AI is both everything and nothing - Sam Altman

Altman illustrated the productivity revolution with a personal example. He described using an upcoming OpenAI model to complete a complex home automation programming task that would have taken him “days to do” before AI assistance.

The AI completed “almost all of the work” in just “5 minutes,” he said. A year ago, “you would have paid a very high-end programmer 20 hours, 40 hours something like that to do” the same task. With AI, it cost “probably less than a dollar’s worth of compute tokens.”

“I have never seen a technology revolution quite like this,” Altman said, calling the change “amazing” and “unprecedented.”

He noted that knowledge work costing $10,000 a year ago now costs “a dollar or 10 cents.” Looking ahead to 2030, he predicted “a software application written” for $100,000 might “cost literally 10 cents.”

I’m having some trouble wrapping my head around this, because 1. I spend more than a dollar in api credits to code.. In fact before PRO mega MAx-gainz plans api consumption could easily be in the tens of dollars per day. Which ok, is cheap if its accelerating programming, but it’s not cheap if you have to spend tokens to have AI run unit tests tell you they’re passing when the console says FAIL FAIL FAIL.

Sticking this under predictions for now… I’l let you know when I start working for a dollar a day.

_{Quote Citation: finalroundai.com, “Sam Altman says world wants 1000x more Software, So Programmer Salaries are Skyrocketing”, Jul 30, 2025, https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/sam-altman-says-world-wants-1000x-more-software}