Technology@lemmy.worldbyLuminousLuddite@lemmy.world
23 hours

'People will buy intelligence from us on a meter': ChatGPT's Sam Altman's AI vision worries critics

www.tomsguide.com English

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.

190
    Sam Altman says people may someday “buy intelligence on a meter” like electricity or water and critics say the vision sounds more dystopian than innovative.
    • arc99@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23 minutes

      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.zipEnglish
        12 minutes

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

    • pyre@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 hour

      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.

      • Holytimes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        7 minutes

        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

    • AccoSpoot1@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 hour

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

    • bitwolf@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2 hours

      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.

    • TotalCourage007@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 hours

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

    • thingAmaBob@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5 hours

      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.worksEnglish
        2 hours

        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 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.

        • Final Remix@lemmy.worldEnglish
          46 minutes

          Seriously. I’ve used it a couple times at work (in education) solely because i needed to fit a rubric in our LMS and the fucking UI to do it means I would’ve spent an hour, whereas the API just filled shit in as placeholders and editing was faster than creating.

          Otherwise, I do my work by hand. I even set up excel sheets to do stuff for me like flag grade patterns or grade exams with a typed-in key. It’s almost fun, but I work with so many people who insist that “claude can do it” but then can’t have a followup conversation about what we supposedly discussed via email.

      • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
        2 hours

        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.

      • AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 hours

        stall critical thinking skills and knowledge

        That’s the point. They want people dumb so they can sell “intelligence” to people.

    • itsgroundhogdayagain@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6 hours

      They scraped the internet’s knowledge and want to sell it back to those who actually created it.

      • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
        6 hours

        Rent-seeking has entirely replaced innovation in modern capitalism.

        • vapordays@leminal.spaceEnglish
          2 hours

          Innovation was only ever a small part. Rent-seeking is more fundamental to capitalism than “innovation” is. It’s just more brazen than we remember from our childhoods.

      • cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2 hours

        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.caEnglish
          1 hour

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

          • cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            31 minutes

            I mean, mostly yes, but also I did benefit from an LLM arguing with me and telling me to not be so cavalier with 15kwh of batteries. It was helpful to have some safety guard rails. It was useful for giving more expansive considerations and playing devil’s advocate against my designs.

            I only shocked myself twice, from the solar panels. 😅

        • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5 hours

          they can try it. my town is armed and legitimately loves its library. liberal hick towns are weird.

          • TotalCourage007@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1 hour

            My proposal would be to turn Libraries into an Open Source datacenter. Wrestle back some control from these power hungry freaks.

          • cpaq47@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3 hours

            liberal hick towns Didn’t know that was a thing. Where do you live?!

            • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3 hours

              bay area california. not petaluma, but check out petaluma. that’s a good example, it’s where my dad grew up. when you get a good mix of rural and urban beautiful things happen. the people who don’t usually mix, they mix. and those barriers come down.

    • OBJECTION!@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6 hours

      I don’t understand how there’s ever a business model since people can just run their own models locally.

      • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1 hour

        If you wanted to run something at the quality of the best models its many many thousands of dollars.

        The smaller models have their place, but have their own problems.

        I do like what Apple is doing with their unified memory making things more accessible, but its not cheap, just cheaper.

        I think you can run a decent sized deepseek for under 5k, and a top notch one for around 10k?

      • reliv3@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3 hours

        The goal is to make personal computing hardware so expensive that the average person cannot afford to do that. 😬

        • Kaligalis@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2 hours

          That will not work long-term. When prices are high for a long time, it becomes more and more attractive for governments to start their own foundries for economic and strategic reasons. And while that is not easy, China is on its way, ASML and Zeiss actually are European companies, and no one starts at zero because there are a ton of patents which already expired or expire soon.
          A fully industrialized nation which really wants to make chips can make chips. Making the best chips is pretty darn hard, but making the chips from a few years ago is doable for China and the US right now, and the EU in ten years.
          On a bloc level it makes sense to have your own foundries independent of foreign influence just for military and infrastructure reasons alone.

    • BigMacHole@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      6 hours

      It’s a GOOD thing for Samuel Alterman that Intelligence ISNT something you could get WITHOUT AI! People don’t know that even PLATO had AI to Help Him!