The heads of big tech companies have an ingenious model for the development of artificial intelligence - they will rely on public money and the knowledge of all mankind. And he will keep the profit for himself. Who cares if they come and destroy the planet
Sam Altman, the director of OpenAI, recently tried to answer the criticism that AI has a negative impact on the environmentHe chose a strange angle.
"It's not fair when people compare how much energy it takes to train an AI model versus how much it takes a human to do a questionable operation," Altman said in interview which he gave on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit, because, as he says, "it takes a lot of energy to train a human." Specifically, 20 years of life, Altman says, plus "all the food you eat during that time before you get smart."
It doesn't stop there: "It also took the evolution of a hundred billion people who have ever lived, to learn how not to be eaten by predators, how to understand science and everything, to create - you. If you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take - once the model is trained - to answer that question, compared to a human?"
"Measured that way," Altman argues, "AI has probably already caught up with humans in energy efficiency."
"Fantastic!" replies the presenter.
Really fantastic. Back then, sheep ate people. Now AI does it. Because from the point of view of capital, a person is a means of gaining profit - either as a worker or as a consumer. All in all – a necessary evil.
But behind the grotesque, it sounds bizarre when Altman says that it took the entire evolution of humanity for one man to type a task into his AI tool. It's as if the AI created itself. The whole thing actually big tech behaves like some kind of deus ex machina, who simply appeared.
That the entire Internet technology was created thanks to the mass public investments is another discomfort of modern billionaires. What can we say about the fact that Altman's company trained its "large language models" on data that represents the unpaid collective labor and knowledge of an entire society. The technological giants have "fenced off" and appropriated for free the entire digital work of humanity - codes, forums, books, art...
It is an undeniable fact that original accumulation data, as well as the use of public money of all citizens, went to build an important tool that is monopolized by a small number of people.
In the same interview, Altman, less noticed, talks about the fact that, due to the needs of companies, even stronger cooperation with the state will be necessary.
"I think that tech industry based on the libertarian view 'we don't need the state, the state doesn't need us'. That has changed a lot in the past couple of decades, as companies have grown," said Altman and concluded that cooperation with the state has never been so important, given the volume of infrastructure that companies need.
big tech, therefore, counts on public money as a resource. The recipe is established: the base is built with the taxpayers' money, the losses are socialized, and the profits are appropriated by the companies.
In order for the equation to be complete, it should also be emphasized that it is the money of real taxpayers, the poorer ones, who allocate several tens of percent of their income to the public treasury, and not billionaires like Altman who pay 0,1 percent, if even that much.
Because, although his fortune is estimated at two billion dollars, Altman's salary is a paltry $75.000 a year. As the system is designed to tax labor and much less capital, billionaires pay virtually nothing. But they use public money and public resources for their entrepreneurial adventures.
Companies will not become independent from public money, but the question arises whether AI models can become completely independent from humans as a source of new information, taking into account that the existing collective knowledge has already been absorbed. This would close the value circle in which technology corporations own both the "teacher" (data) and the "student" (model).
We can make the assumption that, if the models start learning exclusively from synthetic data, they enter the process of self-referential production in which the connection with social reality and the real needs of humanity is lost. The result can be a hyperproduction of information that is potentially completely useless for human emancipation, but serves to maintain the dominance of technological monopolies.
There is no doubt that AI is bringing impressive technological leaps. However, the problem arises when tools with such civilizational potential are locked in private hands.
Namely, the technological giants position themselves as modern rentiers whose goal is to set up "toll booths" for access to general knowledge based on public resources and the evolution of the hundred billion people mentioned by Altman.
Their business model boils down to renting infrastructure to other companies. Those companies then use AI to further enhance exploitation and extract profits – by reducing the cost of labor, mass layoffs – and maximizing billings from end consumers. At the end of the cycle, a huge part of the squeezed wealth flows into the accounts of a few big tech company, through licenses and subscriptions.
Meanwhile, the expansion of artificial intelligence has led to during 2025 released into the atmosphere the amount of carbon dioxide - estimated as high as 80 million tons - equal to that emitted by the whole of New York.
Water consumption associated with AI systems is estimated at 765 billion liters, and exceeds the entire world's demand for bottled water. Given that the data center building frenzy has only just begun, electricity consumption is expected to more than double by 2030.
The largest data centers being built today will individually consume as much electricity as two million households collectively, with the US leading the total consumption (45 percent), followed by China (25 percent) and Europe (15 percent).
Currently, all of these astronomical costs are borne by society, not technology companies, which brings us back to the central question of fairness: if only companies are reaping the profits and benefits from this technology, why shouldn't they also bear its real cost?
When the line is drawn, big tech are, in fact, big takers – great value extractors.
When asked by the host what advice he would give to Xi Jinping, Modi, Putin and Trump about one thing they should do for the future of the people in the context of AI, Altman replied: "I would tell everyone the same thing that they should democratize technology and put it in the hands of the people, but obviously not everyone will listen."
It sounds noble. If we forget that it is a person who reduces a person to an energy efficiency inferior to an algorithm, and uses public (democratic) resources without reservation for his own enrichment.
The author is a sociologist, researcher and editor of the Rupture blog, program coordinator at the Center for Emancipation Politics
Serbia is playing against Germany for points that could save it a place in the League of Nations. In front of almost empty stands, Paunović's team welcomes a selection that also has no room for error
The editors of "Vremena" received a request for denials to the article "Parents of Elementary School '20. Oktobar' tonight demand the resignation of the principal" published on October 29. We transmit it in its entirety and without changes
Like before Caro Claire Burke not only exposed the false image of a traditional woman in America, but also showed the level of women's rights in general - feminists claim. This novel is a direct attack on the traditional way of life - according to conservative Christian women
Forty years of a hairy creature who survived a nuclear disaster on Malmak, and everything he knows about America he learned from an advertising-paid program
In the underdeveloped south, where the saying Pyrrhic victory was born, where 813 men were killed because they did not want to convert to Islam, where the ancient Romans saw war elephants for the first time and many other unrepeatable things
At the moment when the institutions of the Republic are destroyed, when Vučić's octopus is still alive, when people are disgusted by the injustice and the stench left behind by the Essenes regime, we have, as Machiavelli said, only civic virtue as the fuel with which we can return to the beginning
The four independent members of REM are an example of perseverance and civic responsibility. Rodoljub Šabić even, upon leaving the premises of REM, after the sentencing of the Informer, experienced that the Essenes insulted him, hit him with their hands and feet. But that too will soon be over
Vučić pardoned the batterers and Dijana Hrkalović. The election winners should abolish the sultan's power that allows one man to run afoul of the entire judicial system
Interview: Branko Stamenković, public prosecutor of the Supreme Public Prosecutor's Office
A black picture and the breakdown of the rule of law subscribeThe archive of the weekly Vreme includes all our digital editions, since the very beginning of our work. All issues can be downloaded in PDF format, by purchasing the digital edition, or you can read all available texts from the selected issue.
See all
