He's right. Most people don't use much of the RAM in their PC. Having 16GB or 32GB as standard on a PC when Apple's 8GB M1 demonstrated you can do a huge amount of work with much less proves it. Moving the majority of RAM to data centers where it's utilization could be much higher would be a more efficient use of resources.
There are still reasons for people to have a lot locally, but it shouldn't be the default.
Whats better if all the RAM, CPU and storage of phones went to DCs. People are more productive without phones. They work instead of consuming content. The tens of thousands of hours lost (opportunity cost), even at a minimum wage is >$1 million over a lifetime.
it could just be me, but I think there's a difference between maximizing the efficiency and utility of some RAM and maximizing the output of a person. The person has freedom and choice. We want them to be able to do what they want, because the downside is slavery, which is bad.
'Enslaving' RAM so we can get the most work from it as we can isn't quite the same.
I think many here would say the hyperscalers enjoy that the masses can't afford, e.g., ample local RAM (especially GPU RAM) because then they are encouraged to "rent" it from them. And that could lead to a feedback cycle where no-one could independely run models, due to (artificially created) economic conditions. And going further, if your personal economic prosperity is dependent on running capable LLMs, then while you may not be "enslaved" per se but you are certainly forced to pay these large companies for the racket they created and benefit from.
B-but how are you going to be available and responding to emails and Slack DMs 24/7 without a phone?! I guess an employer could allocate each worker a dumbphone that has no other functions than letting your boss reach you. And check where you are physically, probably.
I kind of feel this way about condominiums vs self standing houses, and I think the benefits and problems are comparable.
In the condo I used to own, I shared 5 out 6 faces of the box with neighbors. Cheapest electricity bills I ever had because you're mutually insulating your neighbors.
However, my HOA fees were more than that savings. The chairman noticed we had a lot of money in the reserves and pushed for a vote to do a multimillion dollar renovation. Popularity contest for things I don't value and HOA fees go up. Want to make a change or need to make a repair, need to get approval from the board.
Anyway, I'm sure the parallels are obvious with a little imagination, but I prefer a standalone house.
I am a bit confused on your position - are you saying HOA's are uniquely awful, or saying that we should all have equal access to local RAM (and Sam Altman is like the chairman of the biggest & least efficient HOA ever)?
I know it's popular to take a black or white position and fight viciously about it, but I didn't say either of the choices you're offering. Some things are shades of grey.
Really though, I just wanted to point out that there's a difference between efficient use of limited resources and lower prices for consumers.
It's right if you only focus on the resource allocation aspect. (Which would be a bit hypocritical as other comments here are mentioning).
But the elephant in the room is the question of who would control all that RAM and set or change the rules about which usages are allowed, for what price and which aren't allowed.
This against the backdrop of Anthropic just now deciding to block using Claude for reverse-engineering video games.
Or to go with your meme, the person you hate didn't just make a great point, they would also get to control what you do with your computer. Would you be fine with that?
this would be true to first order if people wanted the work being done in the new crop of ram hungry data centers to be some at all. They super duper don’t.
By the same line of thinking, his SF home has 6 bedrooms, it would be more efficient to transform it in a community housing, why is he hoarding all the bedrooms? He can't even physically be in more than one at a time.
And that's just one of 3 he owns in SF alone. Also he has 2 kidneys and 2 lungs, while he could get by with just 1 of each, and there are people badly needing them.
I will renounce my hardware when he renounces all homes and bedrooms.
Until then he's a hypocrite.
Sure, but housing is far higher on the hierarchy of human needs than RAM, so it’s apples and oranges (not to mention the other absurdities of Altman’s position which are too numerous to mention).
> Isn't the view that people having extra homes they use 5% of the time a very well-known and common criticism?
Not by Sam Altman, surely. Hypocrisy is an individual sin, you don't get out of it because everyone else thinks you're wrong.
To murder the humor: the joke is funny because the idea that we should centrally plan resource usage for the benefit of society as a whole and discourage/disallow individually driven use of those resources for individually popular but socially wasteful applications is... communism, basically.
You can repeat this analysis for pickup trucks or cross-continent travel or desert agriculture, ad nauseum. And we do. And people like Sam Altman tend very strongly to be on one side of the argument. Until they need more DRAM, then it's all "let's pull together comrades".
Famous Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki a climate change (yes I agree it's real and bad) champion so much so he suggested polluters be eviscerated, he owns multiple homes. Also apparently he is an arrogant asshole to anyone he interacts with.
Altman said that people use all of the computer's 32G of memory at most (pulling a number perhaps out of his ass) 5% of the time.
