cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47387000
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.
He followed by saying, “and then I, Sam Altman, will have the most intelligence in the world. Then you’ll see, mommy!”
Description of the author at the end of the article had me howling. I’ll just leave it here for y’all to enjoy.
Amanda Caswell is the AI Editor at Tom’s Guide and one of today’s leading voices in AI and technology. A celebrated contributor to various news outlets, her sharp insights and relatable storytelling have earned her a loyal readership. Amanda’s work has been recognized with prestigious honors, including outstanding contribution to media. Known for her ability to bring clarity to even the most complex topics, Amanda seamlessly blends innovation and creativity, inspiring readers to embrace the power of AI and emerging technologies. As a certified prompt engineer, she continues to push the boundaries of how humans and AI can work together. Beyond her journalism career, Amanda is a long-distance runner and mom of three. She lives in New Jersey.
“certified prompt engineer” lol
‘I’m somewhat of a certified slop wrangler myself’ - Amanda
I’m a L3 certified cum dumpster operator
That description was probably written by the slop machine too 🤣
It almost certainly was. That’s what slop slingers do.
That’s a lot of words just to say you’re a sellout slop slinger, Amanda.
I would not pay for slop… I don’t use slop even for free. I opt out of slop… I run from slop. If slop is all we got then I will stare at the wall holding my hog.
I don’t think that Sam guy has a good understanding of what intelligence is. One test for that is to know the difference between a for-profit and a non-profit organization. I’m starting to believe that this guy will say anything in order for the masses to purchase his questionable product.
OpenAI hasn’t been a non-profit since the Microsoft board takeover. Also formally, not only in practice.
To a devout capitalist, anything and everything can and should be turned into a commodity. First, we need people to get hooked on the convenience of not having to think for themselves, let their natural intelligence wither from disuse, then charge them for the privilege-turned-necessity of outsourced intelligence.
His understanding of just about anything is focused on two questions:
- “How can I sell this?”
- “How can I use this to sell other things?”
Pretty sure that’s well established
Didn’t he pretend to not pay himself/not care about money, and then was filmed driving a multi-million $$ super car?
He’s one in a long line of compulsive liars
He doesn’t pay himself … on a technicality. Rich folk in general don’t spend money like you or I do. They don’t even actually have money like you or I do. They’re leveraged to the hilt using their stock shares to finance loans and then live off the loans. (This is a tax evasion thing.) So he can claim he’s not taking a salary or being paid even while spending a million dollars a day.
And once they have this much “fuck you” money lying around for free, they don’t care about money. It would be like you caring about air. It’s just … there.
It would be like you caring about air. It’s just … there.
Only because we’ve not yet poisoned it to the point where breathable air becomes the most obscene pay-to-live feature.
Don’t worry. They’re working on it.
Look you stupid bastard, you need to own something before you can sell it.
laughs in veolia
also laughs in nestle
It’s dystopian, but he’s not entirely wrong.
My teacher friends are trying to sound the alarm: Kids who can’t even process information written on the board in front of them, being passed through the grades without being able to read, or can’t focus on anything for more than 60 seconds.
And the common refrain is: “If AI can do this for me why do I need to learn it at all?”
These modern tech products are designed to damage cognitive ability and replace it.
Not only replace it. They make it so that people are dependent on it. So much that they can’t form any original thought, because doing so would allow them some degree of individuality, the power to separate themselves from the system. The AI Nazi techbros can’t have independent thought, individuality, or anything that would get in the way of their neverending quest to conform all thought and will to their own.
I think this is one of those cases where what seems like an overarching strategy is just an emerging result of a series of ad-hoc decisions.
I don’t think Altman and his ilk explicitly want to submit people to the system. I believe he genuinely just wants to extort profits with reckless disregard for side effects. The dependency would be intentional, but his motive would be money.
He probably isn’t fundamentally opposed to individual thought either. It’s just that he can’t profit from it. He’d be happy to have you rent freedom from him if he found a way to control it. Individuality Deluxe - now available as family bundle for the low price of two median child salaries!
Of course, he’d also sell the reigns of his machine to governments, again for money. An authoritarian government is more likely to buy it and help expand his market reach (because they also want that dependency on something they control), so he will back any political movement that aligns with his ambition to make more money.
I don’t think he’s a Nazi because of any political convictions or ambitions. He’s a Nazi because the profit estimates look good.
the same way they rely on electricity, Wi-Fi or running water.
I can’t produce electricity, wifi, or (very much) running water with my own body. But I’ve got a pretty decent source of intelligence right there inside my head. Why do I need to pay some meter for it?
How dare you? Did you even take a second to consider the economy at all? You can’t just think yourself!
It can’t burst soon enough.
I’m still just so curious who is paying to use any llm?
