- 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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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 public comment because they are clickbait.
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?
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.
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!
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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))
- 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?
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.
(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.
Bro, c'mon.
If the US wants to interfere with something they will interfere with it.
To think otherwise is Euro-brain-maxxing.
This is such a ridiculous, preposterously self-confident claim. Claims like this give HN (and engineers in general) a bad reputation.
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.
They might as well invest in cold fusion, warm superconductivity, curing cancer or whatever sci-fi concept you have.
So all they have to do is wait a bit and build a frontier model of their own.
At the least OpenAI is worth what the market is willing to pay for it.
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.
The inevitability narrative is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it ends if we decide not to keep telling it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Because they're too stupid and stubborn to rename themselves.
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.
OpenAI is a mess.
Start with a fresh slate, using open models and you can actually build a company that makes sense.
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
The financials of OpenAI make no sense at all unless you're a True Believer.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria
“Invade Greenland and we switch it off!”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Isn't OpenAI running on investor money right now?
The entire EU and Norway could simply block all clankers and US propaganda and experience an intellectual renaissance. For $0.
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).
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.”
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.
I do not see any chance that this may happen