Sam Altman’s beautiful blog post “The Gentle Singularity” hides its most important message in the very last line: 

Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp.

That is exactly the vision #KevinKelly laid out back in 2016 in his book  #TheInevitable. He wrote:

There’s nothing as consequential as a dumb thing made smarter. Even a very tiny amount of useful intelligence embedded into an existing process boosts its effectiveness to a whole other level. The advantages gained from cognifying inert things would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than the transformations gained by industrialization.

Ilya Levin, I’m grateful you put that book on my reading list.

Optimism meets human nature

Altman’s opening reads like the work of an over-excited optimist. We know his child is still very young; in another two or three years—when Sam is coaxing a toddler to finish breakfast—he may rediscover how conservative and stubborn humans can be. He writes:

We are past the event horizon; the take-off has started. Humanity is close to building digital super-intelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.

He then adds:

Already we live with incredible digital intelligence, and after some initial shock most of us are pretty used to it… This is how the singularity goes: wonders become routine, and then table stakes.

The leap from awe-inspiring demos to reliable daily reality is not automatic.

Questioning OpenAI’s strategy 

Reading Sam’s piece, I finally understand why OpenAI so often stumbles on business decisions (more on that later). 

One passage strikes me as the weakest vision statement I’ve seen in years:

OpenAI is a lot of things now, but before anything else, we are a super-intelligence research company. We have a lot of work in front of us, but most of the path in front of us is now lit, and the dark areas are receding fast. We feel extraordinarily grateful to get to do what we do.

Inspiring, perhaps, but what is the team supposed to do on Monday morning? How are priorities set? Does buying WindSurf fit this mission? How does the Saudi project advance “super-intelligence research”?

Altman then offers a “best path forward” for the next five to ten years, and it contains just two points—here they are with the fuller wording he used:

1️⃣ “First, we must solve the alignment problem—that is, achieve a robust guarantee that any advanced AI system we build will reliably learn and act according to what humanity collectively wants, both now and far into the future.”

2️⃣ “Second, once alignment is in hand, we should focus on making super-intelligence inexpensive, ubiquitously accessible, and never so concentrated that any single person, company, or nation can control it.”

Noble goals, but each is so vast that no one can break it into concrete, measurable steps. A plan that cannot be translated into milestones is not really a plan.

The access divide

Altman acknowledges that “it is critically important to widely distribute access to super-intelligence given the economic implications.”

Yet 🇪🇹 Ethiopia still cannot use GPT-4 or Claude. Without U.S.-dollar credit cards, people there are locked out, and Anthropic even blocks Ethiopian IP addresses. None of these multibillion-dollar labs has bothered to accept payments in birr or to integrate local payment rails.

I admire the ambition behind “intelligence too cheap to meter,” but until the labs can turn grand slogans into practical roadmaps—and until they accept birr as readily as dollars—the singularity will remain gentle only for those who can afford the meter.