Sam Altman argues that asking whether there's 'enough compute' is like asking about energy demand without specifying price — falling costs unlock huge new demand curves. ✦ AI generated
Sam Altman · BG2 Pod · 2025-10-31 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 15:49
“How compute constrained do you feel today and do you think you'll ever get to the point where you're not compute constrained?”
If the price of compute per like unit of intelligence or whatever, however you want to think about it, fell by a factor of a 100 tomorrow, you would see usage go up by much more than 100 and there'd be a lot of things that people would love to do with that compute that just make no economic sense at the current cost, but there would be new kind of demand.
verbatim transcript · starts at 15:49
15:49point, but you can't talk about demand for energy without talking about at different you know different demand at different price levels. If the price of compute per like unit of intelligence or whatever, however you want to think about it, fell by a factor of a 100 tomorrow, you would see usage go up by much more than 100 and there'd be a lot of things that people would love to do
16:12with that compute that just make no economic sense at the current cost, but there would be new kind of demand. So I think the the now on the other hand as the models get even smarter and you can use these models to cure cancer or discover novel physics or drive a bunch of humanoid robots to construct a space station or whatever crazy thing you want then maybe
16:32there's huge willingness to pay a much higher rate cost per unit of intelligence for a much higher level of intelligence that we don't know yet but I would bet there will be. So I I think when you talk about capacity it's it's like a you know cost per unit and you know capability per unit and you have to kind of without those curves it's sort of a madeup it's not a super well
16:55specified problem. >> Yeah. I mean I think the one thing that you know Sam you've talked about which I think is the right way is to think about is that if intelligence is what a log of compute then you try and really make sure you keep getting efficient and so that means the tokens per dollar per watt uh and the economic value that the society gets out of it is what we should
17:15maximize and reduce the costs and so that's where if you sort of where like the Jevans paradox point is that right which is you keep reducing it commoditizing in some sense intelligence uh so that it becomes the real driver of GDP growth all around. >> Unfortunately, it's something closer to uh log of intelligence equals log of compute. But we may figure out better scaling laws and we may figure out how
17:37to beat this. Yeah, >> we heard from both Microsoft and Google yesterday. Both said their cloud businesses would have been growing faster if they have more GPUs. You know, I asked Jensen on this pod if there was any chance over the course of the next 5 years we would have a compute glut. and he said it's virtually non-existent chance in the next 2 to 3 years and I