Nobody "trains" a human

This is a post about artificial intelligence (AI), but it's not in response to the AI-doomer science fiction scenario published by Citrini that spooked markets on Monday. The future is inherently difficult to predict, and if Citrini's model was even remotely plausible (it's not) then markets would have reacted by a lot more than 1% (a move which also included all the weekend's other events), nor would it have recovered most of that within 24 hours.

No, today's post is about OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman, who managed to offend most of the human race earlier this week when he uttered the following statement:

"One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human... It takes, like, 20 years of life, and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart."

Altman is technically correct. Just as he would have been correct to say that Bitcoin uses more energy than Norway. Or that AI data centres use more water than a small city. Or that I use more toothpaste than a medieval village.

While all true, they're also all false equivalences and are therefore meaningless without additional context.

In this case, the context is that nobody "trains" a human like they do AI. Humans develop, learn, and grow through billions of decentralised decisions made by themselves, their parents, their teachers, and their communities. As FA Hayek wrote, "mind and culture developed concurrently and not successively".

You don't just pour in inputs (food, time, energy) for 20 years and out pops a smart person to run one "one inference query"; human intelligence doesn't work like that. Unlike AI, for humans the "training" and the "output" are the same thing: people consume, participate, and contribute throughout their entire lives.

Altman is also ignoring the role of prices and the market itself. It was not designed, or "trained". It's a spontaneous order that produces goods and services with no apparent human direction, all coordinated by prices.

If a data centre is buying electricity at market rates, the real question of whether it's 'worth it' has already been answered because prices carry that information. Sam Altman doesn't need to justify his energy bill because market forces and the price system, to the extent it's allowed to work, will sort it out.

So why is Altman making such absurd statements? Because false equivalences are effective if you're trying to win over the public, and my guess is he's trying to persuade people that AI's energy use is socially valuable — as unimpeachable as raising children — because he expects a lot of that energy to come through political channels. Subsidised rates. Fast-tracked permitting. Grid priority.

Altman wants people to subconsciously lump AI in the same untouchable category as kids. But that's a political, not economic, argument. OpenAI as a company has no moat, as competition in the AI model space is fierce.

I suspect by making such statements, Altman is trying his best to dig one for OpenAI by laying the groundwork for political favours such as below-market rate energy—something like the pre-existing agricultural water subsidies or aluminium smelters but for data centres. Basically, if Altman can't out-innovate his competitors, he'll try to out-lobby them on input costs.