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 still have a library card.
Until they remove libraries
they can try it. my town is armed and legitimately loves its library. liberal hick towns are weird.
My proposal would be to turn Libraries into an Open Source datacenter. Wrestle back some control from these power hungry freaks.
this is part of why i donate to project gutenberg
Yeah but we need some actual Digital Library Rights baked into law so scumbag corporates can’t just steal back what we license digitally.
liberal hick towns Didn’t know that was a thing. Where do you live?!
bay area california. not petaluma, but check out petaluma. that’s a good example, it’s where my dad grew up. when you get a good mix of rural and urban beautiful things happen. the people who don’t usually mix, they mix. and those barriers come down.
Any instance of LLMs being adduced as intelligence must be mercilessly ridiculed and mocked. No one impressed by slop should ever be permitted contribution to decisions affecting anyone not similarly cognitively impaired.
LLMs are only AI as Accelerators and Amplifiers of Ignorance and Incompetence, with vanishingly scarce examples of Insight.
This is kind of bullshit. It doesn’t allow a corporate goon with an MBA to hire a virtual desktop developer but it does amplify the work one can do. If you think it can’t do anything you are pretty far off from reality.
Writing tests faster. Writing docs faster. Writing exploratory code faster even if you don’t ultimately use the code. Splitting out general utility functions that are nice to have but which you wouldn’t think. Refactoring.
Maybe if you are top 1% working on hard problems and mentoring it just slows you down meanwhile the bottom 50% has lots of work to do which it really does help with
I’m genuinely curious which part of your reply we should interpret as intelligence?
If anything, these are Iterations, which I’ll add to the list.
All of this is intelligence in my opinion. It may be far less intelligent than some human, but it still is (impressively, in my opinion) intelligent for a computer. Obviously, intelligence is very hard to define precisely. But LLMs can solve some nontrivial problems they have never seen before in that exact form and without existence of a clear algorithm to find a solution. And it even has some utility in many cases, as the comment describes. This is clearly intelligence. Even if it may not hold up to some promises made about them or people using it in inappropriate ways.
Btw., your original comment is very antidemocratic, as you demand to exclude groups of people from decisions, just because you don’t like what they think!
The tokens burned to extrude this clearly qualify for a monstrous bulk discount.
Why would one’s exposure to raw sewage be decided democratically? I’d prefer experts with proven qualifications to be in control of such decisions, not a clown convulsing in the tank naked covered raw whip marks.
I’ll sell Sam Altman an ounce of dignity, only a small 1 billion dollar fee.
Well ofcourse first step to this is to cultivate an environment where most people lose their skills or don’t train them at all. So I bet each time someone uses AI for exams they have a little orgasm.
Don’t get me wrong, I am open to the idea of AI tools as productivity enhancers, especially local models with open weights. But the OP puts what these tech bros want more aptly then I ever could, they want to monopolize on intelligence and skills.
Another desperate attempt to monetize. AI bubble-burst, here we come!
Ollama
dare to be stupid!
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.
It’s a billionaire. I begrudge it for its mere existence.
I do begrudge them. Their service was created through mass copyright infringement
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.
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
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.
Sadly, in the feudal age peasants and serfs did not own the land. They worked the land and paid rent to their lord, who actually owned it.
The land is the “means of production”, and the landlords exist solely to extract value from it.
In the modern era, the digital ecosystem is a new means of production. We are the digital tenants, and they are the digital landlords. Nothing has changed, although for a brief period of time in the 90’s and early 2000’s the wall street capitalists didn’t think the internet was anything more than a fad and things were good, but e-commerce was just too lucrative for them to ignore forever.
Serfs WORK the land lords OWN it. If you make $100 a month working the land the lord takes $80 as rent.
Better not have a bad weather year and only earn $50 a month as you will be kicked off the land and replaced with another farmer that can produce $100 or more.
There’s a name for that already: technofeudalism.
Unbelievably naive.
that assumes they actually believe the shit they’re peddling. aint called scam altman for nothing
No, we wont
Luckily, people who don’t buy intelligence from him tend to have enough already.
I would like to popularize his alter ego, scam fartman. I cannot speak my level of disdain for this welfare queen.
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
Literally the future capitalism has always wanted; all common resources seized from the public for the good of private equity.
