Xueba's computing system

Chapter 259 Enemies? Friends?
Lin Yuan originally regarded Musk as a close friend with a different background.

To some extent, Lin Yuan still agrees with Musk's approach. Because if he were to put himself in Musk's shoes, he doesn't think he has a better way to change anything. In fact, Lin Yuan doesn't even have the courage to keep changing things like Musk does.

Why do we need SpaceX? Wouldn't it be better to be rich and enjoy life?

Matrix multi-engines, stainless steel as rocket body, chopstick-clip rocket recovery, a pioneer in the private space field, and the first person to try out new things in the field of digital currency and electric vehicles, these 0~1 innovations undoubtedly show that Musk is an extremely creative and powerful person.

But a tough guy doesn’t necessarily mean he is a saint, and perhaps there are no saints in this world at all.

Lin Yuan suddenly felt that he had been looking at Musk through a filter. His mind was blinded by his brilliance and he actually ignored his side as a human being.

Lin Yuan remembered the saying: The world is bustling with people because of profit, the world is bustling with people because of profit.

A mean person will do bad things for the sake of profit, because he regards profit as his goal. Then won't a gentleman do bad things for his own goal? Even if that goal may be noble.

But Lin Yuan didn't want to be cannon fodder, he didn't want to be a victim of anyone or anything.

He suddenly wondered if he was being used as a tool by Musk.

For this purpose, Lin Yuan specially used the computing power system to collect all the information of OpenAI.

In 2015, when the AI big language model was still unknown, Musk took the lead in establishing OpenAI.

Three years later, in 3, the GPT-2018 model with 1.17 million parameters was launched, and a milestone product was born, although it was unknown to most people when it was born.

What followed was the common continuous iteration of IT software products, and the parameters of GPT-2 reached 15 billion.

In 2020, the number of parameters of GPT-3 reached an astonishing 1750 billion.

Before this, OpenAI was completely non-profit.

But after going through so many things, Lin Yuan naturally questioned the so-called non-profit nature of this thing. He is not a fool who doesn't think based on emotions.

Behind the exponential growth of GPT model parameters is the huge demand for computing power, which needs GPUs to provide. So which GPU is the best? Longguo Shandong asked Lanxiang! Ugh~~, then NVIDIA's computing power card is naturally the best.

So Lin Yuan opened the stock price trend of NVIDIA.

Coincidentally, NVIDIA’s stock price first surged around the end of 2015. OpenAI was founded in 2015.

NVIDIA's stock price then reached its peak in the second half of 2018.

You have to know that before this, NVIDIA was just a company that sold gaming graphics cards, and even though it was later discovered that graphics cards could be used for mining, NVIDIA's stock price did rise a lot. But what really made it take off was the demand for computing power from AI.

Driven by the dual demands of AI concepts and mining, NVIDIA's stock price has increased tenfold in just three years.

Lin Yuan believes that Musk and his team must have made a lot of money in this process, because when faced with this situation, even Lin Yuan himself wanted to buy NVIDIA shares quickly. Moreover, OpenAI was founded by Musk, and he can fully cooperate with the needs of the stock market and release some AI-related content in a timely manner.

Then Lin Yuan reviewed some of the past events of digital currency before 2020, and vaguely found some traces of Musk in it.

With the powerful data retrieval capabilities of the computing system, even the smallest clues cannot escape detection.

Compared with the later blatant hype of digital currencies such as Dogecoin, Lin Yuan discovered that Musk had actually been tinkering with digital currencies for a long time.

This is also easy to understand. Because NVIDIA's trend before 2020 was essentially driven by both AI and digital currency. Since Musk has touched AI, why not touch digital currency as well?

Picking up one egg is picking up, picking up two is also picking up. If you have money but don't make money, you are a bastard.

Lin Yuan was enlightened. As expected, the greater the ideal, the more unscrupulous the means.

Musk has so much money to burn on rockets. If he doesn't make a lot of money from the stock market, where does the money come from?

No wonder the United States has attracted many scientific and technological talents for a long time, because it has the most open and developed financial market in the world and can rely on its hegemony to attract global funds. There, it is too easy to turn the technology in hand into reality by collecting technology taxes.

As long as you have exclusive technology, you can quickly make profits in the stock market through story packaging.

A tenfold return is hardly a typical case there.

Naturally, for groundbreaking fields such as aerospace, which have huge capital demands, money can only be raised quickly there.

The US dollar and technology are the two sharp weapons of the empire.

Lin Yuan realized this more intuitively from the development history of OpenAI and NVIDIA.

