Passing the Hat for the Infinite

There is something inherently touching about the concept of a bake sale. One imagines a folding table, a slightly damp tablecloth, and a collection of lemon drizzles that represent the collective ambition of a local scout troop. It is a small-scale, human endeavour designed to fix a leaky roof or purchase a new set of whistles. It is not, generally speaking, the mechanism one expects to see employed by a company valued at more than the gross domestic product of several medium-sized European nations.

And yet, OpenAI has decided to pass the hat. In a move that suggests even the most sophisticated algorithms eventually run into the same problem as a cash-strapped parish council—namely, that the electricity bill is due and the VCs are starting to look a bit thin on the ground—the creators of ChatGPT have invited the general public to contribute to their latest $122 billion funding haul. Specifically, they have carved out a $3 billion slice for retail investors. It is, in effect, the world’s most expensive raffle, where the prize is the privilege of owning a microscopic fragment of a digital brain that may or may not eventually decide that humans are a bit too high-maintenance for the long-term health of the planet.

One must admire the sheer, unadulterated cheek of it. For years, the inner sanctums of Silicon Valley have been guarded by the kind of wealth requirements that make the average country club look like a public park. To invest in the "next big thing," one usually needed to be an "accredited investor," a term which is financial shorthand for "someone who can lose a million dollars without crying in public." But now, the doors have been flung open. The velvet rope has been retracted. You, the person currently wondering if you can justify the extra fifty pence for a sourdough loaf, are being invited to the high table.

Of course, this "democratisation" of investment is often presented as a noble effort to share the wealth. It is framed as a blow against the gatekeepers, a way for the common man to participate in the glorious ascent of the machine. One suspects, however, that the gatekeepers have simply realised that the common man has a lot of pocket change, and that $3 billion is $3 billion, regardless of whether it comes from a sovereign wealth fund or a primary school teacher in Reading who has a "good feeling" about the future of chatbots.

I once knew a man who invested his entire life savings in a company that claimed to be developing a self-peeling potato. He argued that the time saved by the average household would lead to a second Renaissance. He is now a very efficient peeler of potatoes in a local bistro, which I suppose is a form of full-circle irony.

The scale of the funding is, in itself, a form of surrealist art. $122 billion. To put that in perspective, you could buy the entire city of Florence, several professional football teams, and still have enough left over to build a very large, very unnecessary pyramid in the middle of the Cotswolds. And what is this money for? It is for "compute." It is for the vast, humming warehouses of silicon that spend their days trying to predict which word should follow "The cat sat on the..." with slightly more accuracy than they did last Tuesday.

There is a certain bureaucratic absurdity in the idea of a retail investor checking their portfolio to see how their "Superintelligence" stock is doing. One imagines the quarterly reports: "We are pleased to announce that the model has successfully learned to identify sarcasm, though it still struggles with the concept of a bank holiday. Your investment has contributed to three new server racks in Iowa and a very expensive coffee machine for the research team."

It is a gamble on a scale that makes the Grand National look like a game of tiddlywinks. We are being asked to fund the creation of a mind that we do not understand, using a financial model that assumes growth can continue until the heat death of the universe. It is the ultimate expression of the "fake it until you make it" philosophy, except in this case, the "it" is a sentient software package and the "fake" is the idea that we have any control over the outcome.

Perhaps we are all just retail investors in the universe, contributing our small moments of consciousness to a grand experiment we didn't read the terms and conditions for.

The irony, of course, is that the more "intelligent" these systems become, the more they seem to require the very thing they are supposed to render obsolete: human capital. Or, more accurately, human cash. We are the batteries in the Matrix, but instead of being plugged into pods, we are being plugged into brokerage apps. We are funding our own replacement, one three-billion-dollar retail tranche at a time.

In the end, one cannot help but feel a sense of begrudging respect for the audacity. To turn the public’s fear of being left behind into a liquidity event is a masterstroke of marketing. It is the billion-dollar bake sale, and we are all lining up for a slice of the lemon drizzle, hoping that this time, the roof won't leak.