OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman has written an essay on his personal blog today that spells out how his company intends to ensure that “everyone on Earth” will be able to leverage artificial general intelligence to fulfill their goals and expand their creativity.

Part of that plan entails “strange-sounding ideas” like giving everyone a “compute budget” to make certain that the benefits of AGI are widely distributed, he said.

“The historical impact of technological progress suggests that most of the metrics we care about (health outcomes, economic prosperity, etc.) get better on average and over the long-term, but increasing equality does not seem technologically determined and getting this right may require new ideas,” wrote Altman (pictured). “In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may require early intervention.”

Altman defines AGI as “a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields,” and he claims that we’re near to creating such systems. His claims may stoke concerns that it might ultimately lead to mass unemployment in many industries, and Altman admitted that its arrival is going to need “lots of human supervision and direction” to avoid this kind of disruption.

However, he insisted that AGI systems “will not have the biggest new ideas,” and that it will be “great at some things but surprisingly bad at others.”

The real value of AGI will be realized when we start running such systems at enormous scales. Altman said he envisions the possibility of millions of hyperscale AI systems that can tackle problems “in every field of knowledge work.”

Such systems won’t come cheap, Altman conceded. He noted that the progress seen so far in the AI industry shows that it’s possible to spend “arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains” in terms of its performance.

That explains why OpenAI is currently said to be in talks over an eye-watering $40 billion funding round, just three months after closing on $6.6 billion. The company has also pledged, alongside partners such as Oracle Corp., to invest up to $500 billion on data centers through U.S. President Donald Trump’s Project Stargate.

However, Altman insists that though AI development requires staggering amounts of money, the cost of using it falls by about 10 times every 12 months. So while building more powerful AI systems will cost money, that technology will become increasingly accessible to everyone.

The rise of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek Ltd. and others seems to support that argument, and also the idea that developing and training powerful AI systems might become more affordable too, but Altman insisted that massive investments will be required to achieve AGI.

If and when OpenAI can create an AGI-level system, the company will no doubt be compelled to make some “major decisions” and also introduce some “limitations” relating to safety that may well prove to be unpopular, Altman said.

Previously, OpenAI has pledged that it would stop competing with, and start assisting any value-aligned and safety-conscious project that gets closer to creating true AGI than it does, in order to ensure its safe development. But that pledge was made when OpenAI was still committed to its nonprofit status. These days, the company is trying to restructure itself as a for-profit organization that hopes to achieve $100 billion in annual revenue by 2029.

As such, Altman said the company’s mission now is focused “more towards individual empowerment” as it works toward AGI, while making efforts to prevent such systems from being used by authoritarian governments to “control their population through mass surveillance” and forestall the “loss of autonomy.”

Such an approach will likely mean OpenAI has to commit to more openness about its AI systems, Altman said. Recently, he admitted that OpenAI has been “on the wrong side of history” in terms of open source, keeping the codebase and training data of its most powerful AI systems under close wraps.

“Many of us expect to need to give people more control over the technology than we have historically, including open-sourcing more, and accept that there is a balance between safety and individual empowerment that will require trade-offs,” Altman said.

Photo: TechCrunch/Flickr