Sam Altman Says Intelligence Will Be a Utility, and He’s Just the Man to Collect the Bills

In an appearance at BlackRock’s U.S. Infrastructure Summit on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offered a surprisingly clear articulation of how he imagines the future of artificial intelligence—it’s just not clear if he meant it the way that it sounded.

While speaking with Adebayo Ogunlesi (who happens to be a member of OpenAI’s board of directors), Altman said, “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter,” which conjures up the nightmarish image of someone being unable to pay their intelligence bill. Altman expanded on this idea, stating that his company has a “fundamental belief in abundance of intelligence” and arguing, “One of the most important things in the future is that we make intelligence, to borrow an old phrase from the energy industry that didn’t quite work: ‘Too cheap to meter.’”

Evoking energy costs is a bold choice for Altman, because the failure to ever achieve that “too cheap to meter” status has turned AI expansion into a major pain point for residents who have the displeasure of calling a data center their neighbor. Altman’s company and the industry he’s become the face of have been responsible for skyrocketing energy costs across the country (though they’re at least starting to agree to fit the bill).

Also, describing intelligence as “too cheap to meter” doesn’t quite sound the same as when that phrase is applied to energy—it seems more akin to “you get what you pay for.” But Altman’s point is simple enough: AI companies are currently in the business of selling “tokens”—the units that models use to process and generate—and as demand scales up, compute becomes finite, meaning companies will either have to charge more per unit or just not meet demand.

Avoiding that outcome, where access to AI comes with a big bill, means a rapid expansion of processing power, which isn’t exactly cheap itself. And while OpenAI and other firms have agreed to pick up the tab on energy costs for these projects, the funding for those data center buildouts is starting to look shaky. OpenAI just backed out of a planned expansion to its Stargate project in Texas due to financing issues.

The way Altman is talking, suggesting that intelligence could be a utility, it’s hard not to recall previous comments from him and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar calling on the federal government to essentially guarantee their investments. Friar said she expects a federal “backstop” to guarantee the company will be able to finance its massive and rapidly expanding data center infrastructure. Altman echoed the comments in a separate appearance, stating, “Given the magnitude of what I expect AI’s economic impact to look like, I do think the government ends up as the insurer of last resort.”

The execs later walked back the suggestion that the government treats them as “too big to fail,” but it seems like Altman is once again dabbling in that suggestion, albeit less directly. By suggesting intelligence as a “utility,” there is a tacit acknowledgement that it will need to be subsidized by the government, the way other utilities are. He’s just seemingly left out that particular part of his roadmap to the future.