• Some tech leaders have found inspiration at Burning Man over the years.
• Burning Man has influenced business decisions for moguls like Sergey Brin and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
• Notable attendees include Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos.

For some tech leaders, Burning Man is better than a boardroom.

Over the years, the arts festival has become a stomping ground for tech moguls, celebrities, and models who want to spend a few days in the Black Rock Desert.

Burning Man attendees encourage some level of anonymity, with costumes and nicknames that give public figures the privacy to party among their fellow Burners. Over the years, it's attracted the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos.

But the execs and tech elite who attend go for more than the party. Several have credited Burning Man with inspiring key business decisions, including investments, philanthropy, and founding their companies.

OpenAI founder Sam Altman, who once criticized Burning Man, has attended multiple times. He said the event showed him what the world could look like after artificial general intelligence — AI that is capable of matching or surpassing human intelligence — is achieved.

"Where people are just focused on doing stuff for each other, caring for each other, and making incredible gifts to give each other," he said on an episode of the "Life in Seven Songs" podcast.

These are some of the business events that have happened during or after spending time on the Burning Man playa.

Jeffrey Katzenberg invested in a drone business after seeing it at Burning Man.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, cofounder of DreamWorks and venture capital firm WndrCo, went to the desert for Burning Man and found a new investment opportunity.

In 2022, Kimbal Musk, cofounder and CEO of Nova Sky Stories and the brother of Elon Musk, put on a drone show in Black Rock City. Katzenberg was among the crowd, and the "dazzling" display led him to want to know more about who was behind the art show.

"Suddenly, in this sky, is this literally mind-blowing exhibition," Katzenberg told CNBC.

The Google founders bonded with a CEO candidate.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt may owe his job to his Burner status. Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have been avid attendees over the years.

In 2018, Business Insider spoke to "Stealing Fire" author Steven Kotler — who wrote about Brin and Page at Burning Man — about how Schmidt landed the job. The pair had "blown through" around 50 candidates before finding out that Schmidt had been to the festival, Kotler said in his book.

"So they bumped him to the top of their list, they took him to Burning Man to see how he would do," he said.

Schmidt ended up serving as the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011.

Elon Musk gave his cousin a business idea on the way to Black Rock City.

In 2004, Lyndon Rive was riding in an RV to Burning Man with his cousin, Musk, when the Tesla CEO gave him an idea for a solar panel company. It would eventually turn into SolarCity and be acquired by Tesla for $2.6 billion in 2016.

"You should look into solar," Musk told Rive, Slate reported in 2013. Two years later, SolarCity was founded.

A Facebook cofounder was influenced to be more philanthropic.

In 2013, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz published a Medium post that gave insight into what tech leaders get up to at Burning Man. In it, he covered his idea to start a philanthropic foundation with his wife.

"Burning Man is a direct contributor to Cari's and my decision to start Good Ventures," Moskovitz said in the post.

Moskovitz also wrote in the Medium post about Mark Zuckerberg serving grilled cheese sandwiches and about running into the Winklevoss twins, who famously sued Zuckerberg over Facebook.

"When I hear about anyone going for the first time, my immediate thought is 'that is so great for them' and when they are a person who has pooled power or capital around them, it is usually followed by 'that is so great for the world,'" he wrote.

• Top OpenAI execs keep talking about the company's never-ending demand for GPUs.
• GPUs have become one of the key metrics in the AI race.
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman already wants the company to 100x the 1 million GPUs it will have by the end of 2025.

OpenAI's C-suite can't stop talking about the company's insatiable demand for computing power.

"Every time we get more GPUs, they immediately get used," OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil recently told XPrize founder Peter Diamandis during an interview on Diamandis' "Moonshot" podcast.

Weil is just the latest OpenAI exec to sound off on the topic. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last month that the company will bring on more than 1 million GPUs by the end of the year. For comparison, Elon Musk's xAI disclosed that it used a supercluster of over 200,000 GPUs called Colossus to help train Grok4.