You referred to using a home at least 5% of the time. If I live in only two rooms totally 150 sq ft of my 3,000 sq ft house for 19 days of the year than I use 5% of the house for at least 5% of the the year.
I trust you see those two 5%s are very different things.
Consider if I had a 32 GB desktop w 2GB for OS, set up to donate CPU cycles to a distributed computing project. I 100% of the time use the RAM on the desktop, even when I use just over 5% of the RAM.
Note also that Altman said nothing about how often people use less than their entire RAM. If I have 32 GB because I regularly use 28 GB and want some in reserve, then knowing that I only need the extra 4 GB about 5% of the time doesn't mean it's worthwhile to take away 4GB and have my code crash 5% of the time.
> You've changed the baseline.
Altman said that people use all of the computer's 32G of memory at most
1. No, I think you changed it - I just re-listened to that section, and I don't hear any mention of "at most", nor any mention of "all of the computer's" DRAM, nor any mention of "32G" - what are the timestamps you are referring to? The only other piece he mentioned was that he was speaking in terms of "a global allocation perspective".
> Consider if I had a 32 GB desktop w 2GB for OS, set up to donate CPU cycles to a distributed computing project
2. The scenario you laid out seems very uncommon - are you actually using a 32GB PC w/ 2 GB for the OS, with the rest being donated to a distributed computing project, or are even you not doing the scenario you laid out? Are you commenting on HN using ≤2 GB RAM w/ the other 30 GB donated? Regardless, the 2GB used + 30GB donated seems like an incredibly uncommon one that is not at all representative of the norm.
3. Instead, a ton of people only use their work PC for <40 hours per week, and only a couple hours per day or less of recreational PC use, out of the 336 potential hours per week if we assume someone has a separate work and home PC.
I said 32GB because that's what's on my desktop, and because my previous comment, in a parallel thread, was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50324468 where onion2k proposed that Altman was right because "Having 16GB or 32GB as standard on a PC when Apple's 8GB M1 demonstrated you can do a huge amount of work with much less proves it."
I chose 32 GB as the high-end of that range, so I could have something concrete.
We are indeed talking the same quote: “But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time,”
I'm fine with having misinterpreted it, but, what does that 5% number mean for global DRAM allocation, how is it determined, and how do you apply the same measure to extra homes?
I use my bicycle far less than 5% of the time, so what does that say about bicycles from a global allocation perspective, and why should that change anything?
> The scenario you laid out seems incredibly uncommon
I was trying to demonstrate how there are at least two very different ways to define what '5% of the time' means. The inspiration for that was a friend who donated processing time to GIMPS, but I don't know how much memory GIMPS needs these days, and the details were beside the point.
> I use my bicycle far less than 5% of the time, so what does that say about bicycles from a global allocation perspective, and why should that change anything?
Perhaps a more apt analogy would be if there was an incredible shortage of rubber for vehicle tires, with possible allocations of each tire including either a bus that would be used ~24x7 for a large number of users simultaneously, or for a car that would be used by 1 person a relatively small percent of the time?
Look, can we instead talk about real problems? Have you even considered how difficult it is to get wifi to work well across your various San Francisco and Bay Area houses?
> Also he has 2 kidneys and 2 lungs, while he could get by with just 1 of each, and there are people badly needing them.
Is that supposed to be an example of hypocrisy? Or why did you specifically type that up in your comment?
Regardless, are people required to not be hypocrites in any other way for it to be acceptable for them to say something else is badly inefficient? Actually, I am not even sure any of your comment is an example of hypocrisy, unless you're saying that someone can't say a completely different thing is badly inefficient, unless that person is personally efficient in (all?) other unrelated dimensions as well (for example, RAM, while being inefficient in terms of kidneys, lungs, and homes)?
For efficient use of RAM, probably. For efficient cost to consumers, not so much. The company that owns the RAM and rents its use to you WILL try to make a profit. At pre-AI prices, $20 per month summed over a year or two bought enough RAM to run local models. Most people won't need the frontier.
In the same vein, it is inefficient for so much wealth to be in the hands of just a few billionaires who just hoard it to no one’s benefit; it would be much more efficient if those dollars were in the hands of the bottom 95%, who would actually put those resources to full use.
The entire industry of Personal Computing is inefficient, given his definition.
Like we have these billions of smartphones just sleeping all the time instead of running at 100% all the time.
But the whole point of personal computing is that you can do whatever you want.
It is the same old argument between centralization and decentralization. Yes, centralization is more efficient, but also the goals of centralized systems are ultimately wrong. So they are efficiently sailing towards the cliff.
