The end result would be the same, with only difference that the training/weights might be open-sourced (which is not a great business differentiator, cost/performance is)
Seems pretty reasonable! Not sure that's the easiest path for them to maximize profit though.
I'd probably say they should:
- allocate the $500M to the new chip, $100M to each of AMD and NVIDIA, then:
- never officially hire any more staff (these founders are 10E6X devs!)
- start "subtly" liquidating the AMD and NVIDIA chips after a year ("Tell HN: IlPathAI are liquidating their GPUs? >I bought a used GH200 off eBay and the shipping label was covering up previous shipping label for Andrej's shipping container treehouse >Are they getting quick cash to finance their foundry run on the new chips? It's that good??").
- Release a vague "alignment" solution on a chatgpt-generated kickstarter clone, take 3 years to "develop" it.
- Raise a series A (maybe a pre-A, or a post-seed. Honestly, maybe even a re-seed with this valuation!) off the hype (some obviously stable diffusion-generated images help here).
- Sell 30% of their shares in a secondary, profit some billions.
- When everyone starts getting suspicious, time to take out those GH200s you "sold" on ebay out of storage (those buyers were just sockpuppets - investors from the family/"friends" round), repackage them in some angled magnesium alloy. Release them to great fanfare. Crowd briefly ecstatic, concern sets in - "this has the same performance as the GH200? That was like 4 years ago!".
- Call the "performance issues" some form of "early access syndrome" and succeed in shifting blame back onto the consumer.
- Release a "performance patch" that in actuality just freaking overclocks and overvolts the device, occasionally secretly training on the user's validation set using an RDMA exfiltration exploit. This gets them to 2028, when the modified firmware on all devices spontaneously causes a meltdown - should've written it in Rust - that should've been a signed int! The fans thought it was suddenly 1773, ran in reverse so fast the whole device melted (aww all that IP down the drain)!
- When asked how on earth that could make any sense, dodge the question with the news that "We just had the unfortunate news that one of the greybeards who wrote the firmware previously at Siemens and then the DoE, has programmed his last PLC. He died glowing peacefully last night surrounded by layered densities of gasses. We are too sad and bankrupt to go on."
- Declare bankruptcy
- Become alt-right pundits on Y.com (If they haven't already wrapped around to AA.com - they managed to grab that domain after some airline went bankrupt after an embarrassing incident involving a 787 Max, the latest Stable Diffusion model, a marketing executive, some loose screws, and a Boeing QA contractor back there who might Not Be Real).
- Start a war with a "totally harmless" post, later admit it was "poorly worded".
- Use some saved funds to "find a way" for IlPathAI, Inc. to leave bankruptcy, pivot to a chat app (you actually just buy HipChat again). Resell that after reusing it for a few particularly juicy govt. tenders. Pivot to defense contracting. End up with enough money for the rest of the millennium.
- Write a joint autobiography called "The Alignment Problem", send it to your "kickstarter" backers. Print the book using old school metal typecasting because they forgot TeX, and the current language models only spit out hallucinated Marvel dialog. Screw up the kerning since you learned typesetting on the TikTok page of a French clockwork museum. Claim this was on purpose.
- The whole time, maintain an amazingly educational YouTube channel teaching Machine Learning to those who love to learn.
- Release "AGI" but it's actually just 5 lines of PyTorch that would have solved Tesla's FSD problems with mirrors. Send Douglas Hofstadter a very slightly smaller copy every day until he recurses into true AGI.
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Well I started out serious at least (OK, only the first and second-to-last bullets were). I do genuinely believe that $100M would not be enough to produce competitive IP right now - You'd likely have to budget a majority of that to the final production run! I wonder how much you'd have to spend on making custom chips to break even with spending the money on research in the performance/model architecture side of things, on average.
> The fans thought it was suddenly 1773, ran in reverse so fast the whole device melted
1) Then the fans should start to get ready for the American Revolution, only three years to go...
2) But actually, all the fans will by that time have read your above comment, so they'll be prepared for what's to come.
3) But actually actually, fans running in reverse will only suck in cold air through the exhaust port and blow out warm through the intake (a bit like politicians?), so they'll still be cooling devices.
