https://preview.redd.it/7jadvztythpg1.jpg?width=1793&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=436cfebe003aef6888cb0ddc917fc8bce656edf7 Altman spoke at BlackRock’s Infrastructure Summit this week and said something that crystallized what I’ve been thinking about for months. “We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for.” I’ve been using a version of this analogy in conversations for nearly a year now, and I keep coming back to one line: we don’t buy tools from the electricity company. Think about electricity for a second. We have power companies. They generate and distribute electricity. But we don’t buy our refrigerator from them. We don’t buy our television from them. We don’t buy our light bulbs from them. Those are products that companies build ON TOP of the utility. The electricity just powers them. AI tokens are headed the same direction. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, whoever wins the model race, they’ll sell the raw intelligence by the token. And then thousands of companies will build specific tools that consume those tokens for particular jobs. Voice generation tools. Code review tools. Design tools. Research tools. Customer support tools. Each one tailored for a specific workflow, a specific user, a specific problem. The model providers become the power grid. Everyone else builds the appliances. This isn’t theory for me. I’m building 5+ AI-native products and services right now. As one person. No team, no employees, no co-founders. A decade ago I tried building ambitious software products solo. I failed badly. Not because the ideas were wrong, but because the infrastructure didn’t exist. You needed a team of engineers, designers, PMs. You needed capital. Today, AI is that infrastructure. I can build things in weeks that would have taken months with a full team. The “electricity” is flowing, and suddenly one person with the right tools can build real products. That’s why I push back hard when people ask me “is AI a bubble?” I’m in it every day, building real things, shipping real products, serving real users. This doesn’t feel like 1999. It feels like the first decade after household electricity went mainstream. Suddenly everyone could plug in a radio, a vacuum, a washing machine. Not because those products were new ideas. But because the power to run them was finally accessible. The question shouldn’t be “is AI a bubble?” It should be “what are you going to plug into the wall?” Curious what others here think. Do you buy the utility analogy? And if AI does become metered like electricity, what does that do to the current crop of AI startups that are basically reskinned API wrappers? submitted by /u/Numerous-Exercise788
Originally posted by u/Numerous-Exercise788 on r/ArtificialInteligence