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.
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.
If you wanted to run something at the quality of the best models its many many thousands of dollars.
The smaller models have their place, but have their own problems.
I do like what Apple is doing with their unified memory making things more accessible, but its not cheap, just cheaper.
I think you can run a decent sized deepseek for under 5k, and a top notch one for around 10k?