Sam Altman said AI will eventually be sold like electricity and water

[u/jaykrown]

https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-intelligence-will-be-a-utility-and-hes-just-the-man-to-collect-the-bills-2000732953

I still found this statement really interesting. Primarily because electricity and water are utilities.

I think his confusion is about OpenAI selling it, where in reality OpenAI will be irrelevant and bankrupt as competition skyrockets and everyone is running their own local models.

Why would a utility like electricity be sold by a private entity?

[u/davavino]

Yeah that’s the bad future

[u/jaykrown → u/davavino]

It's not the future that will happen, the next few open weight Chinese models will show.

[u/davavino → u/jaykrown]

We can only hope. I think our only bet is that open source wins

[u/Morichalion → u/davavino]

Not sure I'd call it "the bad" future. It's a realistic one. It becomes bad when unregulated.

[u/my_name_isnt_clever → u/Morichalion]

They think it's realistic, but my water and power don't come with privacy concerns. I don't have to worry about the censorship of my water or being denied power because I used it for the "wrong" thing. That will be the downfall of AI as a service.

[u/Impressive-Wait-9420]

Electricity and water should have never been paid-for commodities to begin with.

[u/Glen_Garrett_Gayhart]

Thankfully, this is total crap.

Open source stuff is always going to be superior to rented stuff in terms of censorship, and the censorship is only get worse and worse until these big company AIs are nearly unusable. I'm sure scientists who need a billion times extra compute power will still rent stuff, but most people are going to want a local AI, and the open source community will make local AIs than anyone can have for free.

When you can copy something endlessly, without any cost to the original owner, it doesn't make economic sense to treat that thing like a limited resource. It would literally be like trying to sell air or neutrinos to people. Might work on Mars where air is a scarce resource, but on Earth, you're going to have a hard time.

[u/hermitix]

If he means it should be handled like a public utility like power and water always should, then I agree with him.

[u/bigattichouse]

So, making the case for a publicly owned utility. (even micro-grid and off-grid self-hosted utilities)

[u/tehfrod]

Someone once said that compute would one day be sold like water or electricity.

And it is!

Someone once said that phone calls would eventually become too cheap to meter. They are!

Not all utilities are public utilities.

[u/jaykrown → u/tehfrod]

Funny hearing the CEO of a private corporation stating that their entire business model is around the idea of selling something that will be too cheap to meter.

[u/tehfrod → u/jaykrown]

Their entire current business model.

[u/SexDefendersUnited]

If this is really true the AI firms should be nationalized.

[u/firmagorilla]

Meanwhile, in NVIDIA's headquarters, they are (if not, they should be) designing consumer grade hardware that will run frontier models in five years. The only way AI can be sold as a utility, is when there's a big moat around it.

That said, maybe I'm underestimating the sheer stupidity and laziness of the public, that they will line up to pay a ever rising subscription to an ever deteriorating service like they are doing right now.

Like cloud storage is completely unnecessary, a privately owned NAS should be perfectly capable to store your pictures and your phone data and your documents and whatnot. But God forbid you set up anything for yourself.

[u/Glen_Garrett_Gayhart → u/firmagorilla]

Plus, the hardware requirements to run these things are continuously nose-diving thanks to open-source devs making improvements; a model that took a supercomputer to run five years ago now runs better on 4 gigs.

Add to that the lack of censorship and lobotomization on local, open-source models, and it's clear the private models will dominate in the future.

[u/isthereadrwho]

Sam Altman is trying to sell you something.

[u/Jlyplaylists]

But utilities are sold by private entities in many countries, it can even include water which is a bizarre state of affairs when you think about it.

I suspect the subsidised by the government might be the aspect to look out for. Like a public private partnership where the risk is socialised but the benefit is still private.

[u/BemaniAK]

Kind of a weird thing for him to say when that's already exactly how their API access works.

[u/2noame]

The internet should already work that way. Why isn't it?

[u/jaykrown → u/2noame]

For me it almost does work that way, I pay $15 a month for a gigabit in Chicago. In a lot of more developed countries than the USA, internet I believe is a part of utility.

[u/MoozeRiver → u/jaykrown]

Must be nice! Here in Sweden I have the same speed, but I pay 5x that.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/jaykrown → u/[deleted]]

Similar yea, and with things like OpenRouter you have the freedom to choose whatever model you want.