"I don't care if we burn $50 billion a year, we're building AGI," says Sam Altman

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI recently came on Stanford eCorner’s talk and said, “Whether we burn $500 million, $5 billion, or $50 billion a year, I don’t care. I genuinely don't as long as we can stay on a trajectory where eventually we create way more value for society than that and as long as we can figure out a way to pay the bills,” he said. 

“We are making AGI, and it is going to be expensive and totally worth it,” he added.

When asked about ChatGPT, Altman said that is embarrassing. “GPT-4 is the dumbest model anyone of you will ever have to use,” he added, saying that it is important to ship early and often and the company believes in deploying iteratively.

“If we go build AGI in the basement, then the world is walking blissfully blindfolded,” he added, saying that it would not make OpenAI good neighbours and it is going to happen. 

He also added that GPT-5 is going to be a lot smarter than GPT-4 and GPT-6 is going to be smarter than GPT-5. “We are not near the top of this curve…and it is always going to get better,” he added.

Altman said that when he started out with OpenAI, he didn’t realise that they would need so much money for compute. “We didn’t know that we are going to have this nice business,” he said, further adding that the goal for starting was just to push AI research forward. 

On X, there have been a lot of discussions around Altman’s stance on burning so much money for building AGI, which is more than some countries’ GDP. “He knows money no longer has value when they have achieved AGI,” said a user. Another said, “It would be a minuscule price to pay for something that could transform humanity.”

Earlier this year, Altman was looking for someone to invest $5 – $7 trillion (as per sources) to “reshape the business of chips and AI”.