2d • General Discussion 💬
Sam Altman just confirmed what builders already know
Sam Altman said something at the BlackRock Infrastructure
Summit this week that crystallized a lot of my thinking.
"We see a future where intelligence is a utility like
electricity or water and people buy it from us on a
meter."
I've been saying a version of this for nearly a year.
My one-liner in conversations: "We don't buy tools
from the electricity company."
We buy refrigerators from Samsung. TVs from LG. Light
bulbs from Philips. Electricity just powers them.
AI tokens are heading the same direction. The model
providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) will sell the raw
intelligence. Everyone else builds specific tools that
consume those tokens for specific jobs.
Voice generation tools. Code review tools. Customer
support automation. Research tools. Analytics platforms.
Each one tailored to a workflow, a user, a problem.
The model providers become the power grid.
Everyone else builds the appliances.
I'm not theorizing. I'm living this right now.
I'm building 5+ AI-native products and services as a
solo founder. One person. No team, no employees.
A decade ago I tried something similar and failed badly.
The infrastructure didn't exist. You needed teams of
engineers and real capital to build anything meaningful.
Today the infrastructure is here. One person can ship
real products in weeks that would have taken months with
a full team.
People keep asking me "is AI a bubble?" I push back
every time. I'm in it every day, building in the trenches.
This doesn't feel like a bubble. It feels like a utility
going live.
For the automation builders here: how are you thinking
about this shift? Are you building tools on top of AI
APIs? And does the "utility" framing change how you
think about your product's long-term defensibility?
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Sam Altman just confirmed what builders already know
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