OpenAI’s Compute Chief: We Can’t Build Fast Enough | Sachin Katti
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Anytime you have thought you have enough compute, we can slow down. Always negatively surprises like, oh, we should not have slowed down. Demand far outstrips compute supply today. So anything we can bring online, we consume immediately. Our biggest worry is that still at the scale at which we are trying to get compute and build compute. The physical world does not move that fast. We do believe that the world of recursion is not that far where AI will design the systems it needs to train and run the next generation of AI. Encourages.
Hi. I'm Matt Turk. Welcome to the MAD podcast. My guest today is Sachin Khalti, who holds what might be the most fascinating and relevant title in tech right now, head of industrial compute at OpenAI. Sachin has an incredible background. He was a professor at Stanford, a multi time founder, and most recently the CTO at Intel. Now he's leading what many are calling the largest infrastructure build out in human history. In this episode, we step away from the model layer and dive deep into compute and the physical reality of the AI boom. We talk about the staggering scale of the data centers bein
Right, Sachin, welcome. Excited to do this. We are recording this on the sidelines of the RACE conference in Paris. So thank you for braving the heat. It's another heat wave here.
Thank you. Great to be here. Great to be here.
To start, some people describe what's currently happening in the world of compute data centers as the largest infrastructure build out in history, bigger than the highway, bigger than railroads. And I'm I'm curious, one, if you agree, and and two, what it feels like on from the inside. Like, what's how do you view what you currently building at OpenAI?
It definitely feels like one of the largest things humanity has ever built effectively. Definitely bigger than many of the things that I've heard of. I'm not old enough to have experienced the highway build out, but no, it's feels exactly like what it sounds like. I'm in the belly of the beast, so to speak. Every day is we are making decisions beyond compute that historically from my previous role, for example, at Intel, we probably take months to make, given the magnitude of those decisions. But the demand is so insatiable that, and it is growing so rapidly that we have to move very quickly.
Yeah. And I read somewhere that OpenAI was planning on spending about 50,000,000,000 in compute this year. Is that is that still the rough number directionally? Directionally, that sounds about right. Yeah. And the whole industry itself was gonna be 700,000,000,000 in compute spend this year as well. So like insane numbers, seems.
Yeah. And it's probably continuing to grow, right? And a lot of build happening. So a lot of that is also going to translate to compute usage from people like us in a year or two.
Is the right way to think about this, that for OpenAI, it's a bit of a new world, right? There's obviously not quite a pivot because, obviously, the whole AI research is going, you know, full speed ahead. But, like, building a whole new business within the the the company, is that is that fair? Is that how people think about it? Because, obviously, building models is one thing, building data centers, it's a whole different world.
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