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.
The wording also struck a nerve because many AI models were trained on enormous amounts of publicly available internet data such as books, articles, forums and creative work created by millions of people who were never directly compensated.
That’s much too kind. We were never indirectly compensated, either.
and creative work created by millions of people who were never directly compensated.
That’s much too kind. We were never indirectly compensated, either.
We were never even asked for permission to use our works and words.
Flimflam Sam says…
🥱
Luckily, people who don’t buy intelligence from him tend to have enough already.
Why does he keep calling it “intelligence”? It’s not intelligent. Even calling it AI is a stretch. It’s an LLM.
Also, intelligence already means something else. When phrased like it is in this context, it sounds like he’s talking about selling espionage.
But then again, telemetry and adware are essentially espionage. So maybe that is what he means…
Lmao, Sam Altman wouldn’t know what intelligence looked like even if it came up and punched him in the face.
Unbelievably naive.
that assumes they actually believe the shit they’re peddling. aint called scam altman for nothing
Ollama
Altman will say anything to keep the scam alive
Yeah chatgpt used to be leader in tech now it’s nothing , no one is buying AI corporates maybe normal user no
Every motherfucker who went “what am I ever gonna USE this for?!” in computer classes in school are the same ones who like this magic man’s funny words and “save so much time writing emails” and say shit like “Yeah but what are we gonna do? That’s progress!”
I have lost respect for so many people.
I think that’s the problem, most people think this is movie A.I. and it can do anything. In reality it’s just a tool like the computer is a tool. I use A.I. all the time to help me do my work, I don’t use it to do my work.
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
Bingo! Calculator and compilation engine.
The sad part is
LLMs have niche use cases. They are great at summarizing text (“hallucinations” are a problem with an engineering fix). Other models are great at stuff like image recognition, pattern matching, optimization of data structures or the like. There are real, useful applications for this technology that could save actual humans actual time and effort.
But there’s no money in that; so instead they market their mechanical Turk, built with stolen source material, as a replacement for things people do. every middle manger thinks they’re going to save the company and get promoted to CEO for optimizing the workforce out of the job, and the demand allows big tech to finally steal personal computing from society as a whole by buying up literally all the components for decades. Building and using a personal computer is going to become lost knowledge by the time the supply settles from this heist; there won’t BE a market for PCs by then.
Seriously you cannot go to a conference about enterprise software in 2026 without every talk being something AI related. It’s honestly bonkers anyone would put this much trust in another company to essentially run their business. It’s like the WORLD is hallucinating.
You’ve seen what connectivity has already done to some people…imagine what it’ll be like when there is ENTIRELY no control…
No open source, no piracy, no porn, no freedom to discuss anything even slightly taboo on message boards, no safe spaces for LGBTQIA+, or bloc; no criticizing the government, and you pay &59.99 per month or you lose all your pictures of your kid, your loan paperwork, and your tax documents, since local storage just isn’t sold anymore. Hard drives? You mean like a record player? Only hipsters have those! No one who’s serious stores things locally! We’re too busy to deal with the hassle of plugging in devices or making backups, that’s for luddites.
God help you if they decide to exclude you from the banking system.
LLMs absolutely have their uses. Summarise X. I’ve thrown it a list of client sites and told it to group them in lots of five based by geographical proximity when planning the logistics for a rollout. I’ve also literally watched my boss get driven almost to a stroke trying to “troubleshoot” something using AI and failing miserably because LLMs don’t think. They’re literally incapable of saying “Hey, what if you just click on that menu and do that instead” (yeah I fixed it in five minutes and told him LLMs aren’t for that dude, don’t do that.)
but, for my original point: Google is already fucking up the knowledge base. You can try and search something and you will literally have the answer obscured, even using an alternate search if they rely on aggregates of other engines. Unless you use google’s AI summaries. Because they want to present as the authority, the knowledge source and that is actively fucking dangerous, not to mention the sheer fucking audacity of obscuring knowledge sources they don’t even fucking own just so they can pretend they have that information.
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
The real threats are much less sci-fi and more good old fashioned resource theft and exploitative slavery.
Exploitative slavery via technological means is a possibility with supportive evidence. It isn’t the 1800s anymore - this is shadowrun.
No they won’t.
Hype first, tangible income stream last, and this isn’t it.
How did that grifter get the job in the first place.
Somehow that guy can make a call and raise a billion dollars or 10.
Sounds familiar. Hype first, promise “next year” availability, deliver on promises never.
“Your car will be out working as a taxi while you sleep.”
Just one small problem, rent your car as a taxi to whom Elon? Fucking Batman??
Holy used condoms all over my car, Batman!!
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.
WiFi is not a utility. Perhaps cellular service and fiber to the home should be, though.
WiFi is just the radio that gets you from your device to your router. It’s not the internet. Yes it’s an important distinction. Words have meanings. No, YOU’RE not being pedantic enough! 😤
Fucking thank you. Smh, can’t believe people don’t know the difference between WiFi and internet on a fucking tech forum.
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.
Zitron’s point that management are stupid is really important. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t do any work!
You laugh, but this is genuinely how the majority of managers and executives think and act, and now they have a special chatbot that can fart out functional-enough prototypes to convince a Business Idiot they can do anything, because executives and managers do not regularly do much work. As a result, they have little idea what work looks like other than when they look over your shoulder, which is why they wanted you back in the office, and their distance from production is why the same people who were anti-remote work are now aggressively trying to shove AI down your throat.
We are ruled by the worst fucking people.
I think they are hoping they can make a bunch of businesses so dependent on them that they can’t afford to leave. Which could work, but probably not enough for them to become profitable.
On the individual side, maybe they are hoping to exploit a bunch of whales but I can’t see people on average be willing to pay for what it actually costs.
They are talking about $200 pro tiers for the good models. The only way I will still be using them is on a pay per token basis for really important or time consuming stuff where I can justify the spend. Certainly not worth it just as a Google search where I don’t have to sort through the results myself.
