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This is a very "funny" post:

- OpenAI can easily not become anything of significance in the future, even if the OP's prediction of the future becomes reality. I'd argue that being bought by a government and controlled within the ethical confines of that government would be a great way for OpenAI to quickly fall behind its peers who aren't subject to such regulations (which is the entire point of this post in the first place).

- Norway may be a great country ran by a great government, but that doesn't mean they would be a great leader of some AI revolution. Not only is the bar for being a competent government not particularly high on the world scale, but the skills of a competent government don't necessarily translate to the skills of an AI revolution Sherpa. I don't see why the OP feels Norway wouldn't use an advanced AI to simply enrich itself while leaving other countries to fend for themselves. It's not like Norway's fund is designed to serve the rest of the world as it is, nor is it the case that Norwegians would allow their government to serve other countries at the cost of their own well being.

- Those at OpenAI would either (a) never entertain this offer or (b) would sell to Norway if this exact thesis wasn't true (i.e., they'd be happy to sell if they thought OpenAI was going to become worthless anyway). Using the logic that the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global can just buy OpenAI because it has more money than a given valuation for OpenAI is embarrassing. It lacks any understanding of how businesses and investments work, let alone how investments in these specific businesses work. I mean, the OP starts this post off explaining how they think OpenAI can effectively rule the world once their expectations for their technology is realized. Why would they sell their ticket to unlimited wealth for a relatively small offer?

Would Norway be prepared to commit to huge future capex spending? Like the pitch that OpenAI is going to achieve AGI seems to rely on vast investments in more compute over the coming years. If you just pay the $800B and then take your foot off the gas, do you still have a frontier lab or have you just paid a lot of money to remove a competitor from the market?

OpenAI is worth $800B because that’s what the last funding round valued it at. It does not mean that >50% of existing shareholders will agree to sell for that amount. If a serious buyer does emerge they will likely hold out for 2x that, maybe more.

I would agree with this, except it sits on the thesis that one company really has that much of an impact. I don't think it actually does. AI is here and it will continue to progress. Norway controlling OpenAI is not going to change it's trajectory -- the cat is already out of the bag.

Why on earth would Norway do a charity to the world? The oil fund while it has some moral guidelines, profit making is still the primary goal. There is no guarantee OpenAI will be profitable ever.

I doubt that if Norway buys OpenAI, it will be the company that captures the value.

There is no inherent property to those model makers that they will capture the value of the AI boom. The model companies have a lot of competition from chinese models. Of course the US government will likely still keep some model makers alive (just alone for DOD supply chain reasons), but the chinese models will certainly compress margins.

It might as well be a chipmaker, a power company or a cobalt mining company.

Ultimately, it's up to the US government to decide if OpenAI can capture the value provided by AI: if chinese models get banned from the F500, then maybe one of america's famous duopolies can establish themselves.

But this hinges on congress mostly to pass certain laws to put OpenAI into that position. But which value does congress have? If OpenAI is owned by a bunch of Forbes 400 people like right now, then of course those will lobby the hell out of congress and ensure their stakes in OpenAI make them extremely rich.

But Norway doesn't have that access to lawmakers, they would see it as external influence by an alien power. They can certainly benefit from this trend though by being a shareholder.

To give a concrete example of the US government making life hard for foreign investors, take the T-mobile and sprint merger. T-mobile is majority owned by Deutsche Telekom AG, whose biggest shareholder are various institutions of the german federal government.

In this case, the US government just had to _approve_ the purchase, something very standard that happens all the time, but they still dragged that approval out as long as possible, even though Germany is a fellow NATO country.

That would be really good news for Anthropic. Their main competitor owned by a government would be a dream come true.

There are definitely some weird mass psychological movements on the internet right now and I basically view this post as a wishcasting outcropping of this, stories the disempowered tell themselves.

Nothing special about OpenAI to deserve a buyout.

People on the internet have some weird fantasy. News at 6.

Seriously why would Norway do that? With a fraction of that amount of money they can build energy and computing facilities. They can distill OpenAI models. Why would that bet all on one single company?

The US won't let Norway do that anyway. Biden blocked Japan's Nippon Steel from buying US Steel[0]:

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2vz83pg9eo

And what would they do with it. Lock it up like the oil and natural gas? As much as there’s praise here for their achievements in green tech adoption, if you’re an immigrant in Norway, you realise how hermetic this society really is. It’s not great for outsiders.

If AI has a negative impact on employment as some think then AI should be required to fund free college for everyone that wants it. Then the schools can have a strict rule that only limited AI can be used during your education.

Then set up a pipeline between the human generated content from the colleges back into future AI models. Everyone gets an education and there is ongoing non AI training data to advance AI without any model collapse.

Norway could just start a European AI company (or even just a Microsoft replacement).

OpenAI is a mess.

Start with a fresh slate, using open models and you can actually build a company that makes sense.

No I think OpenAI deserves a meaningful valuation reset, but they are in a better potential strategy then Anthropic - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-struggle-of-openai/

And Greenland should buy Anthropic!

Canada can buy either Microsoft or Amazon, Europe buys the other.

The USA vs Rest Of World problem: solved.

It doesn't matter what the valuation is, they won't raise the money to meet their procurement commitments without circular financing. Why would a sovereign wealth fund step in to meet those commitments?

The financials of OpenAI make no sense at all unless you're a True Believer.

And Denmark should buy Anthropic.

“Invade Greenland and we switch it off!”

What a spectacularly terrible investment that would be.