Yeah, "isn't your car sitting idle like 22 hours a day?"
Bathrooms are even more inefficient, btw. How many hours a day do you really use a bathroom? And some people even have more than one just for convenience.
That's close, but basic capitalism is where those who were able to extract the most value from _previous_ resources are able to acquire current and future resources using the value they previously acquired. Managed capitalism is one of the forms where resources eventually get allocated more efficiently. In practice, anyway (philosophically, systems are better than in reality).
Yeah: because he wants me to have to pay him rather than being able to run open models locally and, more broadly, he wants the control and power that removing consumers' ability to run local models would bring to him and his company.
His solution is to return us all to an undemocratic model of computing that has been in decline since the 1970s.
I have a phrase in mind that's considerably more appropriate and to the point but, here, out of respect for HN's guidelines, I'll satisfy myself by merely saying: get off my lawn.
Feels like the whole lot of tech has been driving this direction for a while, trying to remove ownership of everything and make us rent everything from them.
And who caused the supply crunch? Very deceitful framing. Worse than stating plainly what he means like the headlines have done.
He could very easily solve the shortage by not buying up the entire supply. Further, the frontier labs could even coordinate in favor of consumers and agree to limit their compute purchases.
Even with the context, it's still a bad statement to make considering how the over-investment in AI data centers and DRAM price fixing by memory makers has made the price of RAM prohibitivly expensive for average people. Not everyone wants RAM to run local models, they just want to play video games or have an affordable PC for work or entertainment, and we can't do that because people like Sam Altman wants everyone paying Open AI to do the inference. If everyone could run their own local models then the value proposition of Open AI would dramatically decrease, so his statement is really self-serving rather than altruistic.
68 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 42.2 ms ] threadBack to Sam, his memory is not as good as it was before, money gets in the eyes and vision get muddy and foggy.
yes that’s what he’s saying, if consumers had less memory, his would be better.
"No, sorry, I can't allow more ads 'cause I'm running out of memory. If you want me to allow ads you'll have to give me more memory first."
There are still reasons for people to have a lot locally, but it shouldn't be the default.
There's a meme for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbreaking:_The_Worst_Perso...
Whats better if all the RAM, CPU and storage of phones went to DCs. People are more productive without phones. They work instead of consuming content. The tens of thousands of hours lost (opportunity cost), even at a minimum wage is >$1 million over a lifetime.
'Enslaving' RAM so we can get the most work from it as we can isn't quite the same.
(No one is saying the RAM is "enslaved")
EDIT: upon re-reading, maybe we agree
What I don’t like is the idea of rationing it and making it more and more expensive when you promise an era of abundance.
In the condo I used to own, I shared 5 out 6 faces of the box with neighbors. Cheapest electricity bills I ever had because you're mutually insulating your neighbors.
However, my HOA fees were more than that savings. The chairman noticed we had a lot of money in the reserves and pushed for a vote to do a multimillion dollar renovation. Popularity contest for things I don't value and HOA fees go up. Want to make a change or need to make a repair, need to get approval from the board.
Anyway, I'm sure the parallels are obvious with a little imagination, but I prefer a standalone house.
Really though, I just wanted to point out that there's a difference between efficient use of limited resources and lower prices for consumers.
But the elephant in the room is the question of who would control all that RAM and set or change the rules about which usages are allowed, for what price and which aren't allowed.
This against the backdrop of Anthropic just now deciding to block using Claude for reverse-engineering video games.
Or to go with your meme, the person you hate didn't just make a great point, they would also get to control what you do with your computer. Would you be fine with that?
Oh wait, much of the basis of the modern economy is letting individuals make decisions for themselves.
If one could use their RAM in a way that was actually private and without leading to them accumulating huge power it would be different matter.
And that's just one of 3 he owns in SF alone. Also he has 2 kidneys and 2 lungs, while he could get by with just 1 of each, and there are people badly needing them.
I will renounce my hardware when he renounces all homes and bedrooms. Until then he's a hypocrite.
Isn't the view that people having extra homes they use 5% of the time a fairly common criticism?
So... San Francisco?
Not by Sam Altman, surely. Hypocrisy is an individual sin, you don't get out of it because everyone else thinks you're wrong.
To murder the humor: the joke is funny because the idea that we should centrally plan resource usage for the benefit of society as a whole and discourage/disallow individually driven use of those resources for individually popular but socially wasteful applications is... communism, basically.
You can repeat this analysis for pickup trucks or cross-continent travel or desert agriculture, ad nauseum. And we do. And people like Sam Altman tend very strongly to be on one side of the argument. Until they need more DRAM, then it's all "let's pull together comrades".
