{"id":32742,"date":"2025-09-24T08:33:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T08:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/openais-strategy-chief-says-compute-is-not-the-real-edge-for-ai-companies-3-other-things-are-the-key\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T08:33:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T08:33:11","slug":"openais-strategy-chief-says-compute-is-not-the-real-edge-for-ai-companies-3-other-things-are-the-key","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/openais-strategy-chief-says-compute-is-not-the-real-edge-for-ai-companies-3-other-things-are-the-key\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI&#8217;s strategy chief says compute is not the real edge for AI companies &mdash; 3 other things are the key"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/68d36a9c183847aa39d757f8?format=jpeg\" alt=\"openai\"\/><figcaption>OpenAI&#039;s Jason Kwon says labs don&#039;t win by hoarding GPUs.<\/p>\n<p>Samuel Boivin\/NurPhoto via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Compute isn&#039;t the most important edge for a lab, said OpenAI&#039;s chief strategy officer.<\/li>\n<li>Scarcity, bet selection, and organizational structure matter more, said Jason Kwon.<\/li>\n<li>&quot;It&#039;s how you make use of that resource and apply it to various bets,&quot; he added.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Graphic processing units aren&#039;t what separate winning labs from the rest, said OpenAI&#039;s chief strategy officer.<\/p>\n<p>Jason Kwon said on an episode of the &quot;Auren Hoffman&quot; podcast published Tuesday that while compute is crucial for the AI industry as a whole, it isn&#039;t necessarily the most important at the organizational level.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;If you just reduce compute to capital, you know, it&#039;s just money, and then you buy the physical infra,&quot; Kwon said. &quot;We don&#039;t necessarily assume in lots of other industries or even in technology industries that if you&#039;re just the most capitalized company or organization, that you&#039;re automatically going to win.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;It&#039;s how you make use of that resource and apply it to various bets,&quot; he added.<\/p>\n<p>Kwon said that three things matter more: scarcity, bet selection, and organizational structure.<\/p>\n<p>Scarcity can sometimes create innovation, forcing sharper decisions about how to use limited resources, Kwon said.<\/p>\n<p>Bet selection \u2014 what kinds of research directions to pursue, when to double down, and when to pivot \u2014 is also what gives a lab its edge, he added.<\/p>\n<p>Kwon said organizations need to have the right capacity or structure to make and sustain those bets well, as well as the &quot;right taste and selection criteria.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Kwon and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.<\/p>\n<h2>The race for compute<\/h2>\n<p>At the country or industry level, the most important thing is &quot;probably compute,&quot; Kwon said.<\/p>\n<p>Compute is needed for &quot;the breadth and diversity of experiments that you can run on research,&quot; he added.<\/p>\n<p>OpenAI has been vocal about its insatiable demand for computing power. Its CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X on Monday that the company is testing new features by throwing &quot;a lot of compute&quot; at them.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;We also want to learn what&#039;s possible when we throw a lot of compute, at today&#039;s model costs, at interesting new ideas,&quot; he wrote.<\/p>\n<p>OpenAI&#039;s chief product officer, Kevin Weil, said on an episode of the &quot;Moonshot&quot; podcast published last month that &quot;every time we get more GPUs, they immediately get used.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Altman said in July that the company will bring on more than 1 million GPUs by the end of the year. For comparison, Elon Musk&#039;s xAI disclosed that it used a supercluster of over 200,000 GPUs called Colossus to help train Grok4.<\/p>\n<p>Other tech giants have also been blunt about their appetite for GPUs. Mark Zuckerberg said on an episode of the &quot;Access&quot; podcast published Thursday that Meta is making &quot;compute per researcher&quot; a competitive advantage and is outspending rivals on GPUs and the custom infrastructure needed to power them.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OpenAI&#039;s Jason Kwon says labs don&#039;t win by hoarding GPUs. Samuel Boivin\/NurPhoto via Getty Images Compute isn&#039;t the most important edge for a lab, said OpenAI&#039;s chief strategy officer. Scarcity, bet selection, and organizational structure matter more, said Jason Kwon. &quot;It&#039;s how you make use of that resource and apply it to various bets,&quot; he [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32743,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-32742","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}