There's no way someone would be stupid enough to part with $x worth of product and $ 0.5 x worth of stock in exchange for $x, is there? Honestly, it's stupid to even make such an offer. What prevents AMD from turning it around on them?
> AMD: Oh, since you put it like that, why don't you pay us $x for the chips and give us $ 0.5 x worth of stock? When your market cap rises by $ 0.5 x you'll get the money for those stocks. And hell, it might even rise further, giving you back some of the money for those chips. You're really robbing me blind with this deal, you'd be a fool not to take it!
>What prevents AMD from turning it around on them?
Matt's telling is a little facetious, so the exact negotiation probably didn't go like that. More importantly, OpenAI has better options. If they want to pay AMD cash for chips, they could do that without also giving up their equity. The same can't be said for AMD. They're the second choice when it comes to GPUs, and they're desperate for market share, so they're willing to cut deals like this. Without this deal OpenAI probably would have bought Nvidia chips with cash.
> NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed.
AMD might do it just to try and be (stay) relevant in the market. Prior to this, discussions about AMD were slim to none, "just another inference card manufacturer". Now they're shining in the spotlight. Mission accomplished.
If you really think about it though, inference is the end goal for most AI models. So I don't see "inference only" being necessarily bad, especially if you get more bang for your buck.
Because OpenAI has the hype and delivers the pop, not AMD. An AMD investment in OpenAI would probably have had a similar effect on AMD, not an equivalent one on OpenAI. (Either way it's Ooh AMD is getting seriously into AI, awesome, suddenly it seems worth 100x whatever it was before!)
Replace AMD & OpenAI with some crypto company and Trump, hypothetically the latter doesn't really obviously get any significant benefit from the former's endorsement.