OpenAI President teases our 10-billion GPU future — says always-working AI future calls for 'every person to have their own dedicated GPU'

The various recent partnerships involving OpenAI and Nvidia have been discussed at length by the entire internet as well as the stock market. Besides enhancing shareholder value, though, it's hard to say what the endgame of these large corporations is. The answer is a bit clearer after a CNBC interview, where OpenAI's President Greg Brockman talked up a future with agentic AI that works in your sleep — pointing out we'll need 10 billion GPUs or the equivalent thereof for the future he envisions.

The interview in question includes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Brockman. The discussion goes back and forth, but Altman offers some perspective on pointing out that the scale of its partnership with Nvidia is larger than even the Apollo program that put mankind on the moon. He thinks of the future AI proverbial collective as a "superbrain", embedded in our daily lives.

The most interesting remarks, though, come from Brockman, whose vision for the future is that of "an agent that's going to do work proactively for you while you're asleep", with every person on Earth having their dedicated GPU on the job. "You really want every person to have their own dedicated GPU," he told CNBC. That's definitely a hot take, one that might elicit some eye-rolls given how many folks are weary of AI features being shoehorned into every product.

Nvidia will invest $100 billion in OpenAI Jensen Huang Sam Altman Greg Brockman ~ 2025-SEP-22 Monday - YouTube

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However, keep in mind that in the early nineties, Microsoft's ex-CEO Bill Gates envisioned not just one computer in every home, but on every desk, a notion that seemed even more far-fetched and met with excitement and derision in equal measure. And yet here we are today, with one in every pocket.

Brockman continues on to state that the industry is still "three orders of magnitude off" where it needs to be in terms of AI computing power, and posits that to fulfill the always-on, always-working AI vision, about 10 billion GPUs would be necessary — a figure above the 8.2 billion people currently inhabiting the planet. He minces no words, saying that the world is heading to a state where "economy is powered by compute."

Reinforcing the notion, he went on to say he world is heading towards "compute scarcity," and in a direction where "the economy is powered by compute," implying that AI datacenter service could become de facto currency. While some could call that remark dystopian in nature, it's also hard to deny at this point in time, given that Nvidia's GPUs have become flashpoints in Sino-American diplomatic relationships — and that situation is bound to repeat itself in the future quite frequently.

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