> to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips)
Not really. The problem is that learning requires scale, mostly of data. That scale places AI providers at the nexus of value, with OpenAI as the presumptive market organizer and leader. Reducing compute costs would just mean they can capture more of the value. Data costs orders of magnitudes more than compute because it requires curation, so even if individual developers could get compute, they can't get data, so size/access matters.
That's good for this community and could be good for the state of the art and the overall potential contributions of AI. And more paying customers could be good for OpenAI. But it won't put AI in front of non-paying customers/developers, unless their value is otherwise harvested.
> I don't want ASI to only be affordable to the ultra rich.
As a developer or consumer?
And you don't mean it's ok if AI is only affordable for the moderately rich, do you? I agree it's hard to state which developers/people/customers should be subsidized. Generally we subsidize education but not profit or war. Sometimes culture. Companies will subsidize complementary goods and input factors. Otherwise? Not much history of benevolent subsidy.
AI has as much potential to shape society as freeways and the automobile did in the US, but few understand how, and I've seen no plans on point.
With electric energy networks and transportation, the central government has a role in reducing hostaging by hold-out's. With education, states have an incentive to attract and build talent (albeit now reduced with trans-national outsourcing and remote work). But otherwise, it's private enterprise and resource-weighted customers.
Changing that is not really Sam Altman's job. His job is to deliver that value, sooner rather than later. Most would be uncomfortable with AI overlords expressing opinions on cultural values or economic distributions to be imposed.