OpenAI President: Compute power is becoming the new oil of the AI era! For decades, oil was the most critical resource for industrial society. Now, AI is turning 'compute power' into a new means of production. From coding, cybersecurity, and knowledge work to math, biology, and material science, it's essentially about converting the compute power in GPUs, electricity, and data centers into intellectual labor that used to rely solely on humans. Recently, OpenAI used about $2,000 worth of compute power to solve or advance a series of problems that had stumped mathematicians for years. If this capability continues to expand into fields like pharmaceuticals, materials, and engineering, a pretty terrifying economic model could emerge: Problems that used to require dozens of people working for years might, in the future, be solved by spending just a few thousand or tens of thousands of dollars on compute power. So, the cheaper AI gets, the greater the demand for compute power might become. Because as the cost of intelligence drops, more and more things that weren’t worth calculating before will suddenly become worth calculating. The most important commodity of the 21st century might really be shifting from oil to compute power.