THE now ex-boss of OpenAI had the ambition to create a semiconductor company that could compete with Nvidia.
The Sam Altman soap opera will have kept the entire tech world in suspense. But why was the boss of the company to which all eyes were turned in 2023 thanks to his creation ChatGPT disembarked?
Several hypotheses have been put forward on this subject, including one explaining that he may have had eyes bigger than his head, and would have had too important projects in mind. And when we look at this new information, that may well be what happened.
A project codenamed “Tigris”
Sam Altman had big ambitions for OpenAI, with a ChatGPT product that would continually offer new services. But to improve generative AI, and offer it to an ever-wider audience, it is necessary to continually increase the computing power of infrastructures. And for that, you need the best chips on the market, most of which are produced by Nvidia, and which all the major global tech players want to obtain.
Faced with these difficulties, we recently learned that OpenAI was considering producing its own chips. An idea which was far from being a simple working hypothesis, since Sam Altman had in fact been working for weeks on the creation of a new company specializing in AI chips, capable of competing with Nvidia. Code name of this project? “Tigris.”
The largest sovereign funds in the world requested
The plan was far enough along that Sam Altman had to solicit some of the largest sovereign funds in the world, such as the Mubadala Investment Company of Abu Dhabi or the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. According to information from Fortune, the Japanese group Softbank was also surveyed. The former CEO of OpenAI had also suggested to these same investors to follow him in the creation of a hardware device focused on AI.
As a reminder, the OpenAI press release announcing the departure of Sam Altman indicated that the latter had not “ always been frank in his communications with the board of directors. » Wouldn’t the said board of directors have mentioned in these lines, implicitly, problems linked to these goals of gigantic magnitude?
Source : Bloomberg, Fortune
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