The Stargate Project - The $500 Billion AI Agenda

So Donald Trump just announced the Stargate project and OpenAI went to X to sort of give us more details about what this Stargate project is. And to be honest, I have really, really mixed feelings about it. And I'll explain why, because there's one specific thing that I haven't seen anybody else talking about that is a little bit concerning to me. But I'll get to that in just a moment. First, let's take a quick look at what this project Stargate is. So this is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years to build new AI infra structure for OpenAI in the United States. This is already kind of surprising to me because obviously Elon Musk is kind of like one of Trump's right hand men now and he's got xai, but this is actually a project that this money is going towards. OpenAI. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. Personally, I think the entire world portion of this is maybe a little debatable. There's definitely certain countries the US is trying to prevent from getting advanced AI technology, but we'll move on past that for a moment. So the initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, which is CEO'd by this guy right here, Masayoshi Son, OpenAI, which is obviously Sam Altman, Oracle and MGX. And Oracle is Larry Ellison here and he's one of the key figures that sort of makes me a little worried about this. But again, I'll get to that in just a moment. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman. So SoftBank's putting all the money in. OpenAI is basically building the technology ARM. Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners. So ARM basically it manufactures the chips that go into a lot of mobile devices. When you see like Snapdragon chips that's built on basically ARM technology, Microsoft, everybody's familiar with them. OpenAI is essentially 49 owned by Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and OpenAI, they're the key technology partners. They're already building this out in Texas and they're evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements. Now what's interesting about Oracle is Oracle is essentially a competitor to Microsoft Azure, pretty much all of OpenAI systems right now. Are running on Microsoft Azure because they have that partnership with Microsoft. So the fact that Oracle and Larry Ellison is the one that's there making the announcement with them is fairly interesting. It almost feels like OpenAI needs more compute than what Microsoft can provide, so they're bringing in Oracle to help with that. Microsoft, however, did put out a statement right after this information dropped, basically saying that nothing really changed between the partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft. We're thrilled to continue our strategic partnership with OpenAI and to partner on Stargate. Today's announcement is complimentary to what our two companies have been working on together since 2019. The key elements of our partnership remain in place for the duration of our contract through 2030, with our access to OpenAI's op, our revenue sharing arrangements, and our exclusivity on OpenAI's APIs all continuing forward. So Microsoft has the rights to all of the OpenAI IP. The OpenAI API is exclusive to Azure, so if you're using the OpenAI API to build your own products or your own wrappers around OpenAI's AI products, it'll still be running on Azure. Microsoft and OpenAI have revenue sharing agreements that flow both ways, ensuring that both companies benefit from increased use of of new and existing models. And Microsoft remains a major investor in OpenAI, providing funding and capacity to support their advancements and in turn benefiting from their growth and valuation. So essentially that's Microsoft going, yes, they're working with Oracle, they're building this Stargate, but nothing really changes with our agreements with OpenAI. So continuing down this tweet here, as part of Stargate, Oracle, Nvidia and OpenAI will closely collaborate to build and operate this computing system. This builds on deep collaboration between OpenAI and Nvidia going back to 2016 and newer partnerships between OpenAI and Oracle. This also builds on the existing OpenAI partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft with this additional compute to train leading models and deliver great products and services. So based on that, it does kind of sound like Microsoft will benefit from any new models that come out of this project Stargate that is getting financed by Masayoshi Son. All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop AI and in particular AGI for the benefit of all humanity. We believe that this new step is critical on the path and will enable creative people to figure out how to use AI to elevate humanity. And then Elon, being Elon, replied, they don't actually have the money this same announcement that was posted on X by OpenAI was also posted on the OpenAI blog. So if you want to read it in a sort of cleaner format here. They did put this up as a blog post, but there was some press conferences as well. And I want to highlight some of this stuff from the press conference before getting to my major concerns with this. Larry Ellison spoke first, sharing optimism about being able to cure cancers and new drug discoveries and things like that.

The kind of applications that we're building, to give you an idea, maybe the most charismatic and the one that I think touches us all, is electronic health records. Not just maintaining electronic health records, but by looking at electronic health records, understanding the condition of doctors better understanding the condition of their patients, and being able to provide health care plans that are much better than they otherwise would be. A doctor in Indian River Reservation would be able to see how a doctor at Memorial Sloan Kettering would treat the patient, or a doctor at Stanford would treat the patient. We actually provide all of that information, all of that guidance to the doctors who are treating cancer patients or patients of any other kind of disease made possible by AI. One of the most exciting things we're working on is a cancer vaccine. Turns out all of our cancers, cancer tumors, little fragments of those tumors float around in your blood. You can do early cancer detection with a blood test and using AI to look at the blood test, you can find the cancers that are actually seriously threatening the person. So we can again, cancer diagnosis using AI has the promise of just being a simple blood test. Then beyond that, once we gene sequence that cancer tumor, you can then vaccinate the person, design a vaccine for every individual person to vaccinate them against that cancer. And you can make that vaccine, that MRNA vaccine, you can make that robotically again using AI in about 48 hours. So imagine early cancer detection, the development of a cancer vaccine for your particular cancer aimed at you. And have have that vaccine available in 48 hours. This is the promise of AI and the promise of the future.

Masayoshi Son also said a few words here.

This is the beginning of golden age. We would make this happen. We would immediately start deploying $100 billion with a goal of making $500 billion within next four years. This is business. This will help people's life. This will help solving many, many issues, difficult things that otherwise we could not have solved with the power of AI. I think AGI is coming very, very soon. That's not the goal. After that, artificial super intelligence will come to solve the issues that mankind would Never ever have thought that we could solve. This is the beginning of golden age.

