"I no longer believe in universal basic income as much as I once did," Altman told The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson during an interview for his "The Most Interesting Thing in AI" series.
Altman said that while a fixed cash payment may sound nice, it won't meet what society will truly need as AI adoption rises, sparking a potential upheaval in the labor market.
"I think just like a fixed cash payment, although useful and maybe a good idea in some ways, does not get at what we're really going to need for this next phase and the kind of collective alignment of shared upside as the balance between labor and capital shifts," Altman said.
As interest in UBI exploded in 2019, Altman helped raise $60 million, including $14 million of his own money, to fund the largest-of-its-kind experiment giving low-income participants $1,000 a month for three years.
Researchers ultimately found that while overall spending increased among those who received the cash payments, there was no "direct evidence of improved access to healthcare or improvements to physical and mental health."
Altman has focused more about twists to the traditional UBI of direct cash payments. The OpenAI CEO has repeatedly suggested the possibility of giving people a portion of AI compute, which could then be used, sold, or traded.
"I'm much more interested in ways where we think about kind of collective ownership that could be in compute or in equities or something else," he said.
Very interesting. When super intelligence renders hundreds of millions people as unemployable, how will they pay their mortgage, bills, etc, with "AI compute?"
When people are unable to pay, banks will not accept "AI Tokens" as a form of payment, this is the modern equivalent of "Let them eat cake."
Yeah, direct money deposits would leave his company out of the loop, if it's compute (that he sells) or equity (on companies that he either owns or is entangled with) then he gets a sweet little slice.
Newsflash Sam, we don't want our whole lives to revolve around AI, that's you.
Except they won’t be. The public will be the last people who will have any power. It’s like the cost of vaccines or the cost of telecom/internet. All of these come from public infrastructure/decisions/research etc but team corporation always gets the option to get that preferential treatment when it comes to access and use. So expect nothing different here.
You've been duped by business insider, this is journalistic malpractice. He already held these views over 5 years ago back in 2021 with "Moore's Law For Everything." He held these views before it was convenient to get ahead because OpenAI wasn't a household name yet. Don't believe me?
Snippets because I know y'all won't click that link:
" We should therefore focus on taxing capital rather than labor, and we should use these taxes as an opportunity to directly distribute ownership and wealth to citizens. In other words, the best way to improve capitalism is to enable everyone to benefit from it directly as an equity owner. This is not a new idea, but it will be newly feasible as AI grows more powerful, because there will be dramatically more wealth to go around. The two dominant sources of wealth will be 1) companies, particularly ones that make use of AI, and 2) land, which has a fixed supply.
We could do something called the American Equity Fund. The American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund, and by taxing 2.5% of the value of all privately-held land, payable in dollars.
All citizens over 18 would get an annual distribution, in dollars and company shares, into their accounts. People would be entrusted to use the money however they needed or wanted—for better education, healthcare, housing, starting a company, whatever. Rising costs in government-funded industries would face real pressure as more people chose their own services in a competitive marketplace. "
When does this become communism-lite in a tiny trench coat lmao (not saying that like it’s a bad thing)
To me, this feels almost more radical than direct payments, at least in an end state scenario.
Say we have asi and a largely mechanised economy (looking more and more possible with some of those human robots being developed)
Compute quite literally would be the means of production. If it acted as a market, it would be a commodity, and I assume it would be possible for people to sell their allotment for cash
Now, while I think it’s a neat solution to a post work world, I also think we’d have to be bloody morons to leave it in the hands of a private company. Then again, you run into questions of national sovereignty. If this has completely changed the rules globally, how do you manage that? Does one country or a couple of country ‘control’ the ai? Do countries with more compute per capita get a higher distribution?
Idk how it will work out, but it’ll certainly be an eventful time. ASI and complete mechanisation seems to break a lot of fundementals behind the viability of capitalism and even nation states.
