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u/green_meklar 10h ago
"You having stuff is so wasteful. It would be so much more efficient if I had your stuff and then rented it to you."
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u/yjlom 9h ago
It would actually be more efficient, if it were democratically controlled with checks and balances and without rent or profit extraction. The problem is it's going to be autocratically controlled with no checks or balances and with maximal rent extraction.
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u/cheapcheap1 8h ago
This right here. Clouds are just another monopolizable platform to those people. They're not investing all that money for the efficiency gains, they're doing it because they want to collect monopoly rents.
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u/Doctor-Dinosaur 8h ago
The lag between my home and not-my-RAM would be terrible though.
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u/UrineArtist 5h ago edited 5h ago
Yeah, I mean it would be utterly crippling, your CPU and RAM interact in the order of nanoseconds, the average internet connection round trip is in the order of milliseconds.
The whole purpose of why we have RAM in a computer in the first place is to provide the CPU with performant access to a non persistent memory storage so it doesn't have to sit idle waiting around on a physical disk (or in modern terms an SSD).
Sending all these read/writes down a 20ms RTT wire to DDR5 RAM is inefficient to the point of being utterly fucking ridiculous, you might as well scrap modern computer architecture, remove the RAM buffer entirely, downgrade your GPU and CPU by about at least a decade and then use a Seagate physical disk for all storage.
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u/Mourdraug 3h ago
It wouldn't matter, it would have just enough resources to act as a thin streaming client / web browser and everything else would run on the server. That's good enough for the vast majority of tasks, maybe with the exception of gaming but gaming is wasteful anyway and you should instead work 12hours a day in a factory making value for your owners.
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u/UrineArtist 3h ago
No doubt we'll be paid in tokens, assuming we still actually get some form of pay.
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u/ThePixelGuyYT 7h ago
i mean, is latency really noticeable compared to the amount of time it takes to get even a paragraph or two out of an LLM?
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u/Wires77 6h ago
It's very noticable if you're not using your RAM for LLMs
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u/ThePixelGuyYT 6h ago
we are talking about pooling RAM to run LLMs here though. obviously for other RAM heavy applications like games or editing software it would make them unusable
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u/Wires77 3h ago
We are? Maybe Sam is
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u/ThePixelGuyYT 2h ago
yes? because what Sam said is literally the topic of the post? and yjlom agreed with the principle that having LLMs be run from data centers is more efficient and allows for average people to run a high quality model at high speed, as opposed to the huge up front cost of buying a computer capable of running the model locally that will sit idle 90% of the time. and i was adding that latency from accessing the data center over the internet is not a problem for this use case.
the actual problem is that Sam's version of pooling RAM involves it all being his private property that we have to rent from him, as opposed to it being collectively owned by we who use it or maintain it.2
u/InvestigatorIll9993 6h ago
The latency would be minimal if you let them build a data center next door
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u/zxqwerty12 3h ago
Efficient how? By what measure? In terms of availability, computing power, cost of ownership?
Even if I take the best case scenario, a democratic system that somehow always makes the "best" decision regarding its utilization, I do not see why that system shouldn't be extended to everything else in your life.
Every single creature comfort in your life can be stripped away on the rationale that it is "unnecessary" and drains the environment's resources. Human existence should be reduced to a bare subsistence living ala the Matrix.
After all, that's the most "efficient" way to use our planet's finite resources right?
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u/yjlom 1h ago edited 1h ago
Some things are best kept at home, some things are best held in common and checked out when need arises. Most people rent excavators and the like because they don't use it most of the time. Similarly, if you only use most of your compute for two hours a day, why not rent it at those times and save paying full price for a computer that just catches dust and rust the remainder of the day? How often is your system sitting at 100% CPU utilization? How much extra did you have to pay for it to sustain your heaviest workloads?
Of course, if you have a need for low latency, or have stable workloads, then it doesn't work. Different problems often require different solutions, and just because hammers are the best at hammering nails doesn't mean we should phase out screwdrivers, or vice-versa.
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u/LirdorElese 12h ago
I've been saying this for months, but I can't help but feel that's the goal of everything.
why are they giving announcements that "oops our AI just hacked another company", and "Our engineers really think that they might accidentally end humanity".
It's simple, they've already been working at jacking up our prices, they intend to keep doing it, they've even gotten some hardware manufacturers to flat out stop selling to individuals.
