OpenAI’s Sam Altman has a new idea for a universal basic income

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman supports a riff on UBI he calls “universal basic compute.”

Win McNamee/Getty Images

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long supported the idea of a universal basic income.Many in AI think a universal basic income could help mitigate the impacts of the tech on workers.Altman floated a new kind of basic income last week that he calls “universal basic compute.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has an interesting new idea to help those struggling financially.

He calls it “universal basic compute.”

“Everybody gets like a slice of GPT-7’s compute,” he said on the All-In podcast. “They can use it, they can resell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research.”

The idea is that as AI becomes advanced — and embedded into more facets of our lives — owning a unit of a large language model like GPT-7 can be more valuable than money. “You own like part of the productivity,” he said.

Altman has long supported a universal basic income — a recurring cash payment, no strings attached, made to all adults in a given population regardless of their wealth and employment status. Altman, like many others in the tech industry, sees a universal basic income as a safety net for people as AI threatens their jobs.

Altman started his own UBI experiment in 2016, the results of which he said on the podcast would be released soon. The program provided payments of between $50 to $1,000 a month to more than 3,000 enrollees, according to Fortune.

Cities and states across the United States have experimented with a version of this called guaranteed basic income. These programs give no-strings-attached cash payments to people based on demonstrated need or social and societal status instead of a population as a whole.

Most of those programs have shown positive results, though conservatives are increasingly pushing back on what they see as a form of welfare that could discourage people from working. In Texas, the state supreme court recently blocked a Houston area program from giving low-income people $500 a month.

Altman didn’t elaborate on how his so-called “universal basic compute” would work, but it’s certain to raise some eyebrows — conservative and liberal alike.