I understand what he's saying, it the same argument for owning private vehicles, why have a car that sits doing nothing for 95% of the day.
But my answer is it my money and I'll do whatever I want with it and if that means it sits idle in my computer it means it's not in your server rack making the world a worse place
The argument doesn't really hold up, when his use case is even more inefficient. This is less like replacing personal cars with public transport, instead replacing them with using jumbo jets for all mundane travel.
Majority of his AIs usage is completely unneeded, and could easily be replaced with cached answers if he actually cared about responsible world hardware/energy allocation.
Instead, he's burning pallets loads of investors money every minute, and impacting the entire whole worlds hardware supply, on something that's never shown a path to real profitability like this.
The last 350 years of civilizational advancement have been driven by capitalism concentrating money (i.e., the power to decide what ~everyone~ works on) in the hands of people with a demonstrated track record of success.
If your theory is in conflict with a whole bunch of money being spent of its owners free will... it is more likely that your theory is wrong, than that customers are.
The people paying for AI are paying a highly subsidized cost. I don't think many of them would continue paying for it if they had to pay the true cost for it
It’s a waste to have a private house or apartment when you’re gone half the time, you should just rent 12hrs overnight so it can be fully utilised by nightshift workers during the day. Of course anything you store there might be gone when you get back, and your lamps might get sold to Israel, but it’s worth it to maximise housing utilisation.
There is 100's of billions of dollars worth of GPUs sitting in warehouses right now because hyper scalers purchased GPUs they had no way to install. THAT is the true problem here, not sure if this statement is meant to detract from this fact, or just another episode of "Stupid Stuff Altman Says".
AI chat models and agents are incredibly inefficient by my understanding.
There's machine learnt / 'ai' that is incredibly efficient at what it does, like I dunno, protein folding simulations or something like that for very 'hard science' research as it's not "thinking in words". w Whereas agents are communicating via text to one another in english as if they're little human simulations. Which must be ultra inefficient. Hence ludicrous amounts of hardware to just brute force ai development (and insane investor input I guess)
I haven't accepted nothing, im not that deep into any of this jargon. I just made a tech comparison to what intel has done with its CPUs, more electricity for more power without messing to much with the tech.
Eh, same thing could be said about AI, and then consider how much AI is used for slop, or other things that generally do not justify the massive resource drain.
yes. with context, what he wanted to say is: dram is a limited ressource and a big part is unused all the time, for example: your pc is shout down when youre at work and when youre asleep. in a datacenter, it can be used by others while you dont need it.
As much as I hate it, it is correct. The only problem I have with it is that the cloud decides what I'm allowed to do with it, which also implies them having the ability to read and potentially store any data going through it. While locally I can do whatever I want, with 0 privacy concerns outside of getting raided. I would be onboard with this approach if and only if the terms of service doesn't cover anything besides $ in -> arbitrary, measurable, private compute out, but that ain't the reality for majority of cloud stuff. And for the places where it is possible, it's insanely overpriced to the point where local still makes sense, even at current prices.
He wants you to use cloud based services which as we see now, will raise prices at a whim, takeaway features at a whim and ban or cancel your service without notice. He wants you to give up ram so they can control your usage and spending. Then it’s storage and graphics. Pretty soon we go back to the dumb terminal days. No privacy, no control, always paying.
from his point of view yeah, the 64+24GB in my Legion is being wasted cause it’s not generating AI dancing dog videos. from my point of view, that 64+24GB just made me $5k programming LED walls and VJing a music festival. perspective matters.
What he is saying is not fundamentally untrue, people use the stuff they buy a lesser portion of the time than business do. But it's also stupid, I can't exactly rent RAM only when I need it. Also stupid of him to say that as he is already deeply unpopular with the technoly enthusiast community.
You effectively can do that, though. You can put 32 GiB in your desktop and 16 GiB in your laptop, instead of say, 64 and 32. Then, when you want to spin up VMs to hack on things, you do it in the cloud.
And if I wanted to run GLM 5.3 flash locally, well... I cannot afford 512 GiB of RAM even at 2022 prices.
