January 23, 2025

Stargate Reaches for the Stars

Donald Trump’s announcement of a $500 billion artificial intelligence initiative might be the biggest deal ever.

We aren’t at the Singularity yet, so there’s no need to worry. No need to lament that artificial intelligence has outstripped human intelligence and thereby rendered us both obsolete and immortal all at once.

Still, the announcement Tuesday by Donald Trump of a $500 billion joint venture by tech giants OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to create an AI infrastructure here in the U.S. is a really big deal — and not just for the mind-boggling sum of money involved or the estimated 100,000 American jobs it’ll create. As the AP reports, “The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers and the electricity generation needed for the further development of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House. The initial investment is expected to be $100 billion and could reach five times that sum.”

Trump, demonstrating once again that he’s more Babe Ruth than Ty Cobb, more fence-buster than single-slapper, says the joint venture is a necessary one. “It’s big money and high-quality people,” he said, referring to the three tech CEOs who flanked him: Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Sam Altman of OpenAI.

“This monumental undertaking,” said Trump, “is a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential under a new president. … But it’ll ensure the future of technology — what we want to do is we want to keep it in this country. China is a competitor, and others are competitors. … I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations because we have an emergency. We have to get this stuff built.”

Oracle’s Ellison said that AI “holds incredible promise for all of us, for every American.” He added that 10 data centers, each a half-million square feet, are already under construction in Abilene, Texas, and that 20 additional buildings will eventually be built in other locations. That the joint venture is being launched in Texas and not California’s Silicon Valley is certainly a sign of the times and no doubt reflects the far more business-friendly climate in Republican-controlled Texas.

Ellison told Fox News’s Bret Baier that the AI project could revolutionize many industries, but he focused on medicine. “Medicine just touches us all,” he said. “Yes, it takes a huge investment, 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.”

Softbank’s Masayoshi Son said AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is coming “very, very soon,” but that the ultimate goal is artificial superintelligence, which will solve the problems that mankind has never thought solvable. He then turned to Trump and said, “This is the beginning of our Golden Age.”

Said OpenAI’s Altman, “I’m thrilled that we get to do this in the United States of America. I think this will be the most important project of this era.” Altman was also bullish about AI’s potential for medicine and added, “We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President.”

What a difference an election makes. Four years ago, Donald Trump was persona non grata among the Big Tech elite. Indeed, they spent hundreds of millions to help elect Joe Biden while at the same time censoring and deplatforming Trump. But now, having lived through the disaster of the Biden years and having sensed a seismic shift in the political winds, these tech titans have followed the lead of Elon Musk and hitched their wagons to Trump. Perhaps Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichai will one day throw in with Stargate.

Or perhaps not. Stargate seems to me like something of a modern-day Manhattan Project. Not on that scale, of course, but similar in its pursuit of a dangerous and world-changing technology.

Such technologies, though, are hard to harness. Hard to control. Consider the frightening 45-year-long nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union — an arms race whose byproducts turned the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into relative Tinkertoys.

So, while the strategic and economic importance of staking an American claim to AI can’t be overstated, we should be ever mindful of the risks. In an essay titled “Out of Control,” author and technologist Nicholas Carr warns about our technological future:

Much of the power of artificial intelligence stems from its very mindlessness. Immune to the vagaries and biases that attend conscious thought, computers can perform their lightning-quick calculations without distraction or fatigue, doubt or emotion. … Things get sticky when we start looking to computers to perform not as our aides but as our replacements. That’s what’s happening now, and quickly. … When allowed to act on their own in a complex world … mindless machines carry enormous risks along with their enormous powers. Unable to question their own actions or appreciate the consequences of their programming … they can wreak havoc, either as a result of flaws in their programming or through the deliberate aims of their programmers. … The first step in meeting the challenge is to recognize that the risks of artificial intelligence don’t lie in some dystopian future. They are here now.

“They are here now,” says Carr, and indeed they are. He wrote that cautionary essay on January 15 … 2015.

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