"very proud of the team but now they better get to work figuring out how to 100x that lol," Altman wrote on X in July.

Two days later, Musk's, Altman's former ally turned rival, said he wants xAI to have 50 million equivalents of Nvidia's H100 chip in the next five years.

The competition is for good reason. Jonathan Cohen, VP of Applied Research, recently said GPUs are like "currency" for AI researchers. Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg's wife and a cofounder of the couple's philanthropic organization, said the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative uses GPUs as a recruitment tool.

Weil said the necessity is really quite simple: "The more GPUs we get, the more AI we'll all use." He compared how adding bandwidth made the explosion of video possible.

"It's like the internet. Every bit that we lower latency, increase bandwidth on the internet, people do more things," he said. "Video used to be impossible. Now, video is everyday, because the capabilities are there the network can handle it."

The desire for more computing power led OpenAI to launch Stargate, CFO CFO Sarah Friar recently said. A $500 billion project, Stargate is a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. During its unveiling at the White House in January, Altman said the project will allow the US to reach AGI, artificial general intelligence.

"It is voracious right now for GPUs and for compute," Friar told CNBC last week. "The biggest thing we face is being constantly under compute. That's why we launched Stargate. That's why we're doing the bigger builds."

On the product side alone, Weil said there are a number of areas where more GPUs can be plugged in.

"Whether it's we can take them on the product side, and use it to lower latency, or speed up token generation, or launch new products, take a product that's only available to pro users and bring it to plus users or free users, or it just means that we can run more experiments," he said.

At the same time, OpenAI has to balance researchers' requests.

"On the research side, there's basically infinite demand for GPUs within these walls, and that's why we're doing so much to build capacity," Weil said.

OpenAI isn't the only AI company looking to crack down on SPVs.

You can customize ChatGPT to stop it asking annoying questions.

Fidji Simo is wrapping up her first week at OpenAI, where she is expected to oversee most of the company's roughly 3,000 employees.

To investors and partners, OpenAI leaders have been describing the former Instacart CEO as the kind of steady hand the company needs. Her mandate is clear: turn a chaotic, unprofitable startup into a disciplined, publicly traded tech giant. On paper, she seems well-suited. She lived through Facebook's hyper-growth era in the early 2010s, helped take Instacart public, and knows the advertising industry inside and out - experience that will be valuable once ads arrive in ChatGPT.

Simo's arrival also underscores …

Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI has started hiring in India as it looks to expand its presence in the fast-growing South Asian tech market.

OpenAI says that Elon Musk met with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to discuss a $97 billion takeover bid of the ChatGPT-maker.

Last Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters at a private dinner that investors are overexcited about AI models. "Someone" will lose a "phenomenal amount of money," he said, according to The Verge. The statement came as his company negotiates a secondary share sale at a $500 billion valuation—up from $300 billion just months earlier.

"Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes," Altman told the journalists, comparing the current market to the dot-com crash of the 1990s. Wired reported that he also predicted his company will spend "trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future" and that ChatGPT will soon serve "billions of people a day."

For context, Facebook serves about 3 billion monthly active users. Altman's projection would require ChatGPT to reach nearly half the world's population as daily users (not monthly, like Facebook), which is an extraordinarily optimistic outlook.

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As banks around the world prepare to replace many thousands of workers with AI, Australia's biggest bank is scrambling to rehire 45 workers after allegedly lying about chatbots besting staff by handling higher call volumes.

In a statement Thursday flagged by Bloomberg, Australia's main financial services union, the Finance Sector Union (FSU), claimed a "massive win" for 45 union members whom the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) had replaced with an AI-powered "voice bot."

The FSU noted that some of these workers had been with CBA for decades. Those workers in particular were shocked when CBA announced last month that their jobs had become redundant. At that time, CBA claimed that launching the chatbot supposedly "led to a reduction in call volumes" by 2,000 a week, FSU said.

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