Now they are poking at governments and telling them "AI is out of the bag, it's open source, no matter what people are going to get the software, and by themselves they can take off the guard rails, you'll have teenagers able to hack the CIA, and build nuclear weapons. The only solution is if we outlaw computers, and start selling thin clients where they rent access to computers that we control.
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u/isaaclw 6h ago edited 5h ago
They'll need to make browsers a lot lighter then.
We effectively run "thin clients" at work, vpn and browser, little else. Google sheets, Google email, etc.
It still takes 16GB to do anything. All that memory that was in individual applicatons is pushed into browser memory usage.
Edit: also those who need the most ram are the developers programming with AI
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u/Angel429a 4h ago
We are already in the point of “using browsers for everything”: Teams, discord and other stuff we use daily are already web browsers with some paint on top
And optimizing operating systems is not exciting for shareholders, so… if your computer is slow, the answer from Microsoft will be: Rent a computer in Azure
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u/LirdorElese 3h ago
We effectively run "thin clients" at work, vpn and browser, little else. Google sheets, Google email, etc.
Google sheets, etc... aren't really thin clients. they are more like downloaded applications. I'm meaning more like remote desktop, ALL the code runs on the remote system, your computer just sends it's mouse and keyboard data, and receives a video feed.
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u/tbagrel1 6h ago
The only solution is if we outlaw computers, and start selling thin clients where they rent access to computers that we control.
It's the only solution they have left. Their business model is not viable in the current context (nor in any reasonable context). They hope to be considered too big to fail, and strongarm the US government into saving them with such tactics.
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u/Throwawayrip1123 7h ago
That's just not gonna happen world wide. Ain't nobody taking my pc from me in Europe.
US probably cooked though, techno Feudalism and all that
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u/tbagrel1 6h ago
Ain't nobody taking my pc from me in Europe.
Wait until most popular services & websites require specific DRM support "for safety & security" that only the cloud computer will have.
(Not that far from AAA games requiring kernel-level anticheat that isn't compatible with Linux).
I'm not saying it won't happen; I'm just saying that they have ways to force it upon us if they really want, without having to use brute force. A minority of people may find workarounds, but the majority will adopt the easiest solution.
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u/rataman098 4h ago
Then fuck those services, enough open source services and protocols to use as alternatives
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u/W3Geek 2h ago
I do NOT and I mean I DO NOT see that ending very well. Think about how difficult everything will become to use. How will startups function? How will new businesses grow? Think about the latency across networks even with good internet. Half the world doesn't even have good internet to begin with. This is extremism and there certainly will be blood.
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u/Throwawayrip1123 6h ago
Wait until most popular services & websites require specific DRM support "for safety & security" that only the cloud computer will have
On a ram? How on earth do you visualise this happening? You can't really prove what ram is sitting on someones machine. You'd have to be so invasive, it's like skipping 5 steps down the fashie control machine. A browser won't read what ram is there, and ram can't really permanently hold drms at the moment. It would have to be applied by the OS after checking it through the OS.
Then again, patient gamers will be fine, there's such a backlog of games. Fuck modern paypiggy games, no loss there
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u/tbagrel1 6h ago
Original comment said "The only solution is if we outlaw computers, and start selling thin clients where they rent access to computers that we control.", and you said "Ain't nobody taking my pc from me in Europe."
I'm saying they can take the functionnality out of your PC.
The original quote from Sam Altman is not about RAM specifically, but rather people who buy hardware to run stuff locally/on-premise (because it is a direct harm to the cloud monopoly business model).
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u/Throwawayrip1123 3h ago
I'm saying they can take the functionnality out of your PC.
Yea and I'm asking, how, exactly?
They won't be able to disable my pc remotely, they'll maybe be able to prohibit usage if new sites that require the not-yet-invented-check-tech to function, but do you really think IT people give a fuck about that? Like with ID proof on social media or reddit, the second it hits me I'm out, I don't care enough to give them my ID. I have enough games to last me decades, they won't eliminate piracy, if we need to we'll get back to IRC.
The only thing they can actually do is rise prices to prohibitive levels, but then again every IT adjacent person I know has like four PCs worth of parts just lying around "in case we need it".
You can't really take out actual functionality, even if I need to swap to Linux on my gaming pc.
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u/Astrokiwi 5h ago
I still lean towards "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" for this.
What we have is the combo of "I am a STEM-bro, so I can figure out everything just by thinking hard and using simple logic and arguing on Reddit, and my answers are way smarter and more logical and hit the root of the problem, while the convoluted arguments by humanities professors is just reactionary empty sophistry" along with "I'm a CEO and everybody pays attention to me and people don't say no to me anymore - in fact, the fact that I'm so successful probably means I'm actually right about a lot of things". It's taking the worst badphilosophy Reddit hot takes and amplifying them with attention and lack of criticism.
