Was This ChatGPT's Idea

Just a Treasury bust out. Faced with this dilemma—where do you get a trillion dollars quick?—OpenAI is getting ready to run hat in hand to the taxpayer for subsidies, like every great Ayn

Randian self-created entrepreneur, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. At a recent Wall Street Journal tech conference, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar suggested that a government loan guarantee might be necessary to fund the enormous investments needed to keep the company at the cutting edge.

Gerrit De Vynck of The Washington Post explained further that she also discussed “financial innovation,” like making sweetheart deals with chipmakers like AMD that get a stock boost from having any relationship with OpenAI, or trying to get a cut of the revenue that other companies generate through ChatGPT. But the loan guarantee suggestion stuck out; it felt like a pre-bailout, leaping past the crash and going right to the socialization of risk.

Though Friar later walked back her suggestion, saying that she was advocating for structural support for AI in general, not just her company, it is likely true that some kind of huge subsidy or another is probably the only way that OpenAI’s preposterous business model—it is “worth” a supposed $500 billion—can be sustained.