Sam Altman: AI Crypto Tokens Are Coming?

Universal Basic Compute from Sam Altman: AI crypto tokens are coming? Let's examine the real state of AI development and the reflections on distributed value and the future of the economy from the OpenAI CEO.

Join BloFin and qualify for up to $1,000 today

Start Trading

The Challenges of a Future Where AI Does Not Freeze

Recently, on Theo Von's podcast, Sam Altman shared many insights and assumptions about what the future might look like in the AI era, where previous economic models of incentives and income may change fundamentally. Many of these insights are quite interesting, but we will take a closer look at one of them, which, although he doesn't name it directly, may point to crypto as an integral part of this future.

Let's take it step by step. The first potential problem that almost everyone predicts is mass unemployment as AI develops. Of course, there are several different consolidated opinions on this, more or less pessimistic, with more or less grounded arguments. However, several key facts must be taken into account.

Although AI still requires huge investments, as long as they continue, the technology keeps improving further. Also, this improvement is happening exponentially, and we observe the quality of models increasing across various aspects, while the cost of running models is decreasing. And most importantly, the adoption models for AI are becoming more justified than a couple of years ago, showing ever better revenue.

Yes, it is worth noting that there remains a scenario where investment will be cut, failing to bring the technology to the level of AGI that would trigger total automation and unemployment, and instead another AI winter. However, for at least the next year, investment is likely to continue, along with the pace of improvement, which will be sufficient to address global challenges and facilitate a fundamental restructuring in 2026.

At the same time, there is another problem that could make everything much worse. The large tech giants developing AI are consolidating unprecedented capital. For now, this is not an unsolvable problem, since most of these companies are public and anyone can participate in this capital by buying shares. However, there is a trend where more and more companies remain private and manage either with venture investment or without it at all.

And now imagine a situation where AI has reached an unprecedented level of efficiency, generates unprecedented income for AI companies, but most people have neither the work to create value themselves nor an opportunity to share in the value that AI creates.

What Sam Altman Meant, Probably

Here we go back to the idea of a universal basic income, which seems natural and necessary, but doesn't hold up to scrutiny if you ask questions about its implementation in a truly rigorous way. However, Sam Altman proposed an interesting option, Universal Basic Compute, where the value created by AI will be distributed and the universal basic income will take the form of AI tokens. Pay attention that AI tokens are not crypto tokens; do not confuse the two. Tokens here are the smallest possible unit of information generated by AI, for example, a word or even parts of a word if we are talking about text models.

Sam Altman:

"Giving people money is not going to solve all the problems. It is certainly not going to make people happy. But it might solve some problems, and it might give people a better horizon with which to help themselves.

Now that we see some of the ways that AI is developing, I wonder if there's better things to do than the traditional conceptualization of UBI. Like, I wonder – I wonder if the future looks something more like Universal Basic Compute than Universal Basic Income, and everybody gets like a slice of GPT-7's compute, and they can use it, they can re-sell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research. But what you get is not dollars but this, like a slice – you own part of the productivity."

Yes, he didn't say directly that AI tokens would be converted into crypto tokens and stored and distributed on a blockchain. But how, technically, will they be accounted for, stored, transferred, and so on? After all, they definitely should not be state quotas in the form of the dollar or any other fiat currency, as Sam Altman emphasizes. And perhaps at the technical level, he already has a vision of such a system, and we are yet to see a kind of internal economy and currency on the OpenAI platform.

But everybody here already knows a form of finance and financial systems that don't depend on centralized institutions such as the state or banks. Naturally, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology suggest themselves here, and one could only intentionally ignore how suitable they are for filling such a gap.

Thus, it is possible that the two key technologies of the 21st century, crypto and artificial intelligence, may not just be useful as attempts to integrate one into the other. They may be absolutely necessary for each other’s development.

Join BloFin and qualify for up to $1,000 today

Start Trading

Conclusions

Of course, we will not draw hasty conclusions. Even though this scenario is at least technically highly grounded and promising, there is always a probability that we may face a fundamentally different scenario.

In particular, be careful with statements about a crypto launch from OpenAI – we have already seen a similar scam before, but it is very likely that after this podcast, we will see a new and much more powerful wave of it.

However, think deeply about this scenario; it may be one of the most fundamental vectors of technological development in the near future. Stay tuned for the latest updates in crypto, blockchain, and technology.