Sam Altman: ‘Governments should not pick winners or losers’ in AI race
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar stirred debate Wednesday, urging the U.S. government to offer a “guarantee” or “backstop” to spur private investment in AI chips for data centers.
This would be a “guarantee that allows the financing to happen, that can really drop the cost of the financing, but also increase the loan to value.” Friar later walked back her statement in a post on LinkedIn.
“I want to clarify my comments earlier today,” Friar said. “OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for our infrastructure commitments. I used the word ‘backstop’ and it muddied the point.”
Instead, she said she was “making the point that American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part.”
On Thursday, the White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks appeared to be responding to Friar’s comments in a post on X.
“There will be no federal bailout for AI,” Sacks said. “The U.S. has at least 5 major frontier model companies. If one fails, others will take its place.”
Sacks added that the government does want “to make permitting and power generation easier,” with the aim to achieve “rapid infrastructure buildout without increasing residential rates for electricity.”
Altman says government can help secure chip supply
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed the issue in his own lengthy post on X on Thursday, noting that Friar had clarified her comments, while saying “we do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI datacenters.”
“We believe that governments should not pick winners or losers, and that taxpayers should not bail out companies that make bad business decisions or otherwise lose in the market,” Altman said. “If one company fails, other companies will do good work.”
However, Altman seemed to somewhat contradict himself a couple of paragraphs later in his post.
“The one area where we have discussed loan guarantees is as part of supporting the buildout of semiconductor fabs in the US, where we and other companies have responded to the government’s call and where we would be happy to help (though we did not formally apply),” he said.
Altman insisted that this would be to ensure “that the sourcing of the chip supply chain is as American as possible,” which he said would be different “from governments guaranteeing private-benefit datacenter buildouts.”
He pointed out that OpenAI has $1.4 trillion in commitments over the next eight years, but did not mention that the company is losing massive amounts of money at the moment. The company had a net loss of $11.5 billion last quarter.
But Altman said the company is expecting to end the year with a $20 billion annualized revenue run rate that he projects will grow to hundreds of billions by 2030.
Meanwhile, Sacks also addressed Friar’s comments a little more directly, giving her the benefit of the doubt.
“I don’t think anyone was actually asking for a bailout. (That would be ridiculous),” he said. “But company executives can clarify their own comments.”