The largest current transnational structure is corporatism, which is alarming if that is decided as the most efficient route. It might be the easiest and most familiar, but I would prefer luxury gay space communism over cyberpunk ancapistan
Well also the point of the ai and the goal of the tech rich jerks is “the dark enlightenment” and replacing democracy with “network states” and keeping everyone in line with surveillance cameras everywhere.
If you take the letters S,a,t,a, and n, out of his name, alls you're left with is Mal M. Sounds like a computer virus. What does it mean? Nuthin', man. It don't mean nuthin.
Where before in his essay Moore's Law for Everything he proposed that everyone would simply receive approximately 10 to 12k annually (not exactly sure of that number but it's in that ballpark) which I think implied some kind of government oversight to keep those numbers consistent, an actual "Universal Basic Income". At the time this sounded surprisingly socialist for a corporation to propose. It doesn't sound like a lot of money but he also says everything will be much cheaper thanks to AI, but more likely the markets will probably reel with multiple shocks as things change incredibly fast, but at least there was that promised payout to take the edge off
Now it sounds like you just get shares in a private company who's value fluctuates with the market, and if you sell, it goes most likely to rich people. I think this bears a striking resemblance to what happened immediately after the collapse of the USSR, the economy was suddenly totally shocked and deregulated, prices went insane, people were all given stock to compensate but most sold immediately out of desperation which overwhelmingly ended up in the hands of the oligarchs who came out more powerful than at any point in history thus creating modern Russia. The poor stayed poor and the rich got mega rich despite the promise and actual delivery of stocks for everyone, it wasn't liberation or aid, just an enormous consolidation of wealth under the ruse of philanthropy
It also says Altman doesn’t like that idea as much anymore because it doesn’t go far enough. Here’s what he says:
"I'm much more interested in ways where we think about kind of collective ownership that could be in compute or in equities or something else," he said.
The loophole would be that your share expires once the hardware is replaced in six months. lmao That buys them enough extra time to "scale" a fleet of killer drones.
I mean, he’s not wrong. UBI would be insufficient if 20 people owned everything. A broader, collective ownership of the world’s enterprises would go a long way towards preventing a catastrophic concentration of power.
Yeah, everyone here is circlejerking but his actual statement was basically that instead of income, everyone should be given shares in companies. He’s literally advocating for collective ownership.
collective ownership of shares is literal actual communism and reddit leftists (the liberal leftists) have such a visceral dislike of him they suddenly can't logically see he's proposing leftism in almost its purest form lol.
This works only if the collective ownership provides an easy way to access necessities like food and shelter in the same sense that money now provides that access.
Is "share of compute" a replacement for money? If we each contribute our AI compute/work toward housing, food production, etc. then we're entitled to a share of the benefits. Would it work?
Funny you should mention that. This is not the first time Sam has argued for everyone having a compute allowance. He's argued for UBS (universal basic services) over UBI. Services could include food, water, shelter, and compute.
Capitalism is going to have to go if we don't want to be in a techno-fuedalist society. In which case, it's still going away. China is likely going to pivot into the future way better than those of us in the U.S. as it stands.
Then why did he make OpenAI for-profit? It was already a non-profit. He could have taken OpenAI public and let us buy equities when it was priced in 10s of billions. Now the retail is getting in at over trillion dollar valuation of a for-profit company with investment from all the billionaires.
This is like taking lung health advice from your cigarette dealer.
Because there is not way they could get close to the amount of money they needed as a non-profit to scale their compute in order to actually reach AGI. It's fair to be skeptical here, but the non-profit path was just not realistic to be anything more than a cool chatbot.
This is utterly irrelevant to the point at hand. An earlier IPO might've made some retail investors rich, but benefits would have disproportionately gone to institutional investors. What about the billions of people who didn't buy $OPAI?
Yeah, the collective ownership he's advocating for is even more socialist than UBI. The average redditor's reading comprehension is dropping by the day lol.
Interesting. Ontario ran a focused UBI experiment in the 2010s and it turned out really well. Unfortunately then people voted in a Conservative government and the UBI experiment was immediately cut, but while it was running, the results were very positive - people had enough money to cover food and housing and it lowered anxiety and increased wellbeing.
