GDP ill-suited for the age of AI, Sam Altman tells Vinod Khosla

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes GDP is an incorrect metric for measuring quality of life as he feels AI will have a deflationary impact on growth across economies.

“I think GDP is going to be a terrible metric because AI is so deflationary. What we want to measure and I think what GDP is meant to approximate is quality of life,” Altman said.

Speaking during a fireside chat at IIT Delhi with Khosla Ventures' founder Vinod Khosla, Altman said this obsolescence of usual economic metrics is proof of AI changing the global order.


“By 2035 we will have a hugely deflationary economy that the world is not thinking about. It's interesting because Google just issued 100-year bonds… by 2035 you should own all those bonds because the world will be so deflationary that it's hard to imagine,” Khosla added.

These statements come in the backdrop of Altman and Khosla’s claims that education and healthcare are set to radically change with every AI advancement. They added that the growth rate of economic value in the world, in quality of life and pace of scientific progress, is set to change.

“A quote that… has really stuck with me is we built a lot of institutions, policies, (and) structure to deal with a world of scarcity. But almost none of that applies well to a world of abundance, and society is going to have to get reimagined for this world of incredible abundance,” Altman said.

This is going to happen because of automation in scientific discovery, Altman has argued.

“We're going to automate scientific progress. We're going to automate the whole economy. And you think about what that really would mean if these things can happen 10 times faster, 100 times faster than we've been able to do it on our own,” Altman added.

Altman and Khosla said this would make students more agile and passionate as specific technical knowledge may quickly become outdated.