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.
I’m not anti-AI, but anti whatever fresh hell they are unloading unto the masses. This is something that requires careful planning to ensure we don’t devastate resources or stall critical think skills and knowledge.
This is one of the hardest points for me to articulate, trying to convince everyday folks including families and friends that these Technologies are actively making us dumber.
Wiring up a solar and battery array, and then wiring up an entire miniature rack mount full of tech myself using ‘AI’ was absolutely critical in understanding the Nuance between different products and between different wiring schemes, but I realized after about 3 months that I was spending at least 15 times a day asking about the ampacity of different wire gauges (“how much current can this gauge of wire carry safely? What about that gauge of wire?”) Before I finally just made a table of common wire gauges in both aluminum and copper, and then printed it out and tacked it onto my wall like it was still 1997.
I reduced my net time spent querying by at least 20% in the past month by looking at my patterns.
This isn’t a brag. This is me admitting that I got stupid and then I’m forgetting the power isn’t knowing stuff but in having that knowledge at our fingertips, and that asking some mega Data Center two states away to boil half their freshwater and brown out half their town so that I can be told that I really do have to up my wiring material, makes me feel gross.
Fundamentally there’s no difference between a chart you made and asking ai. The problem is you’re not attempting to retain the information.
The upside to the chart is that it doesn’t rely on someone else providing you the means to your informational resources.
The problem isn’t AI makes us dumber. It makes it too easy to be lazy. If you actively try to retain the information that you are gaining and putting into practice from AI and not just letting it do everything for you. Then it’s no different than any other resource. Be it a shit you made on the wall or some shitty ass Reddit thread from 9 years ago. That has one dude with that answer.
Informational resources are only as valuable as your ability to have access to them and your willingness to retain the information so you don’t have to keep going back to your informational resources.
What AI does make you worse a is learning how to quickly and efficiently reference material. You become beholden to the AI to provide you information. Which is slow tedious and needs to be double checked half the time.
Honestly, the worst part of AI is the fact that it’s removing and delaying access to informational resources. It’s actually the same reason I personally hate discord. It’s unsearchable it absorbs information and hides it away and makes everything tedious and less useful.
AI is functionally just a walled garden of information. Instead of letting information be freely shared, you are putting public knowledge behind a paywall.
But stupid people never once attempted to retain information from a book chart or anything else. Anyways. So functionally they are as stupid now with AI as they were before without AI.
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. 😅
Seriously. I’ve used it a couple times at work (in education) solely because i needed to fit a rubric in our LMS and the fucking UI to do it means I would’ve spent an hour, whereas the API just filled shit in as placeholders and editing was faster than creating.
Otherwise, I do my work by hand. I even set up excel sheets to do stuff for me like flag grade patterns or grade exams with a typed-in key. It’s almost fun, but I work with so many people who insist that “claude can do it” but then can’t have a followup conversation about what we supposedly discussed via email.
That’s the point. They want people dumb so they can sell “intelligence” to people.