Sam Altman Envisions an Era of Abundant, Affordable Intelligence as AI Transforms the Global Economy

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman painted a bold picture of artificial intelligence’s future during a wide-ranging conversation with Federal Reserve Vice Chair Michelle Bowman this week in Washington, D.C., where he likened AI’s societal impact to that of the transistor and predicted a coming era of “intelligence too cheap to meter.”

Speaking at the Federal Reserve’s Integrated Review of the Capital Framework for Large Banks Conference, Altman emphasized the extraordinary pace at which AI capabilities and adoption have evolved since the debut of ChatGPT in late 2022. Once viewed as futuristic, AI has become foundational in sectors from software development to scientific research.

Developers now report being 10 times more productive with AI tools, Altman said, and even complex tasks can be completed in minutes at a fraction of the former cost.

He described a near-term future in which the idea of an “AI company” becomes obsolete—because intelligence will be a built-in feature of nearly every product and service. In finance specifically, early adopters such as Morgan Stanley and Bank of New York have already begun using AI for core business functions.

Altman also underscored AI’s deflationary effect on the cost of intelligence. “We’ve been able to drive down the cost of each unit of intelligence by more than a factor of 10 each year for the last five years,” he said, sharing that a coding task that previously took days now takes mere minutes and costs under a dollar.

While the promise is immense, Altman acknowledged profound challenges ahead. He predicted significant labor shifts, with entire job categories disappearing and new ones emerging. But echoing a familiar economic cycle, he argued that enhanced productivity has historically led to more human ambition, not less. “People seem to want unlimited stuff,” he said, adding that he still awaits the long-promised leisure utopia from earlier industrial revolutions.

The conversation didn’t delve into global trade dynamics, labor displacement from outsourcing, or the effects of protectionist policies. However, Altman did raise sharp concerns about AI-related risks—particularly synthetic media and impersonation. He warned that AI now defeats most traditional identity verification systems aside from passwords, creating new vulnerabilities for banks and consumers alike.

He outlined three primary risks: misuse of highly capable AI by bad actors, scenarios involving loss of control over AI systems, and the societal erosion of human agency as people become emotionally and operationally over-reliant on intelligent systems. This latter trend, he noted, is already surfacing among younger generations.

Still, Altman was optimistic about AI’s potential to democratize access to expertise in underserved regions, where tools like ChatGPT can serve as a stand-in for professionals that are otherwise unavailable. “In many places, the alternative to an AI doctor isn’t a human doctor—it’s nothing at all,” he said.

Throughout the discussion, he urged policymakers and business leaders to adopt a proactive but balanced approach to AI regulation—encouraging innovation while remaining vigilant about emerging risks. In closing, he called on governments to actively embrace the next generation of AI, which he said is moving rapidly toward advanced reasoning and decision-making. “We’ll be able to do everything better,” he said, “if we do this right.”