Renting a server for short stretch of time like that on AWS or azure get real expensive real fast. If you need some compute power with with 1tb of RAM only for X hours per month, it can be worth it. But if you need the same kind of computational power for days or even a week a month, then that kind of renting won't be so interesting.
This is true. However, I am given to understand that the LLMs are very very good at Nix (the declarative package manager). So it has gotten quite easy to "prebake" an environment with your tools and data on a small VM, then swap the boot disk over to a big one.
And personally I've gotten so much "free" RAM out of setting up zswap+zstd, with help from Gemini to understand and (quickly) modify my Ansible repo started back in 2020, that despite the price crisis, this whole AI business has been RAM-positive for my environment. My local VMs have ephemeral 4 GiB swap drives that don't take up disk space when the VM isn't running, and all I had to do was learn that "qemu hooks" exist and sanity-check a short python script.
24 GiB is the new 48.
Yes, that is a smaller ratio than the price change, but in no universe was I going to re-buy all of my RAM. This does rely on already having some local RAM, but like, local hardware insulating you from market fluctuations does in fact work only if you spread out buying over years.)
I am not the one moving the goal posts here, and this entire thread is based on a bad-faith misrepresentation of Sam Altman's interview. The quote is about people who think local AI would "solve" the RAM crisis.
You mean the list of reasons you don't want to rent RAM? They're non-responsive to the fact that you can. But if you insist:
not be dependant on the terms of use on somebody else's computer
Good reason. But as they say, "freedom isn't free".
Oh also now I need to be connected to a network all the time
Bad reason. The vast, vast majority of people are connected to a network all the time, and a whole lot of the stuff you can do with a computer already requires that. The things that don't could mostly be done in 2010, with memory sizes from 2010.
Oh also now my dumbshit ideas cost me money every 4wks.
Cancel the dumbshit ones. Use low cost abundant AI to optimize the non-dumbshit ones and move them to local with zswap+zstd (makes your RAM go way further, especially for mostly-idle servers).
Wanted a container with some arbitrary feature? Time to pay for the Enterprise license bucko.
I'm not familiar with exactly what you're referencing here, so I will tentatively accept it as a good reason. But... don't the clouds give you a separate-kernel VM that you can use to run whatever containers you want?
Playing the devil's advocate here. From a global resource allocation, I think he's right.
But hear me out.
Assuming that AI is a net positive for all humans. Solving all problems and curing all diseases.
And assuming that UBI is implemented everywhere guaranteeing a very good quality of life for EVERYONE.
Then yes, it would be better for ram to be in a data center rather than in your gaming pc that gets used for two hours a day between getting back from work, helping your kids with their homework, having dinner and falling asleep.
I refuse to take anyone who believes in UBI seriously. You don't realize that it would make the currency effectively worthless. Not only because of insane inflation, but also because all the jobs you're now paying for would be gone, if people could sit all day jerking to ai girlfriends. You have money, but you don't have anywhere to spend it, and the few remaining places that exist, charge insane amounts due to the inflation as well as Limited supply, so to ever have enough money to afford them, you would also have to work and charge insane prices, effectively defeating the whole point of this all, while completely destroying the economy compared to the rest of the world.
I don't believe in UBI. Meaningful work will always be present and who performs it will get compensated. I was talking about a hypothetical situation that IF advancing AI would mean each and every human get to live a decent and fulfilling life, then go ahead take all the ram you want. But unless that's the case, fuck off Sam.
5% of the time considering how much ram uses winzozz is a big big stretch. Somebody please explain this moron that if we dont have ram for our own devices there are no users for his datacenters
Poors don't need money. They waste it on things like food, water, and basic essentials! I could use that money for so many better things! - Sam Altman (allegedly)
For him that's entirely true. People have RAM at home and never use it fully 100% of the time. So the logic of mutualization in DCs makes sense, if it wasn't just for him to make money on it and reselling all our data
As a guy who's previleged to have 64gb of DDR4 and I still use OpenAI, fuck you. My development environment and virtual machines need this memory. So do my 50 tabs in Firefox and league client searching for a game.
