OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) president Greg Brockman believes the AI industry will continue to deal with computing capacity constraints for the foreseeable future.
“My prediction is very much that we will remain in this compute shortage no matter what,” Brockman said during a roundtable discussion in New York City on Thursday.
“Right now we have to make hard decisions on what models we actually train, what products we actually scale,” he explained.
AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic (ANTH.PVT), as well as Big Tech companies including Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), and others, are struggling to meet demand for their AI services as they juggle training new models and serving up software to customers.
That requires a massive amount of computing power from graphics chips like Nvidia’s (NVDA). And despite collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers, the industry can’t keep up.
During Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) Q2 earnings call on Wednesday, CFO Anat Ashkenazi said that, despite spending heavily on its own data centers, the company will also contract with third parties to access their computing capacity in Q3. Google signed a deal in June to rent AI capacity from SpaceX (SPCX) for $920 million per month.
At times, Brockman said, he’ll see how quickly OpenAI is ramping up capacity and think the company will have a surplus of compute, only for demand to increase further as OpenAI develops new models and new ways to use them.
“I think that that is going to be how it will feel because we are shifting to this compute-powered economy,” Brockman explained.
The executive also said he believes customers are beginning to see a return on their investments in AI as they begin to use the software to improve their productivity. He dismissed the concept of workers and companies tokenmaxxing, or using as much AI computing as possible to simply show they’re capable of doing so.
“I think people are starting to see that [return on investment] is there if you use [AI] right,” Brockman said. “If you just token max, then yeah, of course, you’re just going to get max tokens. But if you value max, if you really try to apply these technologies to problems that matter, then you get the return.”
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on X at @DanielHowley.
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