It was originally a good idea to continue playing like this, using this method to attract strong people from all over the world, and the strong people would band together to bully other weak people in the world.

However, the core cornerstone of this gameplay still needs to create value through hardcore technology.

Without the final value anchor, the story of the stock market cannot continue.

But realizing value is a very hard process, a concrete process of work. And for AI, it is still in the stage of long-term investment. In short, the AI field is not yet ready to reap the fruits of its labor.

But seeing the other masters of the empire eating with their mouths full of oil, patience could no longer be maintained at this moment.

So OpenAI turned to commercialization in 2020 in order to obtain continued funding.

Prior to this, OpenAI had already burned through a billion US dollars, and it was expected to burn through more, so introducing external funds was a helpless move.

Lin Yuan really wanted to ask Musk, did OpenAI really spend so much money in the first few years?
Lin Yuan summoned his computing power system panel and took a look. He felt that OpenAI, which had already spent 200 billion US dollars, was just a little brother in front of computing power. Wouldn't he have hundreds of billions, no, maybe tens of thousands of US dollars? The computing power system is really good!

Lin Yuan collected his thoughts. He knew very well that OpenAI's main focus was on the research and development of the GPT model, although large language models required huge development investment and the purchase of a large number of GPU computing cards.

But that doesn't mean it would cost a billion US dollars in the early stages.

This can only mean that the Eagle Country is no longer efficient in cutting-edge scientific research. This gives people the impression that the empire is in the twilight of its days and can no longer even maintain its mainstay skills.

After introducing external funds led by Juying, GPT-3 launched by OpenAI officially opened its paid API.

Since we are starting to adopt the model of paying for commercial API calls, it is naturally impossible to go the open source route. Otherwise, the code will be taken by others, and anyone can set up their own API service as long as they have enough machines.

Therefore, the moment OpenAI went commercial, perhaps Musk was destined to lose control of OpenAI.

In the same year, at the end of 2020, NVIDIA's stock price began to soar for the second time. This time point was exactly the beginning of OpenAI's introduction of external funds to embark on the road of commercialization.

Then, chatGPT came out at the end of 2022. After a long period of ups and downs, NVIDIA's stock price rose again with the huge momentum of chatGPT. But Lin Yuan knew chatGPT, which was indeed a groundbreaking product at the time. However, due to the problems of AI itself, although chatGPT has taken a big step forward in human-computer dialogue and can even handle a large number of mathematical and programming problems, it still has not achieved a qualitative breakthrough in AI large language models.

Therefore, in Lin Yuan's opinion, from the establishment of OpenAI to the present, the only thing that has been booming is the stock market, and its only profit point is the paid API call of chatGPT.

However, API payment is clearly not enough to support the high market value of AI-related companies such as NVIDIA.

It may even be exaggerated to say that this amount of money is enough to support the electricity bills and hardware losses of AI training.

So, what is the current situation like?

Lin Yuan saw the struggle of a sunset empire. Under the setting sun, the empire wanted to set new heights in the field of science and technology in order to reverse the empire's decline.

But the empire's elites actually used technology as material for storytelling.

The sharp sword of technology is already crumbling in the hands of the empire.

And with the fall of the technological sword, another sword based on it - seigniorage - will also disappear.

Lin Yuan is not sure whether Musk wants to save the empire or just wants to get OpenAI back on track because of his personal ambitions for future technology.

However, when the imperial elites collectively regard technology as material for stories, and when a large number of people are frantically making profits by relying on the stocks of a few AI-related companies, how can OpenAI, which plays the role of story material, continue to remain non-profit?

Lin Yuan instinctively realized the complex interests involved. Those who invested in OpenAI and those who profited from the AI concept in the stock market might not be the same group of forces. There must be money from all over the world mixed in.

The profits made from the stock market by telling AI stories are essentially an overdraft of OpenAI's future profitability.

The seedlings haven't grown yet, and you've already earned the future money. How will the funds invested in OpenAI feel? We really invest and do things, but you bypass us and go directly to the stock market to pick peaches. Why!
If the people who invested in OpenAI and those who profited from the stock market were strictly the same group of people, then everything would be fine. We could even invest the profits from the stock market into AI research and development, which would be back to Musk's model - he has been subsidizing technology research and development by profiting from the stock market for many years.

But based on Lin Yuan's understanding of Eagle Country, it is a place where immigrants and capital from all over the world gather. What stands out is that it is a colorful and messy place. How can you expect them to work together?

Are you kidding? The core of their system is brutal mutual restraint. Yes, it is restraint.