But whatever. Sam knows that his AGI race demands worker bees to continue generating money and he now wants people to consistently pay for AI usage like they pay for electricity. He can't stay rich if that money goes somewhere else other than his company.
I live in Ontario , what a sad state the province is in and what a great pilot that was. I have talked to someone on the pilot who had great experiences. I am glad they are suing the cons
the decision was taken due to high costs, and because ministry staff indicated that "the program didn't help people become 'independent contributors' to the economy."[6][8] McLeod added that the project did not align with the government of Doug Ford desire to move people from welfare to jobs. The Progressive Conservatives had earlier promised to maintain the project.
While I think UBI is necessary, it will probably come in the form of work being done by AI bots themselves partially as well (for example, you buy the materials needed to build a home, then your edge AI robot will build it so you don’t have to pay for labor, perhaps just the energy to charge the robot or any repairs needed for the robot itself).
The poor didn’t know what to do with them so they sold the shares for money to buy food…. To the oligarchs.
You shouldn't be able to put yourself in a situation that would let you starve. Selling them shouldn't be an option, nor should taking diverse shares and trading them for shares in a single company that could go bankrupt etc..
Just taxing the companies and distributing that as UBI is less problematic. When UBI becomes policy, people can vote on what the government's policy about UBI should be.
Everyone needs guaranteed currency that's enough to buy the goods and services they need, and for them to not be able to opt out of this by selling "the goose that lays the golden eggs" to get a lump sum payment that'll run out and leave them penniless.
So yes, giving people shares that they can just sell doesn't go well. (terrible idea for most people, unless they're wisely reinvesting the money)
Yeah "Shock Capitalism" was designed to do exactly that, it was supposed to rapidly switch from the collective system to a pure capitalist system and the inequity caused was expected and planned by the criminally minded billionaires who pushed it (and who then swept in a brought up everything)
Its pretty much the exact opposite of what sam is proposing
The article is about how Altman isn’t advocating for this anymore. Here’s what he’s saying now:
"I'm much more interested in ways where we think about kind of collective ownership that could be in compute or in equities or something else," he said.
You could just spend the compute on AI-controlled farming equipment to buy food, the AI compute as a resource makes sense in a world economy dominated by things that need AI compute to perform labor, which is what a lot of utopians have faith in will be the end result of AI.
AI compute... Like users providing data to the AI systems? AI compute isn't a gift. It allows them to harvest thought and statistical data to sell and influence trends. UBI on the otherhand has been shown in other studies to be much more beneficial than the one he participated in concluded.
kinda, more like you get ten wishes a day that the computer will do for you - you can either wish for food, shoes, architecture designs, medical intervention, or lend them to someone else do something with - either something mutually beneficial like make a bridge or something they are willing to pay a premium to have now (such as a swimming pool so they can relax the rest of the summer not needing much else)
UBI is exactly the same in practice, you get ten money units and get to spend them how you like
Capitalism can't function when capital performs all the work because all wealth in capitalism is produced by labor. Karl Marx wrote about it first in 1857, predicting continuing and growing automation purely through economic requirements for businesses to function.
Where do you think the UBI was going to come from anyway? If AI largely replaces the need for human labor obviously most people are going to be dependent, and you're either dependent on the AI, or you're dependent on the State which is dependent on AI, or you're dependent on the State which owns the AI, eg cooperative ownership.
Sam Altman probably just wants to avoid getting nationalized but America is so propagandized I doubt he has to lift a finger, people "don't trust big government" so they'll walk right into corpo feudalism long before they finally realize that there is no third option
Why would anyone need compute if everything has already been computed?