Whole country now part of bubble gum. Instead, get in touch with ASML and build chips. Lower level technology is getting more and important even look easy (it's not), nowadays limited companies achive.

The gematria[0] of Norway is 96, while it's 60 for OpenAI. The deal is never gonna work.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria

"Breaking News: Sam Altman has installed himself as dictator of Norway"

j/k. I love the outside of the box thinking here, but that doesn't seem like what the annuity was setup for. Of course thats up to Norway.

Echoes of the Darian Scheme somehow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme

This must be satire? Makes no sense. OpenAI isn't worth anywhere close to $800B. The gap to open models is shrinking fast, and it seems that many companies will have models with around the same capabilities.

And have you guys seen the compression ratio of models capabilities? The new Qwen3.8 27B is insane. I can run it at 85-95 tokens per second on my personal PC, and it is, according to artificial analysis benchmarks, around the same level as GPT 5.4 xhigh from march, OpenAIs leading model at that time.

If things keep going this way, OpenAI and it's infrastructure is worth...very little.

Buy a failing, over-hyped, collateral-less company with pension money. F-no!

No it should not it would be better if it saves norweigan retirement funds for the future.

Yes, but wait for the dip.

Then Norway will be holding the multibillion dollar bag once AI flops

FYI "Silicon Valley" is a bunch of of different ppl. Quite a few. Operating in some totally separate day-to-day environments. Flippant comments rise to top because they are clickbait.

It is much better to buy kimi or glm and provide them gpu...

OpenAI will likely not IPO this year because their numbers are so poor compared to those of Anthropic's. However if they don't IPO, they cannot pay for all those datacenters they ordered.

Meanwhile, Chinese companies are creating SOTA models and make them available for free, strongly limiting the amount of money that OpenAI and Anthropic can demand for their similar models via API. Their sky high valuations are likely to suffer as chinese models are considered "good enough" and safe to use when hosted in the West. They even have fewer safeguards and are thus more suitable for cybersecurity tasks.

tl;dr: They're fucked. Don't buy them.

Wouldn't be needlessly expensive and risky before the bubble pops? Just buy the scraps after it pops and If it's not bubble, they can alternatively just buy a fab dedicate its output to build ridiculously large infrastructure in Norway and power it with their wast hydro and wind sources, then bring the talent by providing freedom and resource access.

Why Norway? Why not Saudi Arabia?

This is the entire purpose of the AGI society which is 19 years old and has an annual conference that had 300 in person attendees and 4000 online this year

https://joinagisociety.org

I just took over as society executive director specifically focused on the issues from this article: bridging that gap

You can see our discussion here:

https://youtu.be/pxcL4j5kTg4

The announcement at AGI 26 a few weeks ago which starts at 19:00

https://www.youtube.com/live/qRA1DoMCCSc?si=a2DJeT1vi0JoaWnY

I disagree, that would open up OpenAI to all sorts of EU regulations, rules and laws that prevents something like OpenAI to even be possible. Also the consumer would get less for higher price as increased costs are passed to them.

Norway's fund would first have to definitively find out what it takes to actually run all of OpenAI's compute. Monetarily wise. We still don't know that number.

Isn't OpenAI running on investor money right now?

This would be an interesting way for Europe to maintain AI sovereignty. US would block it though.

assuming this is serious, I would eat a tire if the US government allowed that to happen

OpenAI marketing team's getting pretty innovative huh?

Nice try inflating the IPO valuation. :)

The entire EU and Norway could simply block all clankers and US propaganda and experience an intellectual renaissance. For $0.

OpenAI has a very limited amount of time before their value collapses in the face of cheap Chinese models. The price war is just getting started. It won't be pretty.

Fastest way to burn $800 billion. Even the Chinese government isn't nationalizing its AI companies, because there's no chance a cutting edge technology company can remain competitive when run by bureaucrats.

Why try to tank Norwegian pensions by having them buy OpenAI before the LLM capital expenditure bubble bursts? 8-\

lol can't tell if this is serious

I stopped reading when I saw "Social-Democracy" and Palestine in the article.

"Teacher, teacher! I think that Norway should buy all the weapons in the world and then we wouldn't have any more wars."

How can somebody put their own name on something so infantile as this article? What influence does this author or any of you think you have over the Norwegian sovereign fund?

And everyone should just get along. And software should just work perfectly. And everything should be free.

What's the point of writing something like this? Surely the writer isn't delusional enough to actually expect this to affect state leadership decision-making?

Norway can’t buy OpenAI since it’s not GDPR compliant.

Wow, this is the dumbest thing I've read in the whole year, but I love that the internet should give a voice to anybody and everybody and would defend this right to (perhaps) death.

Author seems to have read on a magazine or something that Norway's Pension Fund assets amount to ~2 trillion US, which he confuses for having 2 trillion US cash but you cannot really expect much from room temperature IQ.

Then, just because 2,000B US > 800B US, he goes on to propose that Norway should buy it ... that's it, that's the whole argument.

Then he elaborates with some of the most deranged ideas I've read like (taken verbatim):

"Such an intervention would clearly be blocked by the United States government, though if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awards Trump the bauble then perhaps there will be an opening of political possibility."

As if Norway would even be remotely interested in acquiring that company anyway.

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according to my understanding, this would (necessarily) include relocation of all OAI stuff to .. somewhere in Europa? (regardless if this "somewhere" is FR or UK or IT or DE or CH))

I do not see any chance that this may happen