Rohan Paul@rohanpaul_ai
Sam Altman is basically saying OpenAI does not want to be just another high-margin software company selling AI tools.
The bigger ambition is to become the core intelligence infrastructure layer for the economy.
i.e. OpenAI wants to sit underneath companies, products, workflows, agents, consumer apps, internal automation systems, developer tools, and business processes. Not just as a chatbot. Not just as an API.
But as something closer to an “intelligence meter”, where people and companies consume AI the way they consume electricity, cloud compute, or internet bandwidth.
The key point is about margin philosophy.
Altman is saying that AI may not remain a very high-margin business forever. As models get smarter, switching from 1 AI to another becomes easier. A company can ask an agent to migrate code, replace workflows, test alternatives, and move faster than before. So defensibility may not come from locking customers into a single app.
It may come from becoming the cheapest, most useful, most reliable intelligence utility at massive scale.
That is a very different OpenAI strategy than “build the best AI app and charge premium prices.”
The real strategy sounds more like, that OpenAI wants to align itself with the success of the whole economy. If companies automate more, build more, sell more, ship faster, and create new products using OpenAI’s intelligence layer, then OpenAI grows with them.
This is closer to an infrastructure business than a normal software business.
The important part is that Altman seems comfortable with OpenAI becoming a huge low-margin company, as long as it becomes deeply embedded in global economic activity. That is a very Amazon Web Services-style idea, but for intelligence instead of cloud servers.
So in the future the winning AI company may not the one with the fattest margins, but the one that becomes the default meter for intelligence usage across the world.
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From "Stripe" YT channel (link in comment)