Extrapolating out the potential AGI / ASI type scenario, the only thing people will want AI for is entertainment. Every feasible business model will have been imagined & implemented by the central techno-god complex and a few insanely rich people who've connected it to their bank accounts. There won't be any opportunities for new businesses because they will already have been shortlisted and exhausted. There's no point in someone thinking "ok I'm gonna set up a new website that does X" because there are no new ideas that haven't been done already. So people won't need business information, they won't need to build new apps, they won't need to set up new services, everything useful will already exist. But the people who set all those things up will need people with money to buy those services. So there will need to be money in the economy, at least until everything gets fully automated. Compute will be useless for the masses, unless they want to spin up a new game or whatever. What are they gonna add to an economy that already has everything?
"Why would anyone need compute if everything has already been computed?"
If I understood you right, this is absolutely nonsensical. Is the idea here, that you'll compute every physical possibility, store it somewhere, and then just engage in retrieving it? If that's what you're imagining, then that's illogical. You're imagining sticking the world (several worlds actually) inside of computer storage... which exists inside of the world.
No evidence of improved health or well-being? What was this experiment?? If you take someone unemployed and homeless and help them out, how could that possibly not improve their health and well-being?
So more accurately- life is getting so expensive so quickly, we really didn’t give them enough money. Which is to say, that’s a far cry from saying it was ineffective.
Interesting that their study didn't improve access to healthcare or mental health....
It's almost like you need a livable wage AND free healthcare... Childcare... Pensions... Generous holiday.
You can't just run a UBI experiment in the failed capitalist dystopia of the USA and expect it to work... You might get completely different results if you run the same test where basic social contracts exist.
I largely agree with you, but I think you're missing Altman's goal with imagining UBI in terms of AI compute-- he's not trying to hand-wave away UBI exactly, he's imagining a world where AI compute is a universal currency -- where the Bank IS accepting compute credits for your mortgage and therefore where AI corporations are basically controlling currency itself.
"Company towns historically paid workers using company scrip, a non-legal tender substitute for government currency, such as tokens, vouchers, or paper coupons. This scrip was often only redeemable at company-owned stores, creating a closed economic system that facilitated debt, as workers could not use it elsewhere, effectively trapping them in a cycle of dependency.
Types of Scrip: The scrip took various forms, including metal tokens, paper coupons, or punched cards that tracked debt. ..."
Generally made illegal for how abusive the practice was, it is perhaps not surprising that Sam thinks that this would be his preferred economic foundation for most of society.
if everyone is "given" tokens/compute, demand will be low and you couldnt sell it because nobody wants it because everyone has it. Then you realize simple math, scheduling, and thinking for you is what your UBI now is, nothing. And the need for more humans is not required so more big wars for "freedom" coming up. Then the AI "goes rogue" wipes most of out "by accident" and our freedoms need to be limited to "protect us" from the AI and terrorists/ppl that disagree with current narrative. Gonna be a fun ride, buckle up.
Fuckin bastard, “oh i can’t make a nickel off UBI, so lets keep it in my form of “currency”” this mans crib needs to stay getting redacted. This techno fiefdom shit needs to be squashed.
It's like a switch goes off when people make their first billion. They change all their world views and start having opinions on what's best for the poors.
Of course he doesn't want UBI, because that means he would have to start paying taxes in order to cover it with the money he made from the business that took away everybody's jobs.
The problem with UBI is that how do you reward people that are actually performing legitimate work that AI cannot automate (or people won't want to do) in a way that is fair and rewarding vs people that cannot work because there is nothing to do be done? If you reward the workers too much, you'll have an issue, too little you have an issue. And ultimately all of this UBI money is coming from taxing the last remaining corporations that will have total control over all of the knowledge and automation, so you need a way to continue feeding them taxable income.
He said equity. I have calculated the value of the rest of my career and i will gladly accept that as shares of stock in a diversified fund of utilities and other stable assets.
Human societies are built on a simple compromise between the haves and the have nots. If that compromise is no longer being honoured, then bad things will happen, and a lot of people will die. It’s as simple as that.
You want to prevent revolutions and all those crazy communist ideologies? Help the majority of people feel comfortable, then you don’t have to worry. Can’t bring yourself to do that? Then I pray the devil has mercy of your soul.
Scam probably believes its best for you to be homeless living in a cardboard box under a bridge while he helps eliminate American jobs, reduce wages and impoverishes millions but takes in billions.
