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.

  • cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    14 hours ago

    I mean, I used an LLM to generate the ampacty chart when I couldn’t find one I liked with web searches, and then just cleaned it up in a spreadsheet for asthetics, before printing it out. 😅

    At first I tried using one of the image generation functions but I noticed that it was making up imaginary values AFTER if printed it. And therein lies my core criticism of relying on LLM’s, that they will lie to me with impunity and with absolute confidence every fourth answer they give.

    You and I agree that readily being able to drill down to information is the superpower that we have to leverage in our human world, and that pattern recognition as well as memorization are key tools on that path.

    I also feel that delay you’re talking about, injecting latency into my day, as I type out the same question for the eighth time on the sixth day, and realizing this is something that could just be on my wall and that I should probably try to flashcard.

    I have definitely seen smart people get dumb with AI though, because it coopts and changes behaviors on some weird and fundamental level. Not just dumb people like me. 😅