Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, isn’t shy about how much his company plans to spend on its quest to build artificial intelligence. “You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on things like data center construction in the not-too-distant future,” Mr. Altman recently said, referring to the massive computing facilities that power the company’s A.I. technologies. “You should expect a bunch of economists to wring their hands and say ‘This is so crazy. It’s so reckless’ or whatever. And we’ll just be like: ‘You know what? Let us do our thing.’” So, what exactly is that thing? As the tech industry spends and spends, turning farmland into data centers and A.I. researchers into some of the most highly paid workers in the country, it has struggled to explain what it is building and why it is spending so much money. Are they building an A.I. system as smart as humans? A godlike machine that will change the world if it doesn’t destroy humanity first?

Full in-depth : Why are Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and OpenAI plan to spend at least $325 billion by the end of the year in pursuit of A.I.?