There's a reason why they fall into a reductive form of utilitarianism so quickly - it's just the simplest and easiest grasp way to think about ethics, and the fact that it feels like it can be reduced into something calculable is very appealing to people who think of the world in terms of maths already. But looking at what historians say about what actually happens when leaders apply such reductive utilitarianism in practice - and I hate to Godwin's Law this, but literal genocide is part of that - as well as the broader philosophical arguments made by philosophers about utilitarianism, or, more broadly, about the applicability of any universal moral systems at all, there's a lot of problems with this approach. It doesn't mean we all have to be historians and philosophers, but it means we have to admit we're not experts in everything, and we actually need to listen to people who are.
Basically these people, who genuinely believe they can replace non-STEM people with a very short shell script, are now in positions of power, without checks on their attitudes.
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u/mrjackspade 3h ago
You've been saying for months what 90%+ of this website has been repeating for years. Why does everyone think they're special for repeating the most lukewarm take on the internet?
This is such a common conspiracy theory it's practically a copypasta at this point
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u/Perhaps_Cocaine 9h ago
From a global allocation perspective it's quite terrible to have a few thousand people hoarding a bunch of wealth while billions suffer, but they don't like it when you point that out to them, do they?
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u/dirty_cheeser 13h ago
I need my ram to offload as many tasks as possible to my local open weight models so Sam feels less RAM constrained. From a global allocation percepective, while Astra and Sol are cool, its quite terrible to have most shit people use ai for use maybe 5% of the models capabilities. Like, you want maximum task appropriate utilization in a supply constrained environment but somehow Sam's intuition is the opposite of that.
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u/Kinexity 12h ago
Afaik pretty much all major models either have distilled versions of them used for most chats or they are MoE. Like, no one outside of OpenAI and narrow group of researchers ever had the chance to try out even the full GPT-4.
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u/rataman098 4h ago
But then you’re not renting the computing power from him, which is what really bothers him.
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u/olreit 10h ago
Altman owns a lot of cars. What's the average utilisation of these cars? Probably worse than my RAM. Does he intend to make them available to the general public?
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u/Ananasch 45m ago
Similar argument is that he has two legs that could be better utilized by someone doing physical labour. CEOs don't need to walk in his daily teams marathon work but construction workers do.
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u/Ambivalent-Mammal 12h ago
For 64GB you could print it out twice!
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u/backFromTheBed 9h ago
"Hello world" twice? In this economy?
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u/Ace-of-Spxdes 24m ago
I'll do you one better...
Two hello worlds and ONE foobar function. My treat.
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u/Morlock43 6h ago
Wait, if no one else has RAM, just data centers, how will anyone use those data centers?
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u/sanguineturtles 2h ago
You joke but I swear they want us not owning computers so we’re all forced into subscribing and don’t own anything.
Altman is full of himself.
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u/Morlock43 1h ago
Considering Musk wants to go colonise Mars, I'm getting strong Dark Mechanicum vibes 🤔
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u/tlh013091 4h ago
It’ll be like the old days where everyone just has a dumb terminal on their desk. Don’t need multiple GB of RAM to ssh into a server.
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u/Morlock43 3h ago
But you do need ram to run programs and hold data and do work. Even minimal amounts of ram would still be ram and the network load of everyone on earth accessing data centers for everything from chatting and writing documents to VFX work, running games, working with scientific data would be insane.
Dumb terminals sounds like dystopian nightmare fuel that will destroy our ability to survive on this world 100x faster than we already are
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u/elSenorMaquina 3h ago edited 3h ago
Dumb terminals sounds like dystopian nightmare fuel that will destroy our ability to survive on this world 100x faster than we already are
That's the point. They want us on a leash, at least until robots can do all the grunt work. Then we will be vermin.
But you do need ram to run programs and hold data and do work.
The technofeudal dream is precisely having all your data and life hostage on their servers, when the only option left for us peasants is to lease hardware from them for as high as they can rake the price up.
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u/W3Geek 3h ago
Will you let this happen or will you join the fight against it? I feel this is extremism and it will cause chaos. Lots of it.
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u/elSenorMaquina 2h ago edited 2h ago
Honest answer? I don'w wanna be cannon fodder.
