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.

      • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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        3 hours ago

        It could go bust first. The reason he’s talking so much is because he needs the attention to hide the fact that OpenAI doesn’t really have any real advantage anymore. Claude models tend to be faster and Chinese models tend to be cheaper (especially since they’re open weight so there are many providers for any given model if you can’t or don’t want to self host. You can get latest Qwen for a tenth of the price of latest GPT on openrouter right now. Even Claude Opus is marginally cheaper than GPT.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.ca
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    11 hours ago

    Back in the day…

    • “Google, what’s playing at the cinema this evening at 9PM?”. “The Amazing Spiderman”. In the near future…
    • “Google, what’s playing at the cinema this evening at 9PM?”. “That’ll be $4.95.”.
    • NickwithaC@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      It feels weird thinking of the amazing Spiderman as “back in the day” when I remember the Toby McGuire Spiderman films.

      • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
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        1 hour ago

        This gets worse and worse as time goes on. Movies like Superbad seem like they just came out a few years ago but is actually about to be 20 years old. The Toby Maguire Spiderman is about to turn 25 years old, a quarter century!

      • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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        3 hours ago

        They can search the Internet now. Would be ironic if Google’s model was worse at googling than some random open weight models I’ve downloaded lol

  • pwxd@lemmy.zip
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    13 hours ago

    Oh okay, now I get why they made it so easy for student to let Ai do their work; they want the generation to rely on them

  • Lemming6969@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    Imagine a world with no libraries, no internet search, no wiki… They turn it all off after gobbling it all up, just to sell it back, because they end up with all information, for sale.

    • Jason2357@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      Wiki’s and Libraries have never been profitable and always existed just outside the capitalists control. Or rather, tolerated. They may get hidden from mainstream view on commercial platforms, but they can’t fully kill them, only drive them underground. Even if they try that, the more people that know about them, the safer they get.

    • GuyIncognito@lemmy.ml
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      7 hours ago

      You don’t have to worry about that too much, the mighty chinese industrial economy will steamroll the american scam economy before they’re able to implement their plans worldwide. Now, we in western countries might end up trapped in a prison society where all information is controlled by LLM chatbots, but it won’t be the fate of the whole world.

  • L7HM77@sh.itjust.works
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    17 hours ago

    OK, but what about the investors? They’re gonna start pushing to see returns soon, you don’t invest $1Trillion USD on a “maybe it’ll trickle back to me in 20 years” strategy.