“Moore’s Law for Everything” is an essay published by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, on March 16, 2021, on his own domain moores.samaltman.com. Written before ChatGPT existed, it is an early statement of the economic worldview Altman would carry into the generative-AI boom: that increasingly capable AI will create enormous wealth by collapsing the cost of producing goods and services, and that the central question becomes how that wealth is distributed.
The essay makes dated capability predictions. Altman wrote that within five years, “computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice,” and that within a decade AI would do “assembly-line work and maybe even become companions.” He argued that “the price of many kinds of labor (which drives the costs of goods and services) will fall toward zero once sufficiently powerful AI joins the workforce,” and imagined a world where the cost of “housing, education, food, clothing, etc.” could halve every two years - the “Moore’s Law for everything” of the title, which he framed as the rallying cry of “a generation whose members can’t afford what they want.”
His proposed mechanism for sharing the gains was the American Equity Fund, which would tax large companies 2.5 percent of their market value annually (paid in shares) and privately held land 2.5 percent (paid in dollars), then distribute the proceeds equally to every adult citizen. Altman estimated this could pay roughly 13,500 dollars a year per person within about a decade, arguing that taxation should shift from labor toward capital and land as AI makes capital, not labor, the scarce input.
The essay is a primary document in two threads: the lineage of techno-optimist AI manifestos written by lab leaders, and the recurring policy argument that abundant AI implies some form of universal basic income or citizen dividend.