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.

  • pwxd@lemmy.zip
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    1 hour ago

    Oh okay, now I get why they made it so easy for student to let Ai do their work; they want the generation to rely on them

  • Lemming6969@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Imagine a world with no libraries, no internet search, no wiki… They turn it all off after gobbling it all up, just to sell it back, because they end up with all information, for sale.

  • L7HM77@sh.itjust.works
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    5 hours ago

    OK, but what about the investors? They’re gonna start pushing to see returns soon, you don’t invest $1Trillion USD on a “maybe it’ll trickle back to me in 20 years” strategy.

  • jaykrown@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    That’s not going to happen no matter what. Open source models are already catching up to frontier proprietary models. Altman wishes he had a monopoly over that, but he doesn’t. The bubble won’t last, and things like OpenRouter will become the main way people use AI. Google alone is a major reason why intelligence will never be like a utility like electricity or water or internet.

    • Toribor@corndog.social
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      8 hours ago

      I’m interested to see what kind of hardware will produce “good enough” AI capabilities in a couple years as things are refined and tuned further. The gap between the absolutely massive commercial models and open source models keeps shifting but I don’t have the same fear that I had a few years ago that it might not be possible to get good results from anything less than millions of dollars worth of hardware.

    • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
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      13 hours ago

      For real. It’s like imagining metered electrical generation becoming the norm if solar was already cheaper and easier to install. Like if it wasn’t for decades of hydro and fossil fuel being the cheaper more flexible option it never would of made sense to focus so much on metered connections in the first place (and increasingly making less sense now…).

      They will have to have some enforced mechanism to “franchise the sunshine” as they old saying went to prevent a world where they (big SaaS AI) are not clearly the option of last resort.

      Even big corp and government world is increasingly “sovereign AI” focused now, just like hybrid cloud almost always makes more sense at certain level of IT infrastructure maturity.

  • AccoSpoot1@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    Literally the future capitalism has always wanted; all common resources seized from the public for the good of private equity.

  • pyre@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    ever since feudalism fell, dipshits all over the world have had one thing in mind: bring it back. now they’re almost there. and the peasants are all too ready to give it back.

    • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
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      16 hours ago

      Dude outside of the technology difference. We are at a point most surfs in feudalistic societies had less problems to deal with then we do.

      Like when you start accounting for betterment in medicine and farming alone. The avg joe would likely have a less stressful life under feudalism. Most people just want to be left alone, work an honest job, and have time to raise a family or at least spend time with them.

      The problem is not that they’re trying to turn us back into a feudalistic society. They’re trying to turn us into a corpitocracy or an oligarchy. While, a feudalistic society can have a lot of the same similarities as an oligarchy or corporatocracy. They tend to be far more for the people and fair.

      Feudalism would unironically be an absolute ideal outcome if we had to choose between the three.

      Is at least in a feudalistic society. The farmers would own the their own land and there’s not much the big corporations would be able to do about that. It would actually elevate a lot of farmers in large landowners onto the same playing field as the big businesses that have a lot of money but not a lot of land.

      If anything it would put them at a disadvantage cuz now they would have to fight an uphill battle to gain more land that they need to expand for these data centers.

      Ideally we don’t go to any of them lol

      • group_hug@sh.itjust.works
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        2 hours ago

        Serfs WORK the land lords OWN it. If you make $100 a month working the land the lord takes $80 as rent.

        Better not have a bad weather year and only earn $50 a month as you will be kicked off the land and replaced with another farmer that can produce $100 or more.

  • bitwolf@sh.itjust.works
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    18 hours ago

    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.