Dem
47
GOP
53
On Tuesday, Donald Trump announced a $500 billion deal to create an infrastructure for AI called Stargate. It would consist of an initial 10 data centers in Texas, with more later, and would create 100,000 jobs almost immediately, according to Trump. The companies involved are OpenAI, Oracle, MGX, and Softbank, a Japanese bank.
Late Tuesday evening, Co-President Elon Musk tweeted that Softbank, which is to handle the financing, doesn't have the money. In fact, it has under $10 billion. He said he had that on good authority. This is the first time Musk has openly said Trump was making up stuff. Sam Altman, of OpenAI, said Musk was wrong. We don't know who is right, but we do know that $500 billion is a lot of money. It is not at all like $500 million, although that is also a lot of money. For reference, the entire Dept. of Defense budget is $850 billion, so this one AI project will cost as much as almost 60% of the entire DoD budget. We also know that building a big AI infrastructure has financial risks since the resulting AI may not work well. Imagine an AI program that does medical diagnoses and cures 95% of the patients and kills 5% of the patients. Can you imagine the lawsuits? Even if it works well, earning that amount of money back could take a very long time. Who will put up so much money with such big risks? Musk sounds like he might be right here.
One thing we definitely know is that openly criticizing Trump has generally bad consequences for the person issuing the criticism. One of the DOGEys has already departed. Will the other one follow soon?
Musk and Altman know each other quite well. They cofounded OpenAI, but then had a major falling out. Musk has brought multiple lawsuits against Altman and the company, so it is hard to tell here who the bigger liar is. But what the bigger story probably is, is that Musk doesn't seem to realize that criticizing Trump can result in his being put in the dog(e)house. (V)