Intelligence only for upfront payment: How OpenAI sells you intelligence

At the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit in Washington, Sam Altman uttered the phrase that encapsulates the business model of the entire AI industry: "We envision a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us by the meter." Thinking by the meter. The electricity meter for the brain, read by a corporation that has previously extracted its product from the intellectual property of half of humanity. The audience didn't laugh, but nod in agreement—after all, they weren't thinkingers, but infrastructure investors.

The meter reader introduces himself
The setting was as honest as rarely before: Altman chatted in mid-March with Adebayo Ogunlesi, a top executive at BlackRock and also a member of OpenAI's board of directors. The interviewer, therefore, sits on the supervisory board of the interviewee, and both explain to a room full of money managers how to profit from humanity's thinking in the future. Altman was refreshingly blunt: The business of OpenAI, and every other model provider, essentially boils down to selling tokens, and whoever gains access ultimately determines the available computing power. In other words: Those who pay, think. Those who pay more, think faster. And those who don't pay, wait in line.

Stolen, compressed, rented back
The outrage was less than 24 hours away and hit the sore spot with surgical precision. Gizmodo He summed it up simply: the very man whose company scraped together its training material from books, articles, artwork, and forum posts from millions of people—unpaid, unsolicited, and with copyright at best creatively interpreted—is now trying to collect the bills. Decades of collective human creation were siphoned off for free, pressed into models, and are now being rented back, token by token, to the very people who supplied the raw material. In the comment sections As one user succinctly put it: Someone is seriously selling a subscription model for thinking. AI here no longer stands for artificial intelligence, but for capitalist intelligence – a hyped business model built on the biggest heist of intellectual property in history.

The neighbors pay for electricity and water.
The comparison to electricity and water is unintentionally more honest than intended, because this AI consumes both in industrial quantities. The data centers where this meter-precise thinking is produced devour electricity, cooling water, land, and grid capacity, while The electricity bills of the residents are rising. – Environmental activist Erin Brockovich commissioned a public map of the data centers to document their impact on the affected communities.

The punchline is self-explanatory: genuine utilities become more expensive because the self-proclaimed new utility consumes them. So, in the future, you'll be paying three times over – more for electricity, more for water, and on top of that, the meter fee for outsourced thinking. Ecologically, this is heading towards a predictable catastrophe; intellectually, it's leading to a generation of consumers who outsource thinking as naturally as they outsource mental arithmetic to a calculator.

It becomes particularly hilarious when you know which historical phrase Altman invoked in the same conversation: "Too cheap to meter"—the legendary promise of the nuclear lobby from the 1950s that nuclear energy would one day become so cheap that reading a meter would no longer be worthwhile. Anyone who has ever opened an electricity bill knows how that story ended. And it is precisely this classic example of broken technological promises that is quoted by a man whose business model literally consists of the meter. The irony is so blatant that not even an AI could miss it—except perhaps its creator.

Publicly regulated or privately collected
And here lies the crux of the matter, often lost in the uproar surrounding the quote: Intelligence as infrastructure is not an absurd idea at all. Electricity has revolutionized industry, water is essential for life, and both are considered so fundamental that no civilized country would leave them to an unchecked private monopoly. Public services are subject to price controls, mandatory connection, a basic service obligation, and democratic oversight—all of which Altman opposes. He wants the revenue of a utility company without its obligations, a monopoly without a regulator, a meter without the sovereign. If intelligence truly becomes the basic infrastructure of the 21st century, permeating education, work, creativity, and decision-making, then the crucial question is not whether it costs anything, but who pays the price: the public according to democratic principles, or a corporation based on quarterly results. The industry's answer has already been given, and it is the latter. Intelligence thus becomes a class issue: The wealthy buy the premium models and with them the cognitive advantage, while the rest get the advertising-funded residual intelligence—or nothing at all if the meter stops. How AI and the monetary system intertwine to form an instrument of power., has already been discussed here and also The question of what remains of a person when they delegate thinking..

When the meter stops
Society is thus splitting in two ways – into the super-rich and the paupers on the one hand, and into people who still want to think for themselves and those who let others do the thinking for them on the other. Doubly stupid, one might say, were it not so deadly serious. Tech companies couldn't wish for a better clientele than a population that subscribes to its own judgment. Electricity once freed the workbench; the intelligence meter chains the brain to the credit card. First, they stole the world's knowledge, then they sold it back to us as progress. Tomorrow, those who can't pay their intelligence bill will have their thinking cut off, just like electricity cut off for delinquent tenants – and the industry calls this the "democratization of intelligence"! What a time, when we're supposed to pay for the only good that nature has previously provided for free!