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.
Please Sam, do the world a favor and step in front of a bus.
Call me paranoid but comments like this really have me worried about forced transhumanism
It’s not intelligence
Its the vast, free resource of the internet. Mined, paywalled, repackaged and sold back to you at a premium by rent seeking talentless hacks
Hype first, tangible income stream last, and this isn’t it.
How did that grifter get the job in the first place.
Sounds familiar. Hype first, promise “next year” availability, deliver on promises never.
“Your car will be out working as a taxi while you sleep.”
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.
Oh its a utility?
… so it should be publically owned and operated?
He didn’t even say ‘like’ or ‘akin to’ a utility.
He said ‘is a utility’.
… So then democracratize it.
And yeah, if WiFi is like that too, then yeah, lets have the public manage that as well.
… I wonder if ChatGPT can draw Altman looking at a broken clock being right twice a day.
They don’t have intelligence, they have spicy AutoCorrect
Exactly, I see people freaking out about this tech replacing them. It’s not gonna happen, not with OpenAI’s tech anyway. They don’t have intelligence to sell. They have LLM’s that are good at tricking people who don’t know better into thinking it’s inteligant. LLM’s can’t think and they can’t reason.
The problem is people are already being replaced by AI. The AI isn’t actually doing the job they vacated, but now they are in a horrible vortex called the 2026 job market.
Sorry, but you’re wrong. I’m gonna get the downvotes because everyone loves to hate on AI, but it’s true. There are many many entry level software jobs that can get replaced right now. I do AI research for climate stuff and all of my colleagues feel the same way. Yall can live in a different reality if it makes you feel better, but it’s not the truth. That doesn’t mean it’s not a form of a bubble or at the peak of the hype cycle, though. Both things are true.
From a wealthy elite perspective, it’s the desire of the ultimate triumph of Capital over Labor, and that’s terrifying as being on the Labor side.
After several attempts ai still cannot fix a bug in a set top box without introducing 3 other bugs and about 7 loops of extra, untested complexity doing fuck knows what
How capable are LLMs at replacing software jobs above an entry-level grade? I imagine giving a gaggle of fresh grads the entirety of human knowledge and asking them to create software would create something, but I don’t imagine the outcome would be high enough quality to have a net positive in productivity after someone has to spend the next 5 years adding to or changing it.
So let’s talk about the Anthropic models, cause that’s what I’m playing with on the company dime.
Wire up a few mcp configs (don’t even start me on the inherent risks associated with current MCP permissions model…) and give it a run book and it’s great at generating reports for me about stuff I kinda care about.
Could if replace an entry level grad? Sure. Will that company have all kinds of strange problems - hell yes. Think of it as an intern. You can give it all the crappy intern tasks while you make coffee. Only the intern improves when you give feedback…
You are right that it can do some entry level jobs, but the system as it is requires those jobs to exist. There is no such thing as a senior developer that was not previously a junior developer.
I believe that is where the collapse will happen. There will be a sucking black hole of demand for senior talent and almost no talent pool. Add on to that the fact that the sources for LLMs’ ability to code (stack overflow, countless private forums, Reddit, etc) have been destroyed by those LLMs. How will they learn anything new?
I don’t fundamentally want the technology to fail, but it seems to ravenously consume everything, even the knowledge and manpower bases that were used to build and train it.
This is actually one of the bigger things overall, this level of disruption they hype, even if you buy the optimistic side of what can be delivered will either eventually lead to some sort of universal basic income for everyone(sus) or millions of people without income and no one able to replace the people who’s knowledge and experience are needed to correct mistakes that will for sure happen even if the models/agents get much better than they are forecasted to be. There’s more but I think the point is made.
Yeah, I’m a translator and the jobscape has completely changed. Basic shit can be done on a “eh, it’s good enough” level so I stopped getting such job offers. The only thing I get now are technical work or something more “human” required like novels, game localization, other such works of art. I think it would be really hard right now for anyone new to find clients because most people are OK with just “OK.”
I made a Lemmy community for translators who like to provide help and also add a bit of human touch to the process.
Interpreting is still in demand, I feel, because people still like hearing natural-sounding speech (AI is getting there but it’s still kinda creepy) and it still mixes up a lot of information. Also, people don’t speak with perfect grammar. They make mistakes, use filler words/sounds, trace back, mix languages… All of which confuse AI—for now. Also language pairs like English and Japanese can be a bit tricky because Japanese sentences tend to run on forever and also kinda go backwards compared to English (JA: reason then conclusion; EN: conclusion then reason, for example) which again throws off AI.
I can hate AI and acknowledge that you’re correct.
I think the worry of large layoffs and instability while idiots try to use AI instead of people is founded even if it’ll end in disaster.
my favorite part of this is that after decades of sci-fi dystopias based on fear of evil AI overlords that destroy the Earth, in reality we’re creating a dystopia where we destroy the Earth to build a bunch of shitty plagiarism bots and treat them like they’re AI overlords.
I can’t stop thinking that all dystopias are actually giving ideas to the rich.
At least one corporation is trying to make every Black Mirror episode a reality as we speak.
I’m not worried about this tech replacing people, I’m worried about the fact that people are actively losing neural elasticity from using LLMs to think for them.
Dont be worried, be certain. People are RAPIDLY becoming dumber. They already were because of the dumbing down of everything in general but this is accelerating it.
