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Lower-cost AI could lead to lower-cost products but more expensive luxury items, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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The cost of using any given level of artificial intelligence falls by approximately ten-fold every year and could lead to a dramatic decrease in the price of goods, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a blog post about AI economics on Feb. 9.
Altman referred to the cost falling by around 150 times from the firm’s GPT-4 model in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024.
This is dramatically faster than Moore’s Law, he said, referring to the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years, leading to greater processing power, efficiency and reduced costs for electronic devices.
“In some ways, AI may turn out to be like the transistor economically — a big scientific discovery that scales well and that seeps into almost every corner of the economy,” he said.
Altman predicted that the price of many goods would eventually fall dramatically, adding:
“Right now, the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy constrain a lot of things.”
However, the price of luxury goods and a few inherently limited resources like land “may rise even more dramatically,” he said.
Evolution of transistors according to Moore’s Law. Source: ResearchGate
Altman said he was open to ways to bring AI benefits to everyone globally, possibly through ideas like providing “compute budgets.”
“We are open to strange-sounding ideas like giving some ‘compute budget’ to enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI, but we can also see a lot of ways where just relentlessly driving the cost of intelligence as low as possible has the desired effect.”
Altman concluded that continuously driving down the cost of AI could help democratize access to its capabilities, with the goal that by 2035, any individual should have access to intellectual capacity equivalent to everyone in 2025.
“Everyone should have access to unlimited genius to direct however they can imagine.”
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The cost of AI was put into the spotlight in January when the launch of the latest low-cost AI model from Chinese developer DeepSeek rattled stock markets, with US companies such as Nvidia, which produces higher-cost hardware, taking a big hit.
Meanwhile, Chinese automakers, technology and leading telecoms firms are already integrating the DeepSeek AI model into their offerings, according to a Feb. 9 Reuters report.
This article first appeared at Cointelegraph.com News
