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.

  • jaykrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    6 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.socialEnglish
      1·
      35 minutes 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.worksEnglish
      3·
      5 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.