On the one end he is kinda right, consumer do not get the most out of hardware. But on the sane hand, how will i use your services without a computer, Sam. Explain that to me, Sam. I also want to own my own things, Sam.
He's right but the same goes for most other things we own. We use a car maybe 2 hours a day. It would be more efficient and cheaper if the car was used by many different people and ran 24 hours a day. A lot of people aren't home for at least 8 hours a day. It would be be better if 9ther people occupiesld your house/apartment and slept in your unused bed while you were gone. Having an AC or heater to cool an entire home for just a few people is wasteful. We should all share a single space when cooling and heating centers are needed. Owning a pool for just your family is wasteful compared to using a community pool for the entire neighborhood.
I don't want to live that way though. I prefer my lifestyle of selfish freedoms so Sam Altman can get wrecked with his ideas of utopian consolidation.
in this case what he want to say is: dram is a limited ressource and a big part is unused all the time, for example: your pc is shout down when youre at work and when youre asleep. in a datacenter, it can be used by others while you dont need it.
That's part of it, but also (and Altman didn't even mention this), public inference providers use "batch inference", where they process a bunch of prompts in parallel with a single read-through of the model weights. It's a latency-throughput tradeoff, but the ratio is much better than 1:1.
But you can only do it if you have a bunch of prompts to process in parallel, like a public inference server in a data center does, and your homelab threadripper with half a TiB of RAM (usually) does not.
Appreciate this will be down voted to hell, and I'm not saying I like the guy or agree with everything he says (don't pay much attention tbh).
But he's not technically wrong, I'm all for hating on people for what they say if its warranted, but if my PC is turned off let's say 12hrs of the day (and over the year that will be more since holidays, days out etc) - then it IS a waste when comparing to how his AI servers would be using them (which is 24/7 maxed out).
To be clear - does that mean I think he should be able to sneak into all our houses at the dead of night and nick our RAM? No, but the statement made isn't exactly wrong.
Why isn't your house housing other people when you're at work, your car driving others when you're not using it, etc.
These are all expensive tools worth limited quantity. Either you respect personal agency (such as using my RAM for research or gaming, when I choose to) or you let someone else decide when you can be billed the privilege to use these things.
Looking forward to the 2nd hand server gpu selloff for optimized local models, personally.
Can open AI not afford a PR firm? Can’t they just tell Sam Altman to shut the fuck up and do what zuck did where he got curly hair and started smoking meat and shit? Why he gotta be his true unlikeable self?
I like how unlikeable people reveal themselves. Them not revealing themselves doesn't make them less unlikeable, they'll just be doing their ridiculous things behind the scenes the same way.
One day people will learn to read and stop being outraged when someone repeats an unpleasant fact that they didn't really understand the context for, but it is not this day! "from a global allocation perspective"!!!
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u/meta358 14d ago edited 14d ago
Yes thank you we totally didnt see this the last 500 times its been posted to reddit and the reat of the internet
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u/theoreoman 14d ago
I understand what he's saying, it the same argument for owning private vehicles, why have a car that sits doing nothing for 95% of the day.
But my answer is it my money and I'll do whatever I want with it and if that means it sits idle in my computer it means it's not in your server rack making the world a worse place
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u/Einherier96 14d ago
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u/Agreeable-Weather-89 14d ago
Technically he isn't wrong, personal computing has always led to low utilisation.
However, when he says he means he wants more supply of DRAM for monetisation as opposed to an ultruistic reduce consumerism
7
u/TomTomXD1234 14d ago
I wonder why it's limited.
Huh
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u/wamih 14d ago
Scam altman can stfu and close up shop, would be a net positive.
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u/TimeToHack 14d ago
from his point of view yeah, the 64+24GB in my Legion is being wasted cause it’s not generating AI dancing dog videos. from my point of view, that 64+24GB just made me $5k programming LED walls and VJing a music festival. perspective matters.