I do have faith in weird pockets of people who have niche interests like role playing games and people who create cool things and write, but the masses disappoint me.
That’s missing the point. They’re going to do it anyway, true intelligence or not.
so… even if it’s not complete AGI, it’s still extremely helpful for many industries, and extremely disruptive. There are long ways to go with it, but even these intermediate products are massive.
Having said that, it’s also in a bubble or the peak of the hype cycle. That doesn’t mean it’s nothing though. It will cause massive upheaval.
ah “disruptive”
It’s so useless for niche topics it’s not even funny… which is the only thing I’d ever want actual AI for in the first place.
they’re pretty up front about it. They want to gatekeep knowledge so they can monetize it and control the labor.
One thing I like to bring up:
If current LLMs are so intelligent, can they write their own inference code?
…Or even make modest code contributions to those bases?
The answer is a resounding “no.” See: llama.cpp’s contribution policy, vllm’s PR history, janky diffusion UIs and such.
The severe bottleneck to efficient inference (much less training) of a variety of models is good code contributors, and AI is doing little to help. And, ironically, if it ever was smart enough to do that, ChatGPT the service would collapse in like a week because a ton of backlogged integration would get done, and the open source/open weights space would explode.
So they stole the data to create these abominations and now they want to sell it back to everyone. Does no one see the fucking hypocrisy?
To psycho/sociopaths/maga, hypocrisy doesn’t matter.
No rules or laws matter. Ethics or morals don’t matter. Pain and suffering don’t matter.
They will do whatever makes their empty souls feel thr need to achieve to satisfy their inhuman lust for power, control, status, and notoriety.
Should be forced to pay every person who ever once posted on a website (no matter what it was) $20,000. Just throwing it out there.
Impossible. It doesn’t require any local infrastructure, so there’s no inherent lock-in like you see with utilities.
Utterly delusional CEO.
Except water. I bet this is some weird way of arguing they are a utility so have a right to utility infrastructure and how water is distributed.
Less “we are a utility” and more “we need all your utilities, all your clean water, all your power, and we want to decide how it’s used”
Water treatment is absolutely a utility. Water itself shouldn’t be, and isn’t if you have a well.
With the right government, anything is possible. Sam isn’t delusional at all. He’s a walking humanitarian crisis, a psychopath, a public threat to society, a terrorist if you will. We were all supposed to be using Loopt by his words.
a psychopath, a public threat to society, a terrorist if you will.
I’ve heard it argued rather well that it’s more dread than terror that these pricks create. It’s a useful distinction, but ‘dreadist’ rolls off the tongue like a brick.
It’s wild how almost everything in the world is comic book evil from like a really poorly written comic.
It’s VERY aggravating to use.
“No I said DON’T include this information I’ve told you three times now.”
“Did I ask for your speculation/discussion?”
“No, I said CITE ONLINE SOURCES, not just make them up!”
“NONE OF YOUR EXTERNAL LINKS WORK!!”
…half an hour later you realise the first answer is probably the best you’re going to get, and you’ll still need to fact check it before using it.
That was my experience playing with the older neural net models back in the day. Usually the initial models and datasets are nearly the best it will get. Trying to feed it more data or trying to tweak the model only gains marginal improvements. Unless you’ve made a critical error in the initial work or miraculously happen upon a much better dataset then not much will change. I mean the whole premise that the machine finds the optimal solution within the limits of its capabilities. Beyond that you’re, rolling the RNG until the output lands on a result you like better, but the capabilities remain the same.
That’s why I suspect LLMs have peaked and these companies must be applying smoke and mirrors to keep the this iteration of AI going. There’s not going to be another leap forward until scientists put out another revolutionary paper for everyone to copy. That seems to be the cadence of AI.
No offense, but when did you last use a LLM? Two years ago?
Granted they‘re talkative, but that’s it what they are, literal blah machines.
I mean fuck Altman and the rest of the tech bros, can’t wait until their bubble burst and they all crash. But the technology is going to stay, like it or not.
The technology is here to stay but nearly all of its current uses are not. There is no way, for example, talking to an LLM at a fast food drive-through, isn’t costing more than it saves. It seems that way today because of VC subsidy, but that is an economic illusion made possible by an anti-competitive oligopoly market. There are many other examples, too, but I thought that a more fun obvious one.
This has literally been my experience playing around with Gemini since I bought a Pixel 10.
yeah. that sums it up. Spend more time and energy to ultimately have to do everything yourself anyway. Only if you truly have no fucking clue about what you are asking, you can beleive anything this evolved T9 autocorrects say.
No they won’t.
Let’s stop repeating this man’s grifts.
Honestly my thoughts on how I’d actually use AI… versus OpenAI’s are exactly the opposite. Honestly I could see a world where a lot of people get an on site LLM server. Plug it in etc… I could actually see that as useful, IE keep it air gapped, and then you can train it off of your e-mails, your house etc…, not trust everything to some outside company. From what I’m gathering from the chinese open source models that sounds very viable.
Of course the ultimate annoyance is, the datacenter surge is actually taking compute out of regular price ranges.
Actually annoyingly makes me think of the point in time that electricity itself was at this crossroads, where eddison wanted every house to have a DC generator, while Tesla was pushing for AC transmission to send current from centralized locations
Not gonna lie, your idea sounds cool as hell.
This man is in the top 10 of my “I hope they get Luigi’d” list