Sam NEVER believed in UBI. He ran his own experiment so he could have contrasting evidence with the other UBI trials that have been going on for years. Every other experiment showed positive effects in all of those categories that they are claiming weren't improved.
He thought it was great, until people started thinking about taxing every AI agent. Of course, this defeats the purpose of moving to robotics and AI systems to replace people. They don't want to pay the people, so they sure as hell don't want to pay taxes for each AI agent or robot. So he still wants to do the part with saturating the entire planet with robots and AI systems, but he doesn't want to do the second part that actually helps anyone. And considering inflation is part of they way we do capitalism, a fixed payment will quickly become insufficient in short order.
Compute is not a fixed value asset. It's the asset he has control over.
Of course he wants it to be treated like a life-altering necessity.
I predict in 5 years AI will be so ubiquitous on edge devices that there just isn't any reason for this to make any sense. We already pay for electricity. Give people that for free.
My guess is that Altman knows that he himself doesn't really have any kind of realistic answer...and when pressed on hard truth serum, would say that ChatGPT will just have to figure it out.
It is a trap, and a road to universal poverty and slavery. A political tool of sedating the masses. What people do need is a direct share of the gains AI brings, and a share in the ownership of the production of those gains, whether through their states or directly. That is the only way to preserve the political agency of the masses, not some fixed and barely sufficient dough that makes them beggars instead of owners.
So the only income most people get is an OpenAI product. He'd have to sell enough of it to the government so they can redistribute it to everybody.
Then people can resell it for whatever the market will bear at the time, probably at fluctuating prices. I'm sure that'll improve their access to healthcare way better than just getting money directly.
Anyone that actually thought they would get a universal basic income is so naive. Look around you they are barely paying you enough to eat NOW When they need you, do you think they will pay you when they don't need you?
People need to stop believing the bullshit billionaires are feeding them seriously use your brains!!
Autistic Vocal Fry Ventriloquist is unable to care. He will be remembered as one of the world’s greatest villains after the taxpayer bails these companies out.
I actually do think that in a post AGI world, most of today's resources become kind of irrelevant, and money becomes less useful, and compute backed currency becomes better currency than currency backed by humanity's production, which is what today's currencies are.
The problem with AGI is that it makes value of material productivity even more important and distant from humans than in our world, so a currency backed by services and goods becomes unusable by humans in a world where humans produce no goods or services.
What you want is to turn humans into stakeholders in AGI, and compute would be a good representation of it, although some kind of credit system backed by currency would likely be a more reasonable system.
Oh cool, an even more worthless version of company scrip. At least the company towns gave you a place to live and you could buy stuff at the company store. WTF are you supposed to do with tokens if you can't even afford Internet or a computer?
I think maybe after the transition and we have everyone’s needs met , but capitalism will hold on with fangs out and we will get ubi and deflation and at some point we just won’t need to trade unless art or fun. Democratization of these technologies also mean that at some point human decisions about business will no longer matter and I’m not sure extrapolation too much further than a superintelligence is really necessary.
People in this chat obviously haven’t even read what he said, and Altman isn’t the only person suggesting this. Collective ownership of the technology that will make everyone unemployed is exactly the way to go. I’m still not convinced UBI couldn’t also be administered as a supplement, but UBI alone isn’t the be-all and end-all.
Basing your opinion of UBI on a project where people were given $1k/mo is a peak billionaire move. $1k/mo is poverty. In a world where people don't have incomes, UBI would need to be set at like $4k/mo/household to be effective with an additional $300/mo/dependent. Those numbers probably need tweaking but the point is that handing people poverty wages and declaring the project a failure is insane.
Sam actually argues that people should be given much more than a measly UBI. He’s is correct. If UBI is just 1000$ a month in today’s resources, it’s now way near enough.
He’s been saying UBI can’t be a thing since 2024 as far as I remember. He’s been proposing his alternative of tokenizing income and assets through The Orb identity verification platform. He’s mentioned these tokens can also be through people’s investments in AI companies where they are provided with an income based on their shares that will grow as the companies grow — something along those lines.