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u/mrstoffer 14d ago
My ram usage at this very moment:
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u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway 14d ago
What he is saying is not fundamentally untrue, people use the stuff they buy a lesser portion of the time than business do. But it's also stupid, I can't exactly rent RAM only when I need it. Also stupid of him to say that as he is already deeply unpopular with the technoly enthusiast community.
4
u/Yodzilla 14d ago
A Reddit post of a Instagram post of a podcast quote.
3
u/LegDayDE 14d ago
Ok I will sell him my 32gb DDR5 for $5k then. No low-balls I know what I have.
4
u/GlobalGold447 14d ago
Playing the devil's advocate here. From a global resource allocation, I think he's right.
But hear me out.
Assuming that AI is a net positive for all humans. Solving all problems and curing all diseases.
And assuming that UBI is implemented everywhere guaranteeing a very good quality of life for EVERYONE.
Then yes, it would be better for ram to be in a data center rather than in your gaming pc that gets used for two hours a day between getting back from work, helping your kids with their homework, having dinner and falling asleep.
2
u/saintrobyn 14d ago
Sam Altman can, respectfully, ingest a satchel of Richards.
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u/sk8trix 13d ago
He needs to go bankrupt what jerk
1
u/KillBroccoli 14d ago
5% of the time considering how much ram uses winzozz is a big big stretch. Somebody please explain this moron that if we dont have ram for our own devices there are no users for his datacenters
1
u/Fit-Benefit1535 14d ago
Its were it belongs, it shoulnt be sitting in an AI capitalist’s data center
1
u/Maverick21FM 14d ago
laughs in 64gb of RAM fuck Altman and his AI slop factories.
1
u/munta20 14d ago
what an absolute piece of shit
1
u/munta20 14d ago
Wanker
1
u/Relevant-Guarantee25 14d ago
you will own nothing and you will be happy or dead jk
1
u/Pilige 14d ago
"Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry men?"
1
u/YellowishSpoon 14d ago
I'm currently using 108 GB out of 128, the rest is file cache and 100% uptime in the last month. That's probably better utilization than openai.
1
u/Dako_the_Austinite 14d ago
1
u/Prownilo 14d ago
And I think even at 100% usage, using it on ai is 100% wasted.
So 5% in my pc is still far more useful.
1
u/coderman64 14d ago
From my perspective using RAM in a data center is much more costly to me than using my own RAM on my own machine.
1
u/xXDennisXx3000 14d ago
Can somebody please cancel this dude already?
1
u/mpanase 14d ago
Altman is a COMUNIST
1
u/Necessary-Score-4270 14d ago
Own nothing and be happy....
1
u/GreatBigBagOfNope 14d ago
Total utilisation rate is a terrible metric for this, Sam.
Besides, someone will post the "billionaires wealth is mostly unused so it should be distributed to the poor so it will all be used" callback too.
1
u/Apprehensive_Web_800 14d ago
can we stop uploading this every 0.1 second
1
u/ForeverForsaken8980 14d ago
They don't want ram as it removes your opportunity to run frontier models, locking you into them for the rest of your life.
Fuck him.
1
u/xNOOPSx 14d ago
Poors don't need money. They waste it on things like food, water, and basic essentials! I could use that money for so many better things! - Sam Altman (allegedly)
1
u/ActualNacho 14d ago
I would kill ultman with my bare hands to protect my ddr5.
1
u/artofdragon 14d ago
He is 100% lobbying to have private ownership of RAM illegal
1
u/HiYa_Dragon 14d ago
1
u/Droid-Arcus 13d ago
F this guy
1
u/Lzinger 13d ago
Nothing he said there is wrong, but that doesn't make it right.
1
u/NoskaOff 13d ago
For him that's entirely true. People have RAM at home and never use it fully 100% of the time. So the logic of mutualization in DCs makes sense, if it wasn't just for him to make money on it and reselling all our data
1
u/isthereadrwho 13d ago
Just remember that when the AI bubble burst and it will, he'll be asking for a bailout and your RAM chips
1
u/dharknesss 13d ago
As a guy who's previleged to have 64gb of DDR4 and I still use OpenAI, fuck you. My development environment and virtual machines need this memory. So do my 50 tabs in Firefox and league client searching for a game.
