Another Monday morning, and my coffee’s getting cold while I try to make sense of Sam Altman’s latest prophecy about our AI-powered future. The Oracle of OpenAI has spoken, and apparently, we’re all going to need “compute budgets” just to exist in tomorrow’s world. Think of it as your monthly bourbon allowance, except instead of sweet Kentucky nectar, you’re buying the right to ask a machine what tie goes with your shirt.
Let me break this down while I pour myself something stronger than coffee.
Altman’s throwing around terms like “compute budgets” like they’re going to be as common as bar tabs. His vision? A world where AI is as essential as electricity, where every Tom, Dick, and Harry needs their daily dose of digital wisdom just to keep up. The real kicker? Not everyone’s going to be able to afford their AI fix.
You know what this reminds me of? Those fancy craft cocktail bars where they charge you $18 for what’s essentially brown water with an orange peel. Sure, they’ll tell you it’s “artisanal” and “small-batch,” but at the end of the day, you’re paying for the privilege of feeling sophisticated. Now imagine that instead of overpriced cocktails, we’re talking about access to basic life functions.
The whole thing reads like a dystopian bar menu where the house special is “Digital Divide on the Rocks.”
Some tech optimists are pointing to projects like DeepSeek R1, claiming we can build these systems for pennies on the dollar. Right, and I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. These are the same folks who thought the internet would make information free and democratic. How’s that working out for your monthly streaming subscriptions?
Here’s where it gets really interesting: They’re talking about “National AI Compute Reserves” and “AI Access Acts.” Imagine standing in line at the DMV, except instead of renewing your license, you’re begging for more AI tokens because you’ve run out of your monthly allowance. “Sorry sir, you’ve exceeded your small talk quota with your AI companion. Would you like to upgrade to our premium plan?”
The really rich part? They’re floating the idea of AI tokens becoming a universal digital currency. Because apparently, regular money isn’t complicated enough. Soon we’ll all be counting our digital pennies, trying to decide if we can afford to ask the AI for help with our taxes or if we should save those tokens for having it write our resignation letter.
And let’s not forget the inevitable black market. You think bootlegging was bad during Prohibition? Wait until you see the underground compute farms, running illegal AI instances out of basement servers. “Psst, buddy, want some unauthorized neural network access? First hit’s free…”
The whole thing reads like a bad science fiction novel written by an economist with a drinking problem. But here’s the truth bomb: Altman might be right. Not because he’s some kind of tech prophet, but because this is exactly how humans operate. We take something potentially revolutionary and immediately start figuring out how to monetize it, ration it, and use it to create new social hierarchies.
You want to know the real punch line? While we’re all scrambling to afford our AI allowances, the machines will probably be laughing at how we managed to turn infinite digital potential into another form of social currency. It’s like we learned nothing from history except how to make the same mistakes with fancier technology.
Look, I need another drink just thinking about this future. But before I go, here’s my prediction: The real winners in this brave new world won’t be the ones with the biggest compute budgets - they’ll be the ones who figure out how to game the system. Because if there’s one thing humans are better at than creating arbitrary rules, it’s finding creative ways around them.
And that’s all I’ve got for today. Time to check my own compute budget - or as I like to call it, the bourbon fund.
Stay human, Henry C.
P.S. If you’re reading this via an AI text-to-speech program, I hope you had enough tokens left to make it to the end.
Source: Analyzing Sam Altman’s Prediction Of Humanity ‘Compute Budgets’ As Pinnacle AI Nears