Sam Altman says OpenAI wants to sell intelligence like a utility
During a recent appearance at BlackRock in Washington, D.C., OpenAI’s Sam Altman, shared his vision for the future of AI. At one point saying, “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”
Altman was describing a world where AI becomes a foundational infrastructure, something woven into everyday life so deeply that consumers and businesses simply “plug into” it the same way they rely on electricity, Wi-Fi or running water.
The dude changes his pricing model everytime he’s interviewed. Dude has no idea what he wants to do, so long as it’s billable.
I was heartened by college graduates booing these assholes.
I’m not anti-AI, but anti whatever fresh hell they are unloading unto the masses. This is something that requires careful planning to ensure we don’t devastate resources or stall critical think skills and knowledge.
This is one of the hardest points for me to articulate, trying to convince everyday folks including families and friends that these Technologies are actively making us dumber.
Wiring up a solar and battery array, and then wiring up an entire miniature rack mount full of tech myself using ‘AI’ was absolutely critical in understanding the Nuance between different products and between different wiring schemes, but I realized after about 3 months that I was spending at least 15 times a day asking about the ampacity of different wire gauges (“how much current can this gauge of wire carry safely? What about that gauge of wire?”) Before I finally just made a table of common wire gauges in both aluminum and copper, and then printed it out and tacked it onto my wall like it was still 1997.
I reduced my net time spent querying by at least 20% in the past month by looking at my patterns.
This isn’t a brag. This is me admitting that I got stupid and then I’m forgetting the power isn’t knowing stuff but in having that knowledge at our fingertips, and that asking some mega Data Center two states away to boil half their freshwater and brown out half their town so that I can be told that I really do have to up my wiring material, makes me feel gross.
Only profits and power matters to these people. They will happily destroy peoples lives. Sam Altman is an obvious psychopath. Zuckerberg is less open with his real thoughts after he said “dumb fucks”, but equally ruthless. Musk lacks empathy and is autistic and doesn’t understand human emotions. Trump is a narcissist.
These are the people who drives Ai.
stall critical thinking skills and knowledge
That’s the point. They want people dumb so they can sell “intelligence” to people.
They scraped the internet’s knowledge and want to sell it back to those who actually created it.
Rent-seeking has entirely replaced innovation in modern capitalism.
Innovation was only ever a small part. Rent-seeking is more fundamental to capitalism than “innovation” is. It’s just more brazen than we remember from our childhoods.
Paving Paradise in 3,2,1…
LLMs are not intelligent lol
I feel like I spend months trying to find the right phrase the people will understand when I mention llms, since I refuse to call these things artificial intelligence.
My favorite thus far, are “spicy autocorrect” and “next words calculator.” The fact that it has all of the compendium of human knowledge on physics or last millennium economics, means it is an excellent research assistant and engineering consultant, as long as I can keep in mind that it’s going to lie to me with impunity and with utmost confidence every fourth question I ask.
The Google AI overview is so often wrong when I ask it basic questions like who is in a TV show or movie, it’s unfucking believable. I’m very anti-Ai. It only creates bad, not good
I still have a library card.
Until they remove libraries
they can try it. my town is armed and legitimately loves its library. liberal hick towns are weird.
liberal hick towns Didn’t know that was a thing. Where do you live?!
bay area california. not petaluma, but check out petaluma. that’s a good example, it’s where my dad grew up. when you get a good mix of rural and urban beautiful things happen. the people who don’t usually mix, they mix. and those barriers come down.
I don’t understand how there’s ever a business model since people can just run their own models locally.
The goal is to make personal computing hardware so expensive that the average person cannot afford to do that. 😬
That will not work long-term. When prices are high for a long time, it becomes more and more attractive for governments to start their own foundries for economic and strategic reasons. And while that is not easy, China is on its way, ASML and Zeiss actually are European companies, and no one starts at zero because there are a ton of patents which already expired or expire soon.
A fully industrialized nation which really wants to make chips can make chips. Making the best chips is pretty darn hard, but making the chips from a few years ago is doable for China and the US right now, and the EU in ten years.
On a bloc level it makes sense to have your own foundries independent of foreign influence just for military and infrastructure reasons alone.
This is fine.
It’s a GOOD thing for Samuel Alterman that Intelligence ISNT something you could get WITHOUT AI! People don’t know that even PLATO had AI to Help Him!
Well ofcourse first step to this is to cultivate an environment where most people lose their skills or don’t train them at all. So I bet each time someone uses AI for exams they have a little orgasm.
Don’t get me wrong, I am open to the idea of AI tools as productivity enhancers, especially local models with open weights. But the OP puts what these tech bros want more aptly then I ever could, they want to monopolize on intelligence and skills.
Companies can already buy intelligence as a utility. It’s called contractor work. Buying tokens from Sam Altman is not going to result in the outcomes the companies want. Hire me instead, at least I kind of know what I’m doing.
I’ll sell Sam Altman an ounce of dignity, only a small 1 billion dollar fee.
The wording also struck a nerve because many AI models were trained on enormous amounts of publicly available internet data such as books, articles, forums and creative work created by millions of people who were never directly compensated.
That’s much too kind. We were never indirectly compensated, either.
and creative work created by millions of people who were never directly compensated.
That’s much too kind. We were never indirectly compensated, either.
We were never even asked for permission to use our works and words.
Stealing your original work so you can pay for a regurgitated version of it.
It also means there’s nothing unique about their AI that couldn’t be replicated by someone else.
He’s basically selling bottled tap water, you can get the same thing by just going into your kitchen. There is no actual product.
Putting aside that what they sell is not even inteligence: if they are providing a utility, then let’s regulate them like a utility, e.g. electricity distribution
Snake oil salesman is saying that snake oil is a cure for everything.
