OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has a cool new idea for distributing free resources to people.
“Everyone is entitled to a share of the GPT-7 calculation,” he said on the All-In podcast. “They can use it, resell it, or donate it to someone to use in cancer research.”
The idea is that as AI becomes advanced – and integrated into more facets of our lives – owning a unit of a large language model like GPT-7 may be more valuable than money. “You own some of the productivity,” he said.
Altman has long supported a universal basic income – a recurring, no-strings-attached cash payment to all adults in a given population, regardless of their wealth and employment status. Altman, like many others in the tech sector, sees universal basic income as a safety net for individuals as AI threatens their jobs.
Altman launched his own UBI experiment in 2016, the results of which he said would soon be published on the podcast. The program provided payments of between $50 and $1,000 per month to more than 3,000 enrollees, according to Fortune.
Cities and states across the United States have experimented with a version of this system called guaranteed basic income. These programs provide unconditional cash payments to people based on their demonstrated need or social and societal status rather than the population as a whole.
Most of these programs have produced positive results, although conservatives increasingly oppose what they see as a form of welfare that could discourage people from working. In Texas, the state Supreme Court recently blocked a Houston-area program from providing $500 a month to low-income people.
Altman didn’t explain how his so-called “universal basic calculus” would work, but he’s sure it will raise some eyebrows — conservatives and liberals alike.
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