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.

  • fuck_u_spez_in_particular@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    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.