Cade Metz

Well, three years after the arrival of ChatGPT, the open AI chat bot that really started this AI boom, this is clearly a powerful and in some ways transformative technology.

It's used not only to search the Internet in new ways, it can help people do specific tasks in a faster and more efficient way than they did in the past.

You see businesses adopting services that can transcribe meetings.

You see other applications in health care.

There are ways that this technology is already changing the way we live and the way we work.

And these companies, and this is classic Silicon Valley, see much bigger transformations on the horizon.

These are people, executives, these titans of industry are looking not just at what is possible today, but what they think this technology will do in the future.

Well, fundamentally, this technology is expensive to build.

It's a mind-boggling amount of money, even for people who have spent decades in the tech industry.

OpenAI alone has said it's going to spend $500 billion on data centers in the United States alone.

to drive these technologies.

Let's stop for a second and think about what that means.

$500 billion in today's money could fund about 15 Manhattan projects.

Wow.

It could fund the Apollo program two times over.

And that's just the money to drive AI for a single startup, OpenAI.

All told, if you look at what is being spent across the globe, not just the U.S.,

We're talking about nearly $3 trillion.

That's an awful lot of money for a technology that is transformative, but is in many ways still speculative, meaning what they see in the future is so big.

They, in many cases, believe they're building what is called in the Valley artificial general intelligence, a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.