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.

  • Taleya@aussie.zoneEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    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.