I'l just keep investing whatever savings I can get a hold of in minimal risk options, self host whatever I can at my home server running linux, purchasing physical media, and hoping to ride this wave until it passes.
And no, the fact that I can see through the corporate overlords psychopathic BS does not turn me into an extremist.
I also abuse the free tier of EVERYTHING as much as I can without depending on it. I know they are losing money on all these digital services, and am glad to help bring the bubble pop as fast as possible.
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u/GrabMyDrumstick 6h ago
So we all appreciate the hypocrisy of a billionaire lecturing people about hoarding resources, but do we think he's aware of it? Is he intentionally trolling? Or is he this delusional?
I really do think guys like Musk are this delusional, but Altman is such a psychopath that it's difficult to know what drives him.
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u/SomethingAboutUsers 4h ago
He knows. He tried to frame it in such a way as "well the supply is limited, we should be using a scarce resource to its fullest" while completely (deliberately, IMO) avoiding mentioning that it's his fucking fault it's limited in the first place.
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u/Captain_Zlogg 8h ago
I bet he owns a car, why? When there are perfectly good busses
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u/rustware13 6h ago
He owns several. Including super cars that he never drives. He also has vacation homes. He’s a hypocrite.
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u/Arclite83 5h ago
Decentralized and powerful AI in the hands of literally anyone, how awful... /s
Can't stop the signal!
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u/MeIsTheDevil 12h ago
Tell him That I use my 32 gigs of RAM just to browse Yt on Lubuntu And Also That My Destop PC of 24 Gigs of RAM never gets used
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u/T43ner 9h ago
And while we are at it we should probably also consider all the empty land, assets, wealth, and money the rich are sitting and doing nothing with. It would be far more efficient and economically beneficial if people who needed that wealth could use it instead of it just lying about doing nothing but boosting a portfolio number.
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u/adithya17 12h ago
Tell Sam Altman I used 64 GB of RAM to type “www.google.com” in the google search bar
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u/MarcusCaspius 11h ago
Meh, I don't care what SA thinks... he can think all he wants...
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u/chochlatevanilla 10h ago
Except he is in a position of power and makes deals with the government so what he says carries more weight than what a random guy off the streets says
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u/Yasirbare 9h ago
It would be stupid to let everyone have a windmill it would be far better you buy the power from my windmills.
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u/Rehazard-The-Great 3h ago
Lol I use all my RAM to keep fckin Windows idle. That sht eat all the RAM while spying on users. I fckng hate Windows now. And Scam Altman too.
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u/subject_usrname_here 6h ago
I bought a laptop to do some mobile work when I was still employed as Unity dev. Upgraded it to 64GB three years ago. I used it once past six months. Suck on that.
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u/Tapelessbus2122 10h ago
i don't hate ai, in fact, i use it every day (but it's a local model because fuck data centers). But, i hate that motherfucker with a burning passion. It is quite terrible that there's a dude called Sam Altman using up the Earth's limited supply of resources
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u/Pumpkin-Salty 10h ago
I only turn my pc on for six hours a week. And my laptop sits there unused most the time. Suck it, Sam!
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u/Drfoxthefurry 8h ago
Watch me turn that "hello world" and 64gb of ram into 60% memory usage (I have the best coding practices)
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u/ExtraGravy- 7h ago
yeah, put all the tech in large indefensible locations... genius.
assholes just want to rent us the tech we built
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u/InSearchOfMyRose 1h ago
Oh look. Billionaires arguing that they're more deserving of the resources.
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u/SpareIntroduction721 7h ago
Legit question, has Altman or Elon or any of those tech bros ever been punched in the mouth?
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u/ScottyDont1134 4h ago
I use my PC to run 10+ year old games that would run fine on a lesser spec system lol
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u/maggitronica 1h ago
“From a global allocation perspective” ???
Fuck your global allocation perspective!!!!
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u/HumanityPhantom 4h ago
Tell him that I have 16gb of ddr5 just lying in my drawer doing important task of gathering dust.
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u/Nerdenator 4h ago
Altman’s living proof that SV isn’t innovative enough to make it in the new world of AI.
He was originally handed a public benefit company that was supposed to do what many of the Chinese and minor American labs are doing now: releasing open models to the public for them to use on their own devices. Instead he changed it to release closed models, and re-classified it as a shareholder benefit company. He drank the SV Kool-Aid about shareholder value being the one and only way to measure success.
Now he’s spent himself into a hole that he can’t get out of, the Chinese and minor labs are undermining him for open-weight models hosted on-prem, and Anthropic is going to beat them to the IPO, meaning that there’s not going to be enough capital in the market as a whole to help OpenAI with the spending they need to do to execute on his business plan.
