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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says its “terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM” instead of shoving it all in datacentres (frvr.com)
submitted 6 hours ago by to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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[–] 17 points 5 hours ago (8 children)

He’s referring specifically to local RAM used to run local AI models, whichl he argues is unused most of time. Say if you use your local AI for 4 hours a day, it’s idle for 20. Where the same model in a cloud might serve users across time zones 24/7.

It’s a similar argument about private car ownership, where a car might be used 5% of the day for a lot of people while 95% of the time it requires storage space, aka a parking spot somewhere.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 hours ago (1 child)

    The argument makes sebse for some things but not for others.

    Take water bottles. Or mugs. Having 15 of them collecting dust in a drawer is suboptimal. Therefore no one should own one and rent it from a muglord.

    There's a balance to be found, and I'd say RAM is more of a commodity than cars are. The fact it's not 99.999% utilized, unlike a certain someone's wishes is a feature of life and not a bug of capitalism not yet being post late stage.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 hours ago

    You can’t just have RAM sitting idle in your PC, you peasant. You use it, when you’re done with your pc, you take that RAM and give it to Sam. Next time you go buy another RAM and turn on your pc. Rinse and repeat. That didn’t make sense? Yeah, that’s how Sam’s argument sounded to me.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago (1 child)

    OK thanks for the explanation. Still having it not used at all, because the data center isn't build yet is worse. Also calling it "everybody" is weird. Unless he means phone and PC, and the very specialized AI run on such systems do not require extra RAM.
    So he remains a selfish moron.
    Companies running their own decentralized AI models on their own servers are the competition. Whining about the competition is also moronic.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 hours ago

    Yes, memory prices are affecting a lot more than people who want to run local models on high-memory desktops. That’s a small minority compared to all computer uses affected by the memory prices.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago

    there is nothing stopping him for mounting our electricity costs in order to tap into this 'unused ressource'. If they are really working for the sake of humanity, nothing is stopping him to support the ressource providers as a kind of community project. Thats what BOINC has been doing for the sake of scientific progress for years.

    i mean, if all they are doing is renting the resources in a data center, so can he with ours. They should be fine with not owning things really.

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