Sam Altman says DRAM capacity should go to data centers, not personal computers

roscas

After a few seconds, popup asking me to allow ads on the site. Ya, sure. Back to Sam, his memory is not as good as it was before, money gets in the eyes and vision get muddy and foggy.

onion2k

He's right. Most people don't use much of the RAM in their PC. Having 16GB or 32GB as standard on a PC when Apple's 8GB M1 demonstrated you can do a huge amount of work with much less proves it. Moving the majority of RAM to data centers where it's utilization could be much higher would be a more efficient use of resources. There are still reasons for people to have a lot locally, but it shouldn't be the default. There's a meme for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbreaking:_The_Worst_Perso...

gruturo

By the same line of thinking, his SF home has 6 bedrooms, it would be more efficient to transform it in a community housing, why is he hoarding all the bedrooms? He can't even physically be in more than one at a time. And that's just one of 3 he owns in SF alone. Also he has 2 kidneys and 2 lungs, while he could get by with just 1 of each, and there are people badly needing them. I will renounce my hardware when he renounces all homes and bedrooms. Until then he's a hypocrite.

suprjami

Guy who makes product says that you owning your own product is terrible and you should rent it from him instead.

xscott

For efficient use of RAM, probably. For efficient cost to consumers, not so much. The company that owns the RAM and rents its use to you WILL try to make a profit. At pre-AI prices, $20 per month summed over a year or two bought enough RAM to run local models. Most people won't need the frontier.

rmellow

Paperclip maximizer enters the chat.

wslh

To include in the series after "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" and "640K ought to be enough for anybody".

j3th9n

This is a confession from a man losing to personal computers/AI.

baal80spam

I don't like Sam Altman, but it is really not what he said. But it's Tom's Hardware, I don't expect good journalism from them. You should watch the talk yourself, it's pretty entertaining.

electric_mayhem

In the same vein, it is inefficient for so much wealth to be in the hands of just a few billionaires who just hoard it to no one’s benefit; it would be much more efficient if those dollars were in the hands of the bottom 95%, who would actually put those resources to full use.

whatever1

The entire industry of Personal Computing is inefficient, given his definition. Like we have these billions of smartphones just sleeping all the time instead of running at 100% all the time. But the whole point of personal computing is that you can do whatever you want. It is the same old argument between centralization and decentralization. Yes, centralization is more efficient, but also the goals of centralized systems are ultimately wrong. So they are efficiently sailing towards the cliff.

ArcHound

If you really want to get these people, tell them that you agree and that trains are more efficient than cars. Usually they implode.

dist-epoch

This is just basic Capitalism - resources eventually get allocated to those who can extract more Profit from them. Efficient use of Resources for the production of more Capital. Those with inefficient usage of their resources (gamers and RAM) go bankrupt, and release the resources to those which can extract more Value from the same resources.

wolvesechoes

Enjoy your "democratization" nerds. This is what you have cheered for.

bartread

Yeah: because he wants me to have to pay him rather than being able to run open models locally and, more broadly, he wants the control and power that removing consumers' ability to run local models would bring to him and his company. His solution is to return us all to an undemocratic model of computing that has been in decline since the 1970s. I have a phrase in mind that's considerably more appropriate and to the point but, here, out of respect for HN's guidelines, I'll satisfy myself by merely saying: get off my lawn.

valeg

"Let them eat cake" of our era...

SpyCoder77

They cut out the context; Dara says it best here: https://x.com/daradoescode/status/2116654047696708009#m Nitter: https://nitter.mie.foundation/daradoescode/status/2116654047...

glimshe

His fortune should go to Hacker News users, not to his bank account. We'll use it a lot more efficiently.

alboy

Not to mention all the people hoarding data center cooling liquid in their intestines.

hagbard_c

You will own nothing and you will be happy. I heard that before, somewhere. Oh yeah, here it was: https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/welcome-to-2030-i-ow...