A vision of AI agents able to exchange cents for summaries or longer reports, is being revisited after OpenAI co founder Sam Altman outlined it in an Atlantic podcast.
In an Re:think interview with the publisher’s chief executive Nicholas Thompson, Altman looked to a future in which micropayments are made on behalf of readers, a concept which has been canvassed by others including Elon Musk. Thompson had asked how media companies might survive the decline of traditional search, and about AI agents “browsing the web on a human’s behalf”.
“What really makes sense in a world of agents is we try a sort of micropayment-based approach. So, if my agent wants to come read Nick Thompson’s article, Nick Thompson or The Atlantic can set a price for the agent to read it – might be different than a human reading it.
“My agent can read it, pay $0.17, and give me a summary of that. If I want to go read the whole article, pay $1, or however that works. If my agent wants to calculate something for me that’s really difficult to do, it can go rent some cloud compute somewhere and pay for that, but I think there will be need to be a new economic model for these agents doing lots of small transactions and exchanges of value with each other on behalf of their human controllers or whatever, all of the time.”
Altman stresses that this is his “best theory”, but qualifies that with “no one knows”.
NiemanLab’s Andrew Deck speculates that the comments may indicate that OpenAI may be moving in this direction for news publishers. “They’re a notable departure from the lump-sum content licensing deals that have been the hallmark of the company’s business with news publishers since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022,”he says.
The interview is on YouTube here.