OpenAI’s Sam Altman says he wants intelligence to flow like electricity and charge humans for every drop

OpenAI’s founder and CEO Sam Altman sat before a massive crowd at a conference and said with a straight face that: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and then we’ll make people buy it from us on a meter.” Chilling, isn’t it?

Sam said OpenAI expects demand to keep rising as AI becomes harder to separate from serious work. “The demand that we see for that seems like it’s going to continue to just go like this. When can a CEO of a major company, a president of a major country, a Nobel Prize winning scientist, when can they not do their job without making heavy use of AI? This doesn’t mean that there will be an AI CEO or an AI president,” said Sam.

Sam Altman says leaders will use AI because one person cannot manage every detail alone

“We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water,” Sam added. He added that people would “buy it from us on a meter” and use it for whatever they want.

Sam believes the role of a human CEO is already changing because no single person can cover every corner of a big company. He said:

“You still do need a person to stand behind decisions and kind of exercise human judgment and all of the understanding that we expect out of someone running a an important organization to do. But the actual parts of my role that I will increasingly have to rely on an AI to do because no human can.”

Sam’s view is that top jobs will become more about watching AI systems, checking their work, choosing when to trust them, and giving them direction. The human stays in charge, but the job becomes less about doing every task and more about managing the machines doing the work.

Sam said this threshold may take “a little bit longer,” but “probably not a lot longer.”

Sam Altman says OpenAI’s tools already shape his own business decisions

Sam also said he is already leaning on OpenAI’s own agents and AI tools inside his daily job.

“It’s ramping incredibly quickly,” he said.

He said when he gets a new idea for a business model, a product, or a strategy change, he asks OpenAI’s tools before he speaks to another person about it.

Sam said the answers get better when the systems have more company context, like internal documents, communication, code, customer data, and other company information, as the kind of material that can improve AI output. (This is absolutely not a good idea.)

“As they can get close to full context of our company,” he said, “the quality of the answers gets better and better.”

During the interview, Sam referred to the recent reports surrounding OpenAI, which raised $110 billion through an investment round just two weeks prior to the discussion. Among others, Amazon, Nvidia, and Softbank participated in the fundraising.

He likened the fundraising to the public market and mentioned that the latter was four times smaller than the record-setting largest public offering ever made. It is worth noting that the public market deal was $25 billion raised by Saudi Aramco. Simply put, even though the public market should theoretically provide the largest amounts of money available, OpenAI raised more privately.

Then, the interviewer wanted to know how OpenAI would be spending that vast amount of money. Sam did not really answer that, though.

At another tech conference this week, Sam also admitted that some of his earlier job-market warnings were off. He had previously said AI could remove “entire classes” of jobs, especially as companies adopted the technology after ChatGPT launched in 2022.

“My scorecard, at the highest level, would be we’ve been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications,” Sam said during a conversation with Matt Comyn, CEO of Commonwealth Bank of Australia ($CBA.AX).

Matt’s conversation with Sam was summarized on Tuesday.

Sam said the near-term hit to entry-level white-collar jobs has not been as bad as he expected.

“I’m delighted to be wrong about that,” Sam said.

That is a major change from his older tone. In 2023, Sam told The Atlantic that jobs would “definitely” go away as companies used AI more widely. He also said better jobs would be created after that. Last year, at a Federal Reserve conference, Sam warned that “entire classes” of jobs would vanish.