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.
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.
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.
Every capitalist is a conman.
Another desperate attempt to monetize. AI bubble-burst, here we come!
yeah no.
If it gets much more expensive then it already is I doubt it
I made a simple project tracker in vite in 30 minutes. It cost me ten bucks in tokens. That’s with a pretty cheap model (sonnet 4-6)
Right now it just makes more sense to not use the API directly, but the subscriptions, they seem to be better priced. Also, Anthropic seems to be more expensive…
How that will look in the future, I don’t know, I’m fairly sure they’re progressively increasing the price, or rather reduce the amount of tokens you can use in the subscription (as they did with gpt 5.5 and claude opus 4.7). The chinese competitors are getting increasingly more interesting. It’s also quite impressive how well small models like qwen 3.6 27B run already on a (not so affordable) 24+GB GPU, unfortunately still far from the quality of say gpt 5.5, but probably comparable to o4 or something like that, certainly usable.
Or people who will need it will use local only, purpose specific, models to do the job… Things you don’t need a datacenter fed by a $100 bills fueled power plant for.
Literally the future capitalism has always wanted; all common resources seized from the public for the good of private equity.
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.
There’s a name for that already: technofeudalism.
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
While I don’t begrudge them trying to make money from their service, the deleterious effect on people’s lives, careers cannot be overlooked. I think it’s obvious that most AI companies are incredibly unethical so governments need to impose the ethics onto them and companies tempted to use AI. They should never be considered as powerful as a utility nor invaluable. Never.
I do begrudge them. Their service was created through mass copyright infringement
It’s a billionaire. I begrudge it for its mere existence.
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.
He just wants money
No, we wont
dare to be stupid!
I was heartened by college graduates booing these assholes.
They scraped the internet’s knowledge and want to sell it back to those who actually created it.
Rent-seeking has entirely replaced innovation in modern capitalism.
Innovation was only ever a small part. Rent-seeking is more fundamental to capitalism than “innovation” is. It’s just more brazen than we remember from our childhoods.
Paving Paradise in 3,2,1…
I would like to popularize his alter ego, scam fartman. I cannot speak my level of disdain for this welfare queen.
