Sam Altman:

A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we're going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data center.

But from a global allocation perspective, actually it's quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time.

Like you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment,

And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that

TL;DR Guy selling product: "Here's why owning your own product instead of renting it from me is a terrible idea"

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 26 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

No.. he actually is right. A local machine will sit idle most if the time.

A data center can balance loads globally.

In terms of resources.. data centers ARE cheaper.

However ... there are other reasons to use local interference that might be more important than added cost

  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 2 hours ago

    You can aggregate spare LLM capacity in a collaborative p2p fashion. But my reasons would be to use spare PV capacity to run an uncensored model during daytime with full privacy.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 5 points 3 hours ago

    Going cheap almost always ends in a more expensive repair bill down the line.

    Likewise, doing the most convenient thing to satisfy one's own desires is probably the most ill-advised course of action. Mainly, because it makes other people take the most convenient course of action to remove the other person from being a problem in their lives altogether.

  • source
  • parent