People like this:
Ty, best cartoon I’ve seen today
Businesses who don’t want their data used to training. Gotta pay the “trust me bro” fee
There’s no way in hell they don’t backdoor data lmaoo
Many academics around me have a paid plan of LLM of some sort, most are on $100 plan some are on $200, all of them are getting reimbursed for their plan.
Most of them uses it to optimize code, generate visualization, or formalize pen and paper proof.
I hated it, and don’t use much of it myself. But it seems too useful for these people and it is hard to stop them. As an example, formalizing a pen and paper proof can take an expert weeks, if not month of work, whereas it only takes codex a week.
But I do feel this success is tied to the nature and value of academia, and might not transfer to other fields or industrial projects:
- we usually have tiny codebases: it is not uncommon to have a 10-line algorithm with a 70-page paper explaining its correctness
- 90%, if not more, of the codes are proof of concepts, without the expectation for long term maintainance.
- the work is highly specialized, everyone is running out of time, and there is high expectation of the outcome of the work: in our recent work, we do have an expert in formalization, but he doesn’t have enough time, so the grad student formalized the project using codex. The overall architecture is probably much much worse than what would have been done by the expert. One interesting outcome is that codex is able to prove a more general result than the expert intended: not because it found a better proof, but because it is much better at bruteforcing a solution than human.
As an example, formalizing a pen and paper proof can take an expert weeks, if not month of work, whereas it only takes codex a week.
And how badly does it hallucinate while doing so?
That is the thing about formal proof: if the definition is correct, which usually is relatively short and should be written by human, there is almost no chance of the prove being wrong. The only exception are when the LLM exploits a bug in the proof assistant kernel, and these kernel are usually designed to be exceptionally small, thus making bugs unlikely.
That being said, opus 4.6 found a bug that eventually lead to the proof of false (opus is unable to produce the proof of false, hence unlikely to exploit it): https://github.com/rocq-prover/rocq/issues/21682
However, like I said, the code quality of the llm is usually not on par with an expert, and they have a tendency to produce unnecessary lemmas and complications that will need to be cleaned up by human.
Also, we have a very detailed pen and paper proof, which are designed to be easily translatable to proof assistants. We have also setup all the lemma and theorems to reach the end goal. All of these are done by humans, without these, I don’t believe any LLM can make much progress on this project.
I hate to hit you with such a tangentially related query to your main point, but what is “formalizing a proof”, and why is there such a discrepancy between the time it might take an expert (weeks if not months) vs an LLM?
(It probably goes without saying, but my college career was spent in the Humanities, where there was not much emphasis on proofs, formal or informal, so I’m curious how the other half lives.)
There are proof assistants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_assistant that would encode a mathematical proof as code, and verify its correctness for you.
Writing completely formal proof is very painstaking, because it means we will need to flash out a lot and a lot of details (which are mostly trivial for experts) for computers to accept it, and we also need to know how to work with proof assistants.
Human proofs often ignore these details to make it readable, yet also make it more prone to mistakes. Whereas formalized prove in proof assistant can very rarely be wrong (unless there is an unlikely bug in the assistant kernel), but mostly unreadable (unless the proof is incredibly elegant).
So in general, translating good human proof to computer proof requires more expert labor than huge conceptual innovation, yet it usually require the steep learning curve of understanding the ins and outs of a proof assistant, which can take years of experience.
LLM used to be pretty bad at this because even filling in trivial details can quickly derail them. Recently a few flagship coding model are finally able to do this, albeit with a large amount of token consumption in thinking.
Fascinating. My godfather is a mathematician at a local university, I’ll ask him whether this is something he runs into. I’ve heard him grumble about formatting his work in the past, but usually in the context of using Latex, which I gather is something else entirely.
Yeah LaTeX is a bit different, think about describing a process in MS Word, v.s. writing a program that performs such process on a computer: LaTeX is more like description aimed for human consumption, where as formal proof is more like a program that computers can rigorously execute.
Proof assistant have only attracted the attension of mathematicians very recently, thanks to the organization surrounding MathLib in Lean, and the promption of Terance Tao.
It also rides the AI train quite a bit, as AI have a tendency to confidently be wrong, having a computer to check its proof can be very useful.
Me, tons, both as part of both of my day jobs, and in my free time I’m building startups, all powered by claude code. I’m building tons faster and accomplishing more outcomes than ever before in my 20+ year career in tech. AMA
What’s your long-term business plan for when Anthropic starts charging per token, at a rate that actually reflects their costs?
