OpenAI CEO: Compute Shortage May Become Permanent, Favors Citizen Wealth Fund Over UBI

According to Dongcha Beating monitoring, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlined the development trend of the next decade in the Stanford University CS 153 course. He noted that a global shortage of computing power could become a permanent issue. Looking ahead, he is more inclined to democratize technology and have the whole society hold capital shares through a "Citizen Wealth Fund," rather than relying on a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the form of cash handouts.

Altman sees computing power as the most critical public utility of the future. He believes that the smarter the models and the lower the cost, the more unlimited the demand for computing power will be. Especially with the proliferation of personal intelligent agents, users tend to have dozens or even hundreds of agents working in parallel around the clock. The massive demand for inference computing power will lead to a permanent computing power gap. Once computing power prices are severely imbalanced due to supply and demand, fairly distributing computing power will become an urgent societal issue.

In terms of the distribution of social wealth and control, Altman assesses an 80% probability of moving towards the democratic path of widespread technological distribution. However, he warns that forces under the guise of security and stability will attempt to concentrate power among a few giants. He bluntly stated that even if OpenAI is part of it, the world should not tolerate a few companies monopolizing the enormous wealth brought by AI. As the social leverage continues to shift from labor to capital, Altman is more optimistic about the "Citizen Wealth Fund" model where the public collectively holds ownership of corporate shares, enabling the masses to share in the long-term dividends of capitalism.