Altman said that people use all of the computer's 32G of memory at most (pulling a number perhaps out of his ass) 5% of the time.
You referred to using a home at least 5% of the time. If I live in only two rooms totally 150 sq ft of my 3,000 sq ft house for 19 days of the year than I use 5% of the house for at least 5% of the the year.
I trust you see those two 5%s are very different things.
Consider if I had a 32 GB desktop w 2GB for OS, set up to donate CPU cycles to a distributed computing project. I 100% of the time use the RAM on the desktop, even when I use just over 5% of the RAM.
Note also that Altman said nothing about how often people use less than their entire RAM. If I have 32 GB because I regularly use 28 GB and want some in reserve, then knowing that I only need the extra 4 GB about 5% of the time doesn't mean it's worthwhile to take away 4GB and have my code crash 5% of the time.
1. No, I think you changed it - I just re-listened to that section, and I don't hear any mention of "at most", nor any mention of "all of the computer's" DRAM, nor any mention of "32G" - what are the timestamps you are referring to? The only other piece he mentioned was that he was speaking in terms of "a global allocation perspective".
> Consider if I had a 32 GB desktop w 2GB for OS, set up to donate CPU cycles to a distributed computing project
2. The scenario you laid out seems very uncommon - are you actually using a 32GB PC w/ 2 GB for the OS, with the rest being donated to a distributed computing project, or are even you not doing the scenario you laid out? Are you commenting on HN using ≤2 GB RAM w/ the other 30 GB donated? Regardless, the 2GB used + 30GB donated seems like an incredibly uncommon one that is not at all representative of the norm.
3. Instead, a ton of people only use their work PC for <40 hours per week, and only a couple hours per day or less of recreational PC use, out of the 336 potential hours per week if we assume someone has a separate work and home PC.
I chose 32 GB as the high-end of that range, so I could have something concrete.
We are indeed talking the same quote: “But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time,”
I'm fine with having misinterpreted it, but, what does that 5% number mean for global DRAM allocation, how is it determined, and how do you apply the same measure to extra homes?
I use my bicycle far less than 5% of the time, so what does that say about bicycles from a global allocation perspective, and why should that change anything?
> The scenario you laid out seems incredibly uncommon
I was trying to demonstrate how there are at least two very different ways to define what '5% of the time' means. The inspiration for that was a friend who donated processing time to GIMPS, but I don't know how much memory GIMPS needs these days, and the details were beside the point.
I also don't have a 3,000 sq. ft. house.
Perhaps a more apt analogy would be if there was an incredible shortage of rubber for vehicle tires, with possible allocations of each tire including either a bus that would be used ~24x7 for a large number of users simultaneously, or for a car that would be used by 1 person a relatively small percent of the time?
(who remembers this executive?)
Is that supposed to be an example of hypocrisy? Or why did you specifically type that up in your comment? Regardless, are people required to not be hypocrites in any other way for it to be acceptable for them to say something else is badly inefficient? Actually, I am not even sure any of your comment is an example of hypocrisy, unless you're saying that someone can't say a completely different thing is badly inefficient, unless that person is personally efficient in (all?) other unrelated dimensions as well (for example, RAM, while being inefficient in terms of kidneys, lungs, and homes)?
You should watch the talk yourself, it's pretty entertaining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMsUcCYNKqY&t=1765s
Like we have these billions of smartphones just sleeping all the time instead of running at 100% all the time.
But the whole point of personal computing is that you can do whatever you want.
It is the same old argument between centralization and decentralization. Yes, centralization is more efficient, but also the goals of centralized systems are ultimately wrong. So they are efficiently sailing towards the cliff.
Bathrooms are even more inefficient, btw. How many hours a day do you really use a bathroom? And some people even have more than one just for convenience.
Efficient use of Resources for the production of more Capital.
His solution is to return us all to an undemocratic model of computing that has been in decline since the 1970s.
I have a phrase in mind that's considerably more appropriate and to the point but, here, out of respect for HN's guidelines, I'll satisfy myself by merely saying: get off my lawn.
Pendulum is swinging against it now though!
Nitter: https://nitter.mie.foundation/daradoescode/status/2116654047...
He could very easily solve the shortage by not buying up the entire supply. Further, the frontier labs could even coordinate in favor of consumers and agree to limit their compute purchases.
* What happens when these services arbitrarily restrict it's usage based on what they deem as unacceptable?
I don't know who Dara is, but they should probably put down that bucket of paint thinner and stop huffing it for a moment.
Oh yeah, here it was:
https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/welcome-to-2030-i-ow...