- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long supported the idea of a universal basic income.
- Many in AI think a universal basic income could help mitigate the impacts of the tech on workers.
- Altman floated a new kind of basic income last week that he calls “universal basic compute.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has an interesting new idea to help those struggling financially.
He calls it “universal basic compute.”
“Everybody gets like a slice of GPT-7’s compute,” he said on the “All-In” podcast. “They can use it, they can resell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research.”
The idea is that as AI becomes more advanced and embedded into more facets of our lives, owning a unit of a large language model like GPT-7 could be more valuable than money. “You own, like, part of the productivity,” he said.
Altman has long supported a universal basic income — a recurring cash payment, no strings attached, made to all adults in a given population regardless of their wealth and employment status. Altman, like many others in the tech industry, sees universal basic income as a safety net for people as AI threatens their jobs.
Altman started his own basic-income experiment in 2016 and said on “All-In” that its results would be released soon. Fortune reported that the program provided cash payments of $50 to $1,000 a month to more than 3,000 enrollees over a three-year period.
Cities and states across the United States have experimented with a version of this called guaranteed basic income. These programs have given no-strings-attached cash payments to people based on demonstrated need or social status instead of to a population as a whole.
Many of these programs have shown positive results, though some conservatives have pushed back on what they see as a form of welfare that could discourage people from working. The Supreme Court of Texas recently blocked a Houston-area program from giving low-income people $500 a month.
Altman didn’t elaborate on how his so-called “universal basic compute” would work, but it’s certain to raise some eyebrows from conservatives and liberals alike.