My businesses don’t depend on Anthropic, so that doesn’t worry me at all - I’m using Claude code as my daily driver when I’m building software just because after trying a bunch of options it has consistently made me more productive than anything else over the last 9 months. Every month or so I try the latest open weight models which I can run locally, when they get good enough for me to have an acceptable productive dev experience fully offline locally I’ll be very happy. Gemma 4 is already a major step forwards there and I’ve used it for some small local hobby projects, but I still get much more done when I’m working on large complex code projects if I use Claude code. If they removed their $200/month subscription and stopped subsidizing compute, I’d likely switch to another tool/chase whoever else is burning VC money for a bit, while accelerating my adoption of local models, accepting lower productivity.
AMA
We’re good, thanks.
Are you the asshole?
Nah, I’m just moving with the times in an industry which didn’t give me much choice - was laid off twice and the contract roles I ended up managing to get were companies who were already heavily using and expecting usage of AI. Tbh though I see it like the early days of the internet - and while I’m not a fan of big tech, wish the US was less corrupt and wish capitalism wasn’t so rampant, at this point IMO the cat is very much out of the bag and the industry has moved on - at least where I am right now. I’d imagine if I move back to Britain the usage/attitudes towards AI are probably pretty different
I see it like the early days of the internet
Yes. The early days of the Internet when workers famously had to be threatened to use the Internet for their work or they’d be fired. The early days of the Internet where the public had to cajoled into using the Internet by cramming it into everything just so the early Internet companies could inflate user count statistics.
Yes, the parallels are very strong!
I guess we have different memories of that era, I remember a lot of people moaning about everything going online, businesses feeling the pressure to set up websites, people being shut out of services if they didn’t get with the times and get an internet connection, etc.
Same shit, different tech. It’s just the brutal march of tech under late stage capitalism, my opinion is that you can’t change it, you can only decide whether you’ll ride the wave and move with the times or bury your head in the sand and hope it blows over. Tbh I did the latter for the first few years but once I realised the job I’d done for decades was basically no longer a job, I realised I had to just suck it up and move with the times 🤷
I have memories of people sneaking some form of Internet connection into the workplace against the rules of corporate IT. I have memories of young people arguing with their (older) bosses that the Internet was the future and bosses pushing back and banning it. I have memories of people being eager to get hooked up to the Internet at home; people actively looking to find an ISP that would allow another sign-up (because most of them were saturated at the time).
I also have memories of how every new user on the Internet increased the profitability of the Internet sphere as a whole instead of, you know—like with modern AI—each new user being a further drain.
So yes, we have different memories. Mine just happen to line up with facts.
I’m not a fan of big tech
Lol! Maybe stop grinding the slop machine then?
Not sure what you mean, I don’t work for big tech and never have. I’m not churning out slop, I’m building products which work, still maintaining the quality standards I always have - in fact I feel like I’m about to raise the bar much more easily now, I can build a thorough test suite which covers the whole test pyramid way faster than ever before which means most of my code is more thoroughly tested now
What’s your favorite project you’re building and what is the biggest market you are targeting?
Well realistically my favourite product is my most recent passion project, which is my karaoke generator platform https://nomadkaraoke.com/
It makes people happy every day, and I get the superpower of being able to let guests at my weekly karaoke night sing literally anything they want (cos I can generate it on the night so they can sing a good quality karaoke version of it even if it’s a super niche song)
Okay I like this one too!
Why do you end your post with AMA (presumably “Ask Me Anything”) and then promptly ignore the questions?
Entertainment (also realistically I’m just super busy, I don’t really use social media and only check this kinda app once a day when I’m winding down)
Go and touch some grass…
I don’t think that’s a question 😅 I work on my garden at the weekends and cycle a bunch thanks - I don’t have (or want) kids so I have a bit more free energy to build stuff without sacrificing my work/life balance too much compared to most folks my age
Oh, they’re going to pay you? With what money? From what job?
That’s what the intelligence is for, duh
My question is similar, once the knowledge base has become obsolete, and nobody is studying or doing research because nobody can afford tuition, what does AI do? Just keep repackaging the same shit?
That’s all the LLMbeciles have always done: repackaged the shit that’s already out there.
We’re setting up toll booths on information we stole! You’re gonna subsidize it! Yay!
Like, this is geniunely terrifying…I can’t wait for this vision to never happen. Despite their best efforts to try to fuck the world up…They’ll get bored when people fail to latch on to this latest madness or have become useless because LLMs have rotted their brains to nothing. At least this is what I hope as I resist with every fiber of my fucking being. I think this is one of the worst things that techbros have come out with in a long time. Can’t wait to see what the next torment nexus is going to be…
First, they’d have to design something that actually outputs truth instead of what is statistically likely from word association.
Why? The kids aren’t learning to tell the difference.
I’m starting to think the intelligence of these AI bros is itself pretty artificial.
I’d rather shoot my computer and then myself before doling out a subscription to these TechnoFascists for LLMslop.
