Sridhar Vembu reacts to Sam Altman’s AI-human comparison

Zoho co-founder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu has responded to remarks made by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about artificial intelligence and human energy usage, drawing attention to the philosophical framing of AI being compared to human life.

Altman, speaking in an interview with a publication, during the India AI Impact Summit, addressed concerns about the energy and resources required to train large AI models. He noted that while AI training and data centre operations do consume significant resources, raising and educating a human being also involves substantial energy and resource inputs over many years including “the food that humans eat.” 

He also says that AI has probably already caught up on knowledge that humans has taken years to learn.

In response to this comparison, Sridhar Vembu took to his X account, rejecting the idea that technology and human beings should be equated. Vembu wrote: “I do not want to see a world where we equate a piece of technology to a human being.”

He elaborated by saying that technology should remain a tool that supports human life, rather than one that dominates or displaces it. “I work hard as a technologist to see a world where we don’t allow technology to dominate our lives,” Vembu said, adding that it should “quietly recede into the background” and enhance human activity rather than overshadow it.

The exchange highlights two distinct perspectives in contemporary AI discourse, one that situates AI within technical and environmental considerations, and another that emphasises the ethical and philosophical relationship between technology and humanity.

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Even social media is divided between the two ideologies. For example,

A user wrote, “world is beautiful because of humans not machines. AI is for overall betterment not to entirely replace you and make you obsolete.” Another defends by saying, “The analogy is not saying humans and AI are the same. It is pointing out that the energy concern needs more context than it usually gets.”

Another wrote, “We debate AI training costs. Nobody mentions: humans need 20 years and 40 million calories to become productive. AI gets weeks. The efficiency gap is absurd,” while someone else countered by saying, “You don’t really train a human. A person grows over time with contradictions, mistakes, shame (or sometimes without it), curiosity, loss and love. The energy an AI uses is just an electricity bill. The energy humans use, is life itself.”

Sridhar Vembu’s remarks on Sam Altman’s comment underscores how conversations around artificial intelligence are evolving beyond technical capability into deeper questions about values and framing. As adoption expands, conversations such as these may become central to defining not just how AI functions, but how it is understood.