this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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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.

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[–] Lemming6969@lemmy.world 6 points 1 hour 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.

I can't wait to lance the AI bubble like a doggone perineal abscess.

[–] kreskin@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Yeah? hows that panning out so far?

[–] eronth@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

lol no they won't. People aren't using it free.

[–] HrabiaVulpes@europe.pub 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 points 1 hour ago

perfect as a sockpuppet for the anti-christ thiel.

[–] L7HM77@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 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.

[–] BillCheddar@lemmy.world 21 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

Every capitalist is a conman.

[–] Goldholz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 hours ago

The only capitalist that isnt, is a socialist

[–] imhungry@leminal.space 3 points 5 hours ago

I am so jealous of this guy's ability to lie. I'm just so crap at it, I end up just telling the truth.

[–] jaykrown@lemmy.world 10 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

That's not going to happen no matter what. Open source models are already catching up to frontier proprietary models. Altman wishes he had a monopoly over that, but he doesn't. The bubble won't last, and things like OpenRouter will become the main way people use AI. Google alone is a major reason why intelligence will never be like a utility like electricity or water or internet.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 points 1 hour ago

google trains thier AI/Open AI on reddit mostly

[–] Toribor@corndog.social 1 points 5 hours ago

I'm interested to see what kind of hardware will produce "good enough" AI capabilities in a couple years as things are refined and tuned further. The gap between the absolutely massive commercial models and open source models keeps shifting but I don't have the same fear that I had a few years ago that it might not be possible to get good results from anything less than millions of dollars worth of hardware.

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 4 points 9 hours ago

For real. It's like imagining metered electrical generation becoming the norm if solar was already cheaper and easier to install. Like if it wasn't for decades of hydro and fossil fuel being the cheaper more flexible option it never would of made sense to focus so much on metered connections in the first place (and increasingly making less sense now...).

They will have to have some enforced mechanism to "franchise the sunshine" as they old saying went to prevent a world where they (big SaaS AI) are not clearly the option of last resort.

Even big corp and government world is increasingly "sovereign AI" focused now, just like hybrid cloud almost always makes more sense at certain level of IT infrastructure maturity.

[–] Quexotic@infosec.pub 18 points 12 hours ago

Another desperate attempt to monetize. AI bubble-burst, here we come!

[–] AccoSpoot1@lemmy.world 25 points 14 hours ago

Literally the future capitalism has always wanted; all common resources seized from the public for the good of private equity.

[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 5 points 10 hours ago
[–] bitwolf@sh.itjust.works 29 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Gonzako@lemmy.world 6 points 14 hours ago

He just wants money

[–] pyre@lemmy.world 18 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] aamram@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 13 hours ago

There's a name for that already: technofeudalism.

[–] Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 2 points 13 hours ago

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

[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

If it gets much more expensive then it already is I doubt it

I made a simple project tracker in vite in 30 minutes. It cost me ten bucks in tokens. That's with a pretty cheap model (sonnet 4-6)

[–] fuck_u_spez_in_particular@lemmy.world 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

For now. But yeah the subs are extremely cheap compared to api pricing. We'll see how long that lasts

[–] arc99@lemmy.world 8 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] plutopos@lemmy.zip 15 points 13 hours ago

I do begrudge them. Their service was created through mass copyright infringement

[–] 7101334@lemmy.world 4 points 11 hours ago

It's a billionaire. I begrudge it for its mere existence.

[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 33 points 17 hours ago

I was heartened by college graduates booing these assholes.

[–] thingAmaBob@lemmy.world 24 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] cardfire@sh.itjust.works 16 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago

stall critical thinking skills and knowledge

That's the point. They want people dumb so they can sell "intelligence" to people.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 5 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Only profits and power matters to these people. They will happily destroy peoples lives. Sam Altman is an obvious psychopath. Zuckerberg is less open with his real thoughts after he said "dumb fucks", but equally ruthless. Musk lacks empathy and is autistic and doesn't understand human emotions. Trump is a narcissist.

These are the people who drives Ai.

[–] Hellgruen@lemmy.zip 20 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

LLMs are not intelligent lol

[–] cardfire@sh.itjust.works 4 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

I feel like I spend months trying to find the right phrase the people will understand when I mention llms, since I refuse to call these things artificial intelligence.

My favorite thus far, are "spicy autocorrect" and "next words calculator." The fact that it has all of the compendium of human knowledge on physics or last millennium economics, means it is an excellent research assistant and engineering consultant, as long as I can keep in mind that it's going to lie to me with impunity and with utmost confidence every fourth question I ask.

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

That's the problem, a public archive with all it's training data that you can query would be infinitely more valuable.

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[–] Microtonal_Banana@lemmy.zip 19 points 19 hours ago (8 children)

I still have a library card.

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[–] sturmblast@lemmy.world 4 points 14 hours ago

No, we wont

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 3 points 13 hours ago

dare to be stupid!

[–] TotalCourage007@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago

I would like to popularize his alter ego, scam fartman. I cannot speak my level of disdain for this welfare queen.

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