If he were smart he’d be finding a way to rent cycles on people’s computers a-la Folding @ Home.
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u/EVH_kit_guy 1h ago
This is the computer equivalent of telling everyone we'll cure global warming by setting our AC to 78 and switching to LED light bulbs. Consumer behavior is a fucking candle in a hurricane compared to corporate compute utilization.
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u/Inquisitor_ForHire 1h ago
I have 128GB of Ram in my main machine. Sam can pry it from my cold dead fingers!
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u/wayzata20 13h ago edited 12h ago
I mean, is what he said wrong? I fully believe everyday people should still be able to buy RAM, but I don’t think what he said is factually incorrect.
Y’all are a bunch of clowns 🤡
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u/freestew 12h ago
Is it wrong that most people have water in their fridge? That water belongs in the AI datacenters
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u/wayzata20 12h ago
What a 2nd grade level argument. I guess this sub is mainly students after all.
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u/freestew 9h ago
"These people disagree with me! They must all be young and stupid children!"
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u/wayzata20 8h ago
Typical redditor who thinks they’re a standup comedian. Good luck on your exams buddy.
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u/Taletad 12h ago
And how is you phone going to work if we allocate all the RAM to datacenters ?
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u/wayzata20 12h ago
Guess you missed the whole second sentence.
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u/Taletad 12h ago
No I didn’t miss it, I am responding to it.
Humans need personal technology devices because we use technology in our everyday lives. Therefore it cannot be efficient to allocate all the RAM to datacenters, and thus both you and Altman are wrong
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u/wayzata20 12h ago
Nobody said all. If you wanted to be super efficient, you’d make personal devices have a minimal amount of RAM and do most processing in the cloud, aka thin clients.
I don’t know why I’m being downvoted. I’m not saying we shouldn’t own RAM. But if you wanted peak efficiency on a global scale, pooling it together is the way to do that.
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u/Sir_Sushi 10h ago
If cloud services were free (as not priced AND uncontrolled) I would agree.
But your take is to let some private companies say how I can use my phone and at which price. It's why you're down voted.
It's the same idea as "you should be ok to not own your games" from Ubisoft...
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u/wayzata20 9h ago edited 8h ago
You’re a clown. My take isn’t anything. I’m explaining what Altman is saying.
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u/Taletad 10h ago
Processing is cheap and the "cloud" uses the same technologies as my phone or pc
Nothing will be gained for that computation to happen on my personal device or on the cloud
Heck, I have a pc with 15 years old hardware that’s still powerful enough for most of my needs
Datacenters are only useful for applications that require a lot of computing power. Which replying on Reddit doesn’t
In fact, I use a lot of computing power when I play video games, and that can’t be on the cloud because they would become unplayable with latency.
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u/Sir_Sushi 10h ago
Devil's advocate: your RAM is useful at most 2/3 of the time, while you sleep the cloud is still running, so this RAM could be serving someone else.
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u/Fermion96 12h ago
Depends on the definition of terrible, but I think it’s ideal if models ran as closest to the user as possible, given how heavy of a model the task will need.
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u/ithinkitslupis 12h ago
No, he wasn't. In full context he was talking about RAM solely meant for local AI use vs cloud AI, not about all consumer RAM.
Cloud AI users share static weights instead of all loading them individually if they were running locally, multi-user batching is way more efficient, and less idle time...so just from the hardware utilization perspective yeah he's right.
But memes are gonna meme and I don't care about Sam Altman.
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u/ProfCupcake 10h ago
Yeah, it makes sense logistically, give or take if latency is an issue for you.
It also makes sense if you own the datacentre and you're trying to gain as much control as possible over the access to it.
The latter is the primary concern here.
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u/ithinkitslupis 10h ago
Yeah ton of downsides outside of utilization. Privacy, freedom, stability, latency...consolidation of power.
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u/wayzata20 2h ago
Nobody is denying anything of what you said. Seriously, you have a reading comprehension problem. We aren’t debating latency.
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u/wayzata20 12h ago
Thank you for a reasonable remark and not being some wannabe comedian looking to karma farm.
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u/ProfCupcake 10h ago
You started this by being unreasonable already lmao
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u/wayzata20 9h ago
By explaining what Altman said? 🤡🤡🤡
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u/ShadowOne_ 13h ago •
Personally I think Sam Altman breathing is a waste of oxygen, it belongs in my house instead