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.
The technology is here to stay but nearly all of its current uses are not. There is no way, for example, talking to an LLM at a fast food drive-through, isn’t costing more than it saves. It seems that way today because of VC subsidy, but that is an economic illusion made possible by an anti-competitive oligopoly market. There are many other examples, too, but I thought that a more fun obvious one.
Honestly, you’re example could already be done today by a local model like like Qwen 3.6 27b. There’s no need to run an expensive cloud model for such a simple task.
Wouldn’t even destroy jobs, there are always people needed to fry the burger.
Now do I want to talk Rona fucking robot while ordering burger? Hell no. But it could be done economically without any problems.
I’m not sure what model they use there, but it is surprisingly poor given the limited problem space being covered. I can’t imagine a local model would work better than that.
Strange. You should think that’s a pretty basic task. Like you said, limited problem space. Every current LLM that is big enough and has the necessary guardrails and instructions should be able to handle it.