> In private conversations, Mr. Altman has compared the world’s data centers to electricity, according to three people close to the discussions. As the availabi

> In private conversations, Mr. Altman has compared the world’s data centers to electricity, according to three people close to the discussions. As the availability of electricity became more widespread, people found better ways of using it. Mr. Altman hoped to do the same with data centers and eventually make A.I. technologies flow like electricity. Reminds me of a quote I saved from Kevin Kelly's book The Inevitable, which was published in 2016. I saved it because it sounded so absurd at the time. To be clear, it sort of still does sound absurd to me, who remain moderately skeptical about AI (though admittedly less so than in 2016, largely because of the following sentence). What's very serious is how much money and old-fashioned brainpower is going into making this future real. I don't know whether the metaphor was arrived at independently, derives from the same source, or is just an obvious way of thinking about the world when you've drunk the right flavor of Kool-Aid. > Amid all this activity, of a picture of our AI future is coming into view, and it is not the HAL 9000—a discrete machine animated by a charismatic (yet potentially homicidal) humanlike consciousness—or a Singularitan rapture of superintelligence. The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off. This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need. You’ll simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity. It will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century past. Three generations ago, many a tinkerer struck it rich by taking a tool and making an electric version. Take a manual pump; electrify it. Find a hand-wringer washer; electrify it. The entrepreneurs didn’t need to generate the electricity; they brought it from the grid and used it to automate the previously manual. Now everything that we formerly electrified we will cognify. There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or more valuable by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it.