and rent it out at below-market rates to citizens, universities, and small businesses.
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!
---------------
[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.
Should be stated right away: The pension fund has to follow strict rules.
They can't just put half their account on black and spin the wheel.
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]:
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2vz83pg9eo
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.
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.
People loose track of this a lot.
Massachusetts, the small state in the US, has a population 25% larger than Norway. The New Jersey suburbs of NYC, not even the whole state, has a population comparable to Norway.
Norway is cool, but it's not very useful as a guide for managing a country.
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.
And Denmark should buy Anthropic.
“Invade Greenland and we switch it off!”
Talk about perverse incentives.
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.
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.
There’s already a solid case that AI profits or revenue should be significantly taxed for public goods whether or not there are employment impacts. The models simply do not exist without vast amounts of training data much of it acquired by murky or clearly problematic methods (even before you start to get into how technical developments mean the letter of the law doesn’t cover the spirit of the situation). The source of that data is more or less everyone. Some benefit should go to everyone.
>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.
If AI really becomes effective enough to displace so many white collar jobs then it'd be far more efficient to fund free AI tutoring for everyone that wants it. A system where you get at best an hour daily of discussion with a human expert is grossly inferior to one where you can have 24/7 discussion with an AI expert that has infinite patience for dumb questions. There'd be no reason for college to exist in a future where AI professors are at least as smart as human professors but far far cheaper.
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.
This is great use of AI and Fellesferie :: The model is unavailable in July. This is not a bug. It is arguably the most effective capability control anyone has proposed.
That would be really good news for Anthropic. Their main competitor owned by a government would be a dream come true.
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.
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/
> Their best bet is hardware
Why would Nvidia continue to finance OpenAI to meet its procurement commitments if it became a direct competitor?
Where is the money coming from?
I think OpenAI's opportunity is ai first hardware; I mean, the consumer is Google, simply because the distribution and the product are perfect. Enterprise is much better with AI; I do not see any AI-first enterprise companies succeeding in the long run.
But google already has their tpus?
AI consumer hardware
If they want to throw away a lot of money, they should indeed. Qwen 3.8 has the level of Luna and runs on my laptop. Are their a bit more frontier models worth a trillion in a couple of years..?
I guess you don't like Norway ? ;-)
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.
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.
It should wait for when it can get it for pennies
The gematria[0] of Norway is 96, while it's 60 for OpenAI. The deal is never gonna work.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria
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.
"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
So you want it to end with Norway essentially coerced out of financial stress to join the US as a junior partner?
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.
Yes because governments are known for keeping things running smoothly
The US government would never agree
No it should not it would be better if it saves norweigan retirement funds for the future.
Buy a failing, over-hyped, collateral-less company with pension money. F-no!
Then Norway will be holding the multibillion dollar bag once AI flops
Yeah, I think a crisis in unavoidable.
Great technology, but $20-$200 a month technology, with a lot of people going for free options. Like the telecom industry. Average is probably going to be like a phone bill. Basically: you can become Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile. $450 billion a year in revenue. A superb business, but merely a superb business.
Their valuations arent based on the 20-200 subs but enterprise customers
So, for OpenAI 60-100 instead of 20-200. It seems pretty much the same.
Yes, but wait for the dip.
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.
Very different races.
The incentives in north america favor software-esque plays where the players are racing towards % of marketshare based on usage.
China on the other hand is driving towards winning of manufacturing and % of hardware produced by them. China is competing with Nvidia, OpenAi and Anthropic are collateral damage.
Don't worry, AI companies and the companies around them have ensured that so much of the US economy is tied into AI that they've become Too Big to Fail, so that when things eventually collapse the US government will give them trillions of dollars without asking anything in return. That will allow them to socialize their irresponsible spending and wipe the red out of their ledgers so that they can focus on destroying the environment at massive scale.
FUD that they might be bought and controlled by foreigners, then offer a good slice to the US government (maybe they put you as part of the Army), and you become non-bankruptable.
No thanks.
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.
Look, the last fund to openly push an AI focused position got screwed over by Wall Street for the tune of $45 billion.
Norway isn't dumb enough to make the same mistake.
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
https://joinagisociety.org
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:
https://youtu.be/pxcL4j5kTg4
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.
In the article it's suggested that Norway could award a peace prize to trump in return for regulatory approval.
