Sam Altman, Elon Musk in ‘game of one-upmanship’

Of course, Microsoft has been propelled by the boom in artificial intelligence kicked off by ChatGPT maker OpenAI, in which it is the largest investor. But as AI weaves its way into how we work and play in the years ahead, Altman foresees a problem: an inadequate number of AI chips and chipmaking facilities.

With that in mind, he’s seeking to raise large sums from wealthy investors around the world for a project that would boost production of AI chips. The Wall Street Journal, speaking to unnamed sources, reported this week that Altman wants $5 trillion to $7 trillion for the project, in which OpenAI, investors, chipmakers, and power suppliers would team up to build chip foundries.

The amount dwarfs, as the Journal notes, the size of today’s global semiconductor industry. 

Sam Lessin, a Silicon Valley investor and early Facebook executive—he’s running for a slot on the Harvard Board of Overseers, an effort backed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a former classmate—mused about the fundraising in an X post on Friday entitled “The Era of Absurdist Capitalism.” 

When trillions are being sought in a fundraise, Lessin wrote, “you have to question what has happened to society/our system.”

He brought up Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, writing: “I don’t grudge Sam’s showmanship in and of itself—he is just extending the game Elon has played with ‘self-driving cars around the corner’ or ‘Mars by 2024.’”

Read more: Sam Altman sheds light on feud with Elon Musk: ‘The closer people are to being pointed in the same direction, the more contentious the disagreements are’

In 2020, Musk said that SpaceX’s first…