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.

  • TheFogan@programming.devEnglish
    16·
    5 hours ago

    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