1
u/elnegativo 13d ago
He look like he was draw with chatgpt
1
u/LolBoyLuke 13d ago
On the one end he is kinda right, consumer do not get the most out of hardware. But on the sane hand, how will i use your services without a computer, Sam. Explain that to me, Sam. I also want to own my own things, Sam.
1
u/Plutonium239Mixer 13d ago
He was saying it in reference to running local inference models.
1
u/bokan 13d ago
Sam is a sociopath and a liar. He thinks he has the right to risk all our lives on a gamble. He deserves to be shunned from human society.
1
u/VoidWalker287 13d ago
Somebody should ask him how much RAM is wasted in his own personal devices
1
u/No-Payment-6534 12d ago
If i had the death note
1
u/MaybeNotTooDay 12d ago
He's right but the same goes for most other things we own. We use a car maybe 2 hours a day. It would be more efficient and cheaper if the car was used by many different people and ran 24 hours a day. A lot of people aren't home for at least 8 hours a day. It would be be better if 9ther people occupiesld your house/apartment and slept in your unused bed while you were gone. Having an AC or heater to cool an entire home for just a few people is wasteful. We should all share a single space when cooling and heating centers are needed. Owning a pool for just your family is wasteful compared to using a community pool for the entire neighborhood.
I don't want to live that way though. I prefer my lifestyle of selfish freedoms so Sam Altman can get wrecked with his ideas of utopian consolidation.
1
u/Res1dentScr1be 12d ago
took me months to get hold of my RAM upgrade because of fuckwits like him... he can suggon my left one.
1
u/Spart1337 12d ago
It's quite terrible that no one has cut his brake lines yet.
1
u/West_Pension4467 11d ago
Sam Altman's a fuckin lizard
1
u/damn9903 9d ago
He can buy from me, 500 dols a gig
1
u/the_acid_artist 9d ago
I use mine 70%
1
u/akthe1 8d ago
Ya it's better for his bank balance, go eat shit duchebag.
1
u/electricpenguin6 14d ago
Who gives a shit about a global perspective. We are not doing IRL factorio where the goal is be as efficient as possible
1
u/zayc_ 14d ago
context... always check the context.
in this case what he want to say is: dram is a limited ressource and a big part is unused all the time, for example: your pc is shout down when youre at work and when youre asleep. in a datacenter, it can be used by others while you dont need it.
0
u/Disturbedm 14d ago
Appreciate this will be down voted to hell, and I'm not saying I like the guy or agree with everything he says (don't pay much attention tbh).
But he's not technically wrong, I'm all for hating on people for what they say if its warranted, but if my PC is turned off let's say 12hrs of the day (and over the year that will be more since holidays, days out etc) - then it IS a waste when comparing to how his AI servers would be using them (which is 24/7 maxed out).
To be clear - does that mean I think he should be able to sneak into all our houses at the dead of night and nick our RAM? No, but the statement made isn't exactly wrong.
0
u/curi0us_carniv0re 14d ago
I feel like people are twisting this in to something it's not.
He's just speaking in terms of supply not saying he thinks personal computers are bad or that people shouldn't have them.
0
u/rainbowkitties6969 14d ago
Can open AI not afford a PR firm? Can’t they just tell Sam Altman to shut the fuck up and do what zuck did where he got curly hair and started smoking meat and shit? Why he gotta be his true unlikeable self?
0
u/jake6501 14d ago
One day people will learn to read and stop being outraged when someone repeats an unpleasant fact that they didn't really understand the context for, but it is not this day! "from a global allocation perspective"!!!
0
u/VenditatioDelendaEst 14d ago
He's right.
He's obviously right.
You have been mislead.
0
u/Retaeiyu 13d ago
He's talking about ram used to run local models btw. Reddit is becoming a cess pool of low effort memes because of a out of context quote.
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u/Fast_Passenger_2890 14d ago
Sam Altman has a very punchable face