And then of course, Sam had a few words to say as well. I am doing some little chop chop and editing to just the most important parts and cutting out some of the fluff just, just so you know. That's why there's some edits throughout this.

I think this will be the most important project of this era. And as Masa said, for AGI to get built here to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, to create a new industry centered here, I think it'll be an exciting project. I think we'll be able to do all of the wonderful things that these guys talked about. But the fact that we get to do this in the United States is I think, wonderful. I believe that as this technology progresses, we will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate. We will be amazed at how quickly we're curing cancer and that one and heart disease and what this will do for the ability of to deliver very high quality health care. The costs, but really to cure the diseases at a rapid, rapid rate I think will be among the most important things this technology does.

The three also did a quick little interview on the White House lawn after the press briefing and I'm going to chop it down to just the points that I think are worth hearing here.

When you go to the hospital these days, if you're using a modern system, the doctor will get a little note written by AI describing what the purpose of the appointment. And then that note will have your latest lab tests. So the doctor's prepared. When they meet with the patient, the AI will actually listen to the conversation between the doctor and the patient and make recommendations and improve the likelihood that the patient's going to get a high quality of care. It's easier for the doctor, it's better outcomes for the patient. It's really a revolution in medicine. It's a revolution in many other industries as well. Medicine just touches us all.

Hundreds of millions of people using these tools today. It'll go to billions. People are using it and really dependent on for all sorts of great things in their lives. Like any new technology, we do have to put some rails on it. You can imagine ways it could go wrong, but if you look at the safety record we've been able to ship so far, what I think we'll be able to do in the future, the benefits of this tremendously outweigh the downsides. We have to be responsible about how we do this. We have to build it carefully. But I think people are really Good. And people will do, on balance, incredible things with this technology. The scale of this investment, obviously is huge. What I think that says about the likely progress of the technology, at least what all of us believe is correspondingly huge. But I have enormous faith we'll figure it out.

The data center we're building will be the largest computer ever built, which enables this AI, which will allow personalized medicine. This is going to touch all of us. Yes, it takes a huge. But the result of the investment will be vaccines that prevent cancers, personalized medicine where we never again run into a problem like COVID 19 because we get an early warning. We know when Covid starts, when there are a handful of patients, rather than having to wait until it's become an epidemic and very difficult to control. This is a very large investment that affects all of humanity.

So I find all this to be really, really fascinating. And like I mentioned towards the front of this video, I do have mixed feelings about it. I think it is smart for the US Try to be first in AI. Make no mistake about it, there's essentially like equivalent of the space race going on right now between countries like the US and China trying to be the first AGI, because the first country to get to AGI is most likely the first country to get to asi, and the world's going to get there. And since the world's going to get there no matter what, the US wants to be the first country to get there to essentially control this superpower, which will be AGI, artificial General Intelligence, followed not long after by asi, artificial super intelligence, where now this artificial intelligence is smarter than pretty much any human. And we almost lose track of why it's doing what it's doing because it is so much smarter than the smartest human beings. And I do think there is a lot of good that will come from this. I do believe that it will cure diseases. I do believe that in the near term it will create a lot more jobs. And what these guys are saying during these press conferences is all of the really exciting stuff that all the talking points that people should be excited about around AI. However, this is something that I haven't seen anybody else talking about yet. And it's this guy right here, Larry Ellison, his involvement in this. I do have a little bit of concern about his true motives around this. In fact, let me show you a clip of why I have some concerns. This is from Oracle's financial analysis meeting. Listen to what he has to say in this meeting.

Everyone would see a it your body cams will be transmitting that the police will be on their best behavior because we, we're constantly recording, watching and recording everything that's going on. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.

Ellison's vision is for AI to analyze data from this network of cameras in real time in an attempt to prevent.

Crime while also tracking and influencing public.

Behavior for a safer society.

We're going to have supervision. In other words, every police officer is going to be superv at all times.

Ellison seems to have this vision of constant surveillance all the time. Police being on their best behavior, citizens being on their best behavior because they know they're always being watched. And AI is constantly analyzing all of these cameras and what is happening out in the real world. You know what that would require? A mega massive data center. Now, I don't want to be all tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist here, but it makes me wonder if, if Larry's out there talking about all the big healthcare benefits and all of the increased job benefits to get people on board with this idea, but sort of behind the scenes, his real goal is to build this data center to use AI for better surveillance of the citizens. Again, I'm not saying that's actually what's going on. I'm just sort of putting some pieces together here and inferring things from various conversations. I think overall this is a good thing. I think I'm excited about the sort of utopian scenarios of an ASI curing all diseases and creating vaccines to make it so nobody has to worry about cancer and things like that. And in the short term, building these massive data centers that are going to employ hundreds of thousands of people. I think all of that is really exciting. But I also think that those are the main talking points they're going to present to the public, while at the same time there are other things that the government will want to use this AI for. Anyway, I don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole. I'll let you do your own deep diving and to your own conclusions. I just wanted to put together a quick video, talk about this Stargate project, share it with you so you're in the loop of what it's all about, what's going on, what are the sort of talking points about it, and just share a little tinfoil hat conspiracy around it based on some of Ellison's past comments. But also take that with a very, very, very small grain of salt because maybe that's nothing. Anyway, that's all I got for you today. If you want to stay in the loop with more AI news, learn about AI tools, get some cool AI tutorials, things like that. Make sure you like this video and subscribe to this channel. And I will do my best to looped in as really interesting stuff happens in the AI world. Thank you so much for tuning in. Really, really appreciate you. I'll see you in the next one.

Bye. Bye.