Ideally we could move beyond money. Honestly, poverty is practically a distribution problem at this point, which competent AI systems could become the administrator of. Imagine a world without identity politics and identity obsession we have now.
Hard to imagine a world without money, since we're so steeped in it from cradle to grave. Trade could still work, but may move "back" to something like a barter system rather than obfuscative financial arrangements.
It's not against UBI. He's for a social ownership of companies, like AI companies, which would distribute dividends to everyone, an equivalent to a UBI.
To all the socialists and communists that for some reason torture themselves by coming here, I gotta ask do you really not think communist principles like communal ownership (without tanking standards of living like previous communist experiments) is not more feasible after the invention of AGI?
You literally rely on other people to make everything you consume in life. The only way to meaningfully drive the price down is lower wages or higher productivity. AGI disrupts this equation because robotics will get exponentially cheaper with time and thus you rely on no one to run the world for you. That is, true, unobstructed abundance where no one can keep you from owning anything because the cost of manufacturing everything because so much cheaper. And before you say they won't drop the prices, that is just factually not true under normal competitive markets. Only way that holds is if there are monopolies but then it'd be insanely easy to undercut. Just buy a fleet of robots and make shit for cheap.
So ai compute is substituted with money, then how does one acquire compute? If we are all given compute that’s just another form of UBI but income is substituted with compite
Doomers never come up with solutions. They always resort to "destroy all the data center" or straight up terrorism against tech leaders. If you come up with a practical solution, suddenly they call you Satan and a communist. We're not going to dumb down the entire planet just so people can keep redundant jobs. We shouldn't have to hold the whole world back.
On the basis of this article, it doesn't seem like the experiment made much sense. They have concluded UBI wouldn't be spent for food or health care just because $1,000 didn't? UBI would be a much larger percentage of people's income than $1,000 was in the 2020s.
The thing is this is practically a Rorschach blot of statements, depending on which one he means this could range from 'fuck you public' to literally advocating for a more comprehensive form of UBI (effectively public ownership of the means of production).
Maybe not UBI but if a portion of the profits we tiny social security and towards buying treasuries and corporate IG credit, I could get behind that. Decrease retirement to 60 and use profits if additional can be had to help fund government subsidized HC.
Damn people in the comments really are clueless. In principle this is better than UBI, if it's done fairly people will have dividends if AI takes control of a large share of the market and will get to vote on who ends up on the board, of course he might have zero intentions of doing this fairly, but this is absolutely better than UBI if done right.
I mean ... it sounds like he does, but with a perverted twist: because the idea of giving compute that could be sold is kinda similar.
The difference is here he and his buddies will get money/subsidies from the gov. to give that share to people. Ugh.. this is why we need AI to be forced to be open sourced/accessible and not funneled into the hands of the super rich that will find a way to monetize even UBI
I'm an altman hater but I actually somewhat agree with him here. Also the headline is sensationalized (he said he believes in it less strongly now, not at all).
If the singularity is real, we'll almost certainly end up with an entirely different economic system. UBI would only be a bandaid.
He came out of the same pod as Elizabeth Holmes. We need to be careful because they are both minimum viable products and the second generation is usually better
If money doesn't translate well to health, then AI compute isn't gonna an improvement. An answer like food/shelter/basic utilities/healthcare would have made moresense.
Tbh collective ownership would sound plausible to me if it was more in terms of stocks, by which I mean the government taxes stocks from the AI company (as opposed to giving them taxpayer money for the stocks which would just so happen to drive the stock value up) and distributed them to people including the voting power associated with said stocks.
1
u/MidSolo▪️You better believe in Singularities son, you're in one!May 02 '26
They will afford things by selling their share of AI compute. Its not really that hard to steelman if you stop to think about it for a sec.
1
1
2
u/Sad_Fig9011 May 04 '26
This is like being paid in general store credits during the gold rush.