Sam Altman Thinks You're Wasting DRAM

iugtmkbdfil834

In a sense, I think everyone knew it was coming. Historically speaking, in US at least, there initially may be a notable number of upstarts, but those numbers quickly dwindle to form oligopolies. That is how we end up with 3 million cereal types, but 2-3 companies controlling them. The same repeats throughout most industries with an annoying consistency. I actually use both gpt and local qwen and I personally think the question tends to be of what one needs ( speed? privacy? lack of corporate silliness? ). Still, it is sad that we can predict the future so well based merely on what happened before. Edit: I certainly hope I don't have to explain to you why the above is relevant. No market participant would dare to argue this if the competition was healthy.

jacobo37

i think Sam Altman is wasting oxygen

nextaccountic

The look on his face looks a lot like Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything

logancbrown

Two statements can be true and he stated one of them. Sam is not wrong. 1. Local inference can cause a large under-utilization of resources from users that do not run local inference hardware at capacity over the hardwares lifespan. This is under-utilization and under-utilization is not optimal from an economics perspective. 2. The concentration of inference hardware to singular providers can aggregate power to single systems or organizations, and their incentives may be at odds with individual users. The same power dynamic and economics struggle has existed nearly everywhere for all of history. For example, if you want to decide to own or rent a piece of heavy construction machinery for business, you will find a long list of do-not's on the rental contractual terms, but you are more than welcome to buy your own and operate your own machinery at several times the price for the hours used and use it however you want.

arjie

It would be interesting if there were some kind of holographic LLM. You could send part of the encoded prompt and receive generated tokens that only you can decode. Then we could use the distributed capacity of the world and everyone could be paid for marginal token generation capacity. Even open models are profitable to run on almost all electricity.

bugake

Altman: You are welcome to invest a little bit of your fortune in making major software developers write more efficient code that stops wasting our RAM. Start with internet browsers and the Windows 11 app that wastes one gigabyte showing the weather.

feverzsj

How? I'm still on ddr3.

TheJCDenton

He's right in a such a narrow space on this particular matter that it's just a perfect example of what's wrong with a lot of things lately. OpenAI triggered this ordeal with its order of 900K DRAM wafers per month on october 2025, making everyone panic because it was around 40% of the world production at the time. We all know that memory providers know what near bankruptcy feels like when they over invest, but right now SK Hynix have 80% margins (ie TSMC ~60%) and choose to pay their shareholders this year the quivalent of ALL their revenues in 2025. It's now common knowledge thanks to Samsung that the rate of factory buidling is not maxmium to portect their margins. And memory providers have already been fined in 2000 for price fixing. Supply is short because they all choose to make it that way.

staminade

I mean, he's right: individuals hoarding scarce resources is less efficient that everyone holding them in common. The problem is, how to ensure we all get a fair share of them. We can't leave that up to commercial enterprises, because they also have an incentive to hoard and control them for their own profit. Perhaps what we need is some kind of government that holds them in common for the benefit of the entire populace and. But what to call it? Common-ism...?

wilg

He is obviously correct about the specific narrow statement made here and it’s so annoying everyone has to be memey mad about it like a bad reddit thread.

lightedman

I think Sam Altman is wasting space - as in he needs to get the hell off this planet. I use my RAM how the hell I want and nobody else better damn well think about telling me otherwise.

znpy

In a way he’s right, but it’s not my fault a lot of the software i use is some web bullshit that ships it’s own chromium runtime.

perarneng

Sam Alt-RAM

aunwick

Get off my lawn.

superboum

There is a huge loophole in the reasoning: Sam Altman assumes, without stating it clearly, that RAM is used only for AI use, and the only question is "should AI inference being run in the cloud or on our computer". But that's not true. Computers, including RAM, are used for many different things that do not involve AI at all. video games, office work, communications, access to culture, etc. So, what Altman really says is "AI is the only thing that matter for computing, and thus, for the success of his company, we must allocate all the RAM to his company, and forbid any people from accessing it". And, IMO, we should not accept that kind of discourse :s

robotshmobot

I have a vehicle in my driveway, but I am not driving it all day, therefore I am wasting it and should give it to a corporation to rent it back to me. You will own nothing and be happy

robbbed

Was thinking of selling my desktop because I wasn't really using the compute but now I'm doubling down and using it for local AI inference.

mous_tik

I understand what he's saying. Sam Altman thinks that HE, with his data centers, will make better use of the potential of VRAM (or whatever word designates computing capacity) compared to the local market. In theory, I don't disagree. He needs it, and he will use it, that's for sure. Moreover, his logical argument should be viewed purely through the lens of his own self-interest: "I need it, I don't have it, it's your fault, and anyway, you don't even use it properly." But the question I ask myself is: can he use VRAM for something other than what is requested millions of times? "GPT, make me an app to boil eggs," "GPT, make me an app to compare prices," "GPT, make me an app to alert me during Black Friday..." So many resources used thousands of times... With his VRAM... So the counter-argument we can give him is: Stop thinking like an American picking flowers with a bulldozer (no offense, it's just a metaphor) and learn to conserve your resources.

dns_snek

The most fascinating thing about this is how american billionaires can speak in public and advocate for abolition of private [computing] property (means of production), to give full control over these resources to a handful of megacorporations (the party), in effect letting them control and command the economy (central planning). It's the communist boogeyman wearing a trench coat under the banner of capitalism!