Lin Yuan didn't think that the Eagle Country's system was called checks and balances. How could checks and balances work like that? When a group of people don't even have the same goal when doing something, how can this be called checks and balances? It's like the four wheels on a car are all driving in different directions.

The most notable feature of the twilight of the empire is that there is no longer a force that can coordinate all parties. For example, OpenAI can make money in the stock market by relying on the concept of AI, but after making money, it must use part of it to feed back AI research and development.

Let OpenAI always maintain a truly open attitude, then gather global strength through the open source community, and then use openness to achieve technological advancement and conceptual advancement.

We can even shout a slogan: We only use open, free and inclusive AI.

Then, emotional value is mixed into AI products. Lin Yuan believes that this is what Musk is good at. Once emotional value is mixed in, AI interfaces can be sold like buying BBA.

What? The AI service called by your product is not from OpenAI. Then your product is too evil and not free at all.

In this way, money can be easily spent.

OpenAI can continue to maintain open source, as long as it charges for large-scale commercial applications. It doesn't even need to ask users directly for money. This is the way the standard setter at the top of the industry chain plays.

However, due to the disunity, who knows who has the money from the Eagle Country stock market after it is harvested. Lin Yuan only knows that many of the Eagle Country's top executives are stock gods.

Since the big guys have set an example themselves, Lin Yuan can guess how the people below will follow suit.

So everyone was only thinking about making money in the stock market and completely forgot to fulfill the stories they had told.

Since everyone is doing this, why should OpenAI be open source? Why should I provide you with story materials for free while you earn money? So OpenAI stopped being open and became today's CloseAI.

Lin Yuan could guess Musk’s helplessness in this matter, because he also felt that the elites in the empire were short-sighted.

Killing the goose that lays the golden eggs and draining the pond to catch the fish; credit takes a long time to build, but it collapses quickly.

Musk has two treasures, rockets and AI. Rockets are doing well now, although they are being criticized by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, but fortunately, Musk still has the final say in SpaceX.

Even if launching rockets burns money, the scale of the money burn is predictable, and there is also a clear profit prospect - space orders from the Western world, and the subsequent development of the private space sector. These are stable and visible profit points.

However, the profit point of AI is vague, so even if Musk is rich, he can't control all of OpenAI. Because ideals do not mean recklessness, and smart people will not hold something with unclear profit expectations in their hands.

The problem with throwing it out into the market is that it is likely to get out of your control.

In fact, this is true. Musk cannot prevent openai from becoming closeai.

Although Musk still supports OpenAI in public, Lin Yuan feels that the other party is probably just "bitter".

After analyzing all of this clearly, Lin Yuan was certain of one thing - Musk did use his own hands to do things that he himself did not dare to do.

By creating an imaginary enemy for OpenAI, did Musk sound the alarm for the imperial elite?
Lin Yuan had no way of knowing the other party's specific thoughts, so he chose to call Musk directly and said, "It seems like you have done something to let me down."

"Uh...haha. This is the process you must go through to grow up, my little brother."

Musk didn't make any excuses.

Lin Yuan didn't know what to say for a moment. After a long silence on the phone, Lin Yuan said calmly, "I never thought that the person who urged me to grow was you. Elon, you are really an asshole. I gave you the intellectual property rights of the algorithm."

"Well~~, I appreciate your action, and I will always remember it."

"Elon, I think we will have many hostile times in the future."

"I think so too. Lin, this is life. The road to the ideal palace is never smooth. We live to do everything we can to realize our dreams. Otherwise, what is the meaning of our lives? Lin, you are very young and I admire you very much. I want to give you a piece of advice: personality is only for others to see, don't let it become a moral burden for you to make decisions..."

"I see. I come from the countryside, and I've seen a lot of tantrums in my teenage years. Don't worry, I can easily understand what you mean. I don't have any moral burden."

"That's good. I sincerely wish you the best, my little brother. I don't feel lonely in this world because there are people like you."

"Elon, do you really like showing your mercy in front of other people's tombstones?"

"Lin, I'm serious. The position is given to us by fate, but the ideal is chosen by ourselves. And you, my friend, even if one day I fall under your sword, I still think you are my friend..."

Lin Yuan savored the other person's words, "I will just assume that what you said is true. But I feel that it doesn't matter whether it's true or not. I will hold the sword tightly in my hand."

"Haha~~, Lin, your tone is too serious. I just gave an extreme example. It would be more accurate to say that we are both enemies and friends in the future. I hope that the times we cooperate will be far greater than the times we are enemies. I sincerely wish you all the best, my friend..."

(End of this chapter)