Sam Altman says people may someday “buy intelligence on a meter” like electricity or water and critics say the vision sounds more dystopian than innovative.

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.

  • wjrii@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    20 hours ago

    I like listening to Ed Zitron stuff, though admittedly part of it is AI Doomer comfort food, but one of the drums he beats is that the spend is absolutely obscene, and they’re going to have to start dramatically dialing up the prices, and soon, to have any chance at all of converting to profitability.

    From what I’ve seen, even people who like AI won’t pay for anywhere near as much as they’re using now while it’s free or flat rate.

      • wjrii@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        In small but statistically and financially significant numbers, yes, absolutely.

        The bigger paradigm shift will be moving corporate users to per-token pricing, and that’s the one that will really kill Anthropic and OpenAI (and maybe Oracle) if it doesn’t go how they need, but there are way more actual people spending money on AI than one might think… or hope.

    • jtrek@startrek.websiteEnglish
      6·
      17 hours ago

      Zitron’s point that management are stupid is really important. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t do any work!

      You laugh, but this is genuinely how the majority of managers and executives think and act, and now they have a special chatbot that can fart out functional-enough prototypes to convince a Business Idiot they can do anything, because executives and managers do not regularly do much work. As a result, they have little idea what work looks like other than when they look over your shoulder, which is why they wanted you back in the office, and their distance from production is why the same people who were anti-remote work are now aggressively trying to shove AI down your throat.

      We are ruled by the worst fucking people.

    • realitista@lemmus.orgEnglish
      6·
      18 hours ago

      They are talking about $200 pro tiers for the good models. The only way I will still be using them is on a pay per token basis for really important or time consuming stuff where I can justify the spend. Certainly not worth it just as a Google search where I don’t have to sort through the results myself.

    • vividspecter@aussie.zoneEnglish
      3·
      17 hours ago

      I think they are hoping they can make a bunch of businesses so dependent on them that they can’t afford to leave. Which could work, but probably not enough for them to become profitable.

      On the individual side, maybe they are hoping to exploit a bunch of whales but I can’t see people on average be willing to pay for what it actually costs.