Ai Will Help Lower Prices, But Could Be Used By Authoritarian Governments, Openai Ceo Sam Altman Says
Published February 10, 2025 9:32am EST
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicts that artificial general intelligence will lead to lower costs for many goods, but has also warned that AI could be leveraged by authoritarian governments aiming to control people.
Altman explained in a blog post that AGI generally refers to "a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields." He noted that systems "are coming into view" which begin "to point to AGI."
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, speaks during a panel discussion titled "The Age of AI" at the Technical University of Berlin on Feb. 7, 2025, in Berlin, Germany. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
"Although some industries will change very little, scientific progress will likely be much faster than it is today; this impact of AGI may surpass everything else," he noted.
Altman suggested that while prices for many goods will decrease, some things, such as land, could see significant price increases.
"The price of many goods will eventually fall dramatically (right now, the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy constrain a lot of things), and the price of luxury goods and a few inherently limited resources like land may rise even more dramatically," he wrote.
While Altman predicted that AI will permeate society, he also warned that the power of AI could be harnessed by authoritarian governments.
"AI will seep into all areas of the economy and society; we will expect everything to be smart. Many of us expect to need to give people more control over the technology than we have historically, including open-sourcing more, and accept that there is a balance between safety and individual empowerment that will require trade-offs," he wrote.
"While we never want to be reckless and there will likely be some major decisions and limitations related to AGI safety that will be unpopular, directionally, as we get closer to achieving AGI, we believe that trending more towards individual empowerment is important; the other likely path we can see is AI being used by authoritarian governments to control their population through mass surveillance and loss of autonomy."
It is important to make certain that "the benefits of AGI are broadly distributed," Altman asserted.
He suggested that "the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may require early intervention. 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."