100% the US government would maintain that AI is the key to the success of the US economy over China, and that it can only happen as long as it's run by profiteering billionaires aiming to extract money from society at the fastest rate possible. Only by accelerating ecological collapse for profit can private US capitalism maintain its edge over freely shared Chinese open-weight models.
Bro we are talking about using Norway's 2 trillion dollar oil and natural gas surplus to buy OpenAI. Nobody has the environmental high ground here.
assuming this is serious, I would eat a tire if the US government allowed that to happen
In the article it's suggested that Norway could award a peace prize to trump in return for regulatory approval.
Yes, drain their sovereign wealth fund to Scam Altman's coffers. Nothing opposable in that, noo.
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?
The author does have this bio at the bottom:
A guest post by Zachary Jones “My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”
Good Lord.
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 marketing team's getting pretty innovative huh?
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.
Can we fastforward to that point so I can buy some GPUs at non-inflated prices? It is insane how fast they are going up. I bought some stuff last week and it is already up $1K compared to then. And I thought it was overpriced when I got it.
Unfortunately the deflation of OpenAI would not lower your GPU prices. People will still require the hardware to run LLMs, it's just that it will probably be commodity models.
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.
More importantly, openly shared public-weight models limits the scale of the success that closed-weight private AI services can manage. Eventually it'll become cheaper and easier to pay some AI data centre to use their capacity plus an open-source harness rather than to pay Anthropic to pay an AI data centre etc. etc.
IOW China almost definitely sees their own open-weight models as a pressure release valve to ensure the US AI companies, and by extension the US economy, doesn't get too big, and to ensure that these companies don't become the dominant global force (the way that e.g. US cloud companies did originally).
100% this. I would assume if any government purchased an ai company and wasn't completely hands off (which from the sound of this post, it wouldn't be), I would assume that company would fail.
Could it be that the goal is not to be competitive, but to be responsible?
They're responsible for the Norwegian people's retirement savings, and burning $800 billion of it just to render an American AI company uncompetitive is not that.
lol can't tell if this is serious
Going by the author's other articles, if it's a bit it's a long one.
Pretty sure this is satire. Maybe it alludes to recent concerns that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund could be exposed to an AI-driven investment bubble or valuation correction.
Yeah I can’t say either. I cannot imagine what the current political machine in Norway would do with it but nothing good and they would run it into the ground. When it comes to Ethics maybe read up on Telenor and Burma.
I stopped reading when I saw "Social-Democracy" and Palestine in the article.
Are you operating on a purely keyword-based level?
It became clear that the article isn't about OpenAI or technology, it's left-wing propaganda.
Didn't Norway just invest 1 billion in SpaceX via their sovereign wealth fund?
Nice reminder that even the most successful socialist societies still depend on someone somewhere being productive to generate wealth to redistribute. North Sea oil money doesn't hurt.
Yes. https://finbold.com/norways-sovereign-wealth-fund-discloses-...
Some may not be aware that SpaceX is also an AI company.
Norway can’t buy OpenAI since it’s not GDPR compliant.
Why try to tank Norwegian pensions by having them buy OpenAI before the LLM capital expenditure bubble bursts? 8-\
"Teacher, teacher! I think that Norway should buy all the weapons in the world and then we wouldn't have any more wars."
How can somebody put their own name on something so infantile as this article? What influence does this author or any of you think you have over the Norwegian sovereign fund?
Wow, this is the dumbest thing I've read in the whole year, but I love that the internet should give a voice to anybody and everybody and would defend this right to (perhaps) death.
Author seems to have read on a magazine or something that Norway's Pension Fund assets amount to ~2 trillion US, which he confuses for having 2 trillion US cash but you cannot really expect much from room temperature IQ.
Then, just because 2,000B US > 800B US, he goes on to propose that Norway should buy it ... that's it, that's the whole argument.
Then he elaborates with some of the most deranged ideas I've read like (taken verbatim):
"Such an intervention would clearly be blocked by the United States government, though if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awards Trump the bauble then perhaps there will be an opening of political possibility."
As if Norway would even be remotely interested in acquiring that company anyway.
according to my understanding, this would (necessarily) include relocation of all OAI stuff to .. somewhere in Europa? (regardless if this "somewhere" is FR or UK or IT or DE or CH))
I do not see any chance that this may happen