I listened to the full podcast, and this is taken completely out of context. His point was entirely logical: if there’s scarcity, it’s important to maximize utilization of the scarce asset, and you do that by putting it in a data centre where it’s serving people constantly.
This forum has a hard time championing anything that isn’t “logical” as if ethos and pathos are inferior for some reason.
The man caused a worldwide RAM shortage. Who gives a flip about context?
I’ll take lower utilization for on prem thanks. Should I give my solar panels to my power company so they can overcharge me too in the name of “efficiency”?
>Should I give my solar panels to my power company so they can overcharge me too in the name of “efficiency”?
That doesn't make any sense because solar panels hooked up to the grid already benefits from high utilization. However if there is some national energy crisis, and there's a bunch of solar panels sitting idle, it might very well make sense to at least connect them to the grid so the energy isn't wasted.
Maximizing worldwide memory utilization isn’t generally something that people (individual human people) care about. They usually care more about ownership.
That would be true if the only use case of RAM was to hold context for LLMs or other cloud based processes. There are many other things RAM is useful for, not only running processes in the cloud.
Or should, for example, gamers all have to stream video games from Geforce Now instead of having their own PC?
Hospitals don’t use generators at 100% capacity so we should probably stop using them there /s
This is not logical because RAM a resource we want to use. There are many uses of RAM that don’t involve LLMs, and to assume that “max utilization” and “max utility” are the same thing is naive at best. The entire reason there’s scarcity is a problem of OpenAI’s own doing (along with the other labs).
His point is the highest and best use of the chips is to be full of model weights predicting the next word 24/7 instead of maybe being in a laptop that's off or underutilized sometimes.
It just so happens that the highest and best use is also what makes him the most money.
Nevermind the fact that there was no RAM shortage before he and his buddies decided to hyperscale their word guessers.
It'd be a bit like if an almond farmer came to a town with plenty of water, used up all the water growing almonds, and then tried to argue that growing food for everyone is a higher and better use than townfolk taking baths or watering their vegetable gardens.
It's not just ideologically bankrupt utilitarianism, it's ideologically bankrupt self serving utilitarianism.
So not very out of context at all? People see through it and are upset because the message effectively comes down to "We, the rich/corporations, deserve it more than you so we can rent it back to you".
I’d be more impressed with this scarcity argument if all the RAM companies are buying up were actually getting put online, instead of sitting around in warehouses as currently seems to be the case.
If you are the cause of artificial scarcity due to hoarding, you don’t also get to claim to be the solution to the problem. That’s just running a racket.
How is that not taking things out of context (or rather, leaving them stripped of it)? Scarcity caused by what? For the benefit of who? Utilization for what purpose? "Serving people", heh.
I wouldn't want RAM or a GPU for a decent price to run local models, but to do normal computer stuff. That is what is scarce, RAM and GPU for people. Nobody would give a flying fuck if ONLY data centers had trouble acquiring RAM.
If someone fuckers buys up all the drinking water to make enemas 24/7, and people survive on the rain water they catch in bowls, and then those guys says actually, we should have those too, they're just greedy sociopaths, no need to complicate it.
If we want to talk efficiency, the market and investors seem awfully irrational to me. The whole scarcity and costs skyrocketing for other proven and more valuable use cases is because of inefficiency imo.
Yes and as a side effect that guy gets unprecedented level of control over who gets to use that RAM for how much and what models will be used and so on.
Even things like decommissioning an old model can be extremely disruptive if all your workloads are tweaked for it. Like when Opus 4.8 dissappear from copilot in one company I work for. Suddenly our PR reviews started missing issues they always caught before.
While it is out of context, there is truth to his statement. There is something vile about people who become very rich very fast and they lose all sense of self-awareness and humanity. He wants all the resources for himself and his company. We're back to the "You'll own nothing and be happy" statement.
I understand from other discussions that Sam has several houses in SF alone (plus other cities). He did not discuss maximizing the utilization of those?
Is it possible to reinvent memory with stuff everyone owns or a separate system? It's been a while since I did hardware and low level stuff, so approach this question from a more "inventive" and perhaps "dreamy" way. Or just educate me on physics again and tell me to stop being dumb.
I feel like he could sell this as a future where people have super computers at home and when they’re not running they’re generating income, he doesn’t seemed constrained by the truth, just promise everyone that you’re going to replace their jobs and that their home computer will provide for them. This universal basic compute idea here seems consumed with is not appealing to anyone outside of tech.
So a gig economy but for compute? The problem with this, it will be a race to the bottom and will not pay enough to support the people. Not to mention the energy costs and wear and tear on the compute parts.
> “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,” he added. “You want maximum utilization 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.”
Altman not acknowledging that companies like his are creating the conditions that cause the supply constraints is the Dr. Evil cherry on top.
Tech company execs are among the stupidest people on Earth. Another article went around recently where the former CEO of Yahoo couldn't think of three positive words to describe her own child[1]. It's baffling that these people who probably put their pants on the wrong way around 50% of the time get as much airtime as they do. Truly breathtakingly stupid people.
> “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,”
It’s terrible from a global resource utilization perspective for people to fly around in private jets; but I can’t imagine Mr. Altman does otherwise.
So thank you for trying to protect us from the terrible scourge that is personally-owned DRAM, but I’ll take my chances.
He's worth like $3 billion. From a global allocation perspective, it's quite terrible he has a bunch of the world's limited supply of money in his own possession and only using 5% of it to live off of.
The exact same configuration I bought in 2025 for less than $2,000 now costs $24,000. If I didn't need it, I'd be tempted to sell it and buy a used car, or save the money for when the bubble bursts.
Quite a few variations of this story, if one can call it that, have been posted already. (Edit: I listed them in a collapsed reply to this comment, if anyone cares.)
It's obviously a riler-upper and therefore off topic for Hacker News. In fact, with its revved-up linkbait title and ragepilled content, it's an exemplar of what this site is not for.
Everyone is making fun of him for this clumsy take, but there is some truce to it. It's essentially how Cloud computing came about. We will have good LLM models that run on local hardware, and that is fine. However, it is foolish to think that it will ever make economic sense to run frontier models on hardware that sits idle 40% of the time.
Indeed. It is like cars vs public transport. Or private planes vs airlines. I am sure Vampire Sam would love to hand over his cars and jets because it is more efficient use of resources to take the bus.
It frustrates me that these AI companies’ hardware grab is aggressively antagonistic to technology enthusiasts.
I find it reassuring that the leadership confirms that their intention is to make my hobbies and profession less financially viable, as I would otherwise worry I’m overreacting.
Maybe Altman can resurrect the SETI@home project, though I would rather have my PC work on finding things among the stars instead of answering dumb AI queries.
By this logic the gaming PC running ComfyUI 24*7 generating custom porn should get RAM preference over the laptop of the kid who will cure cancer in ten years, doing her homework.
> As long as they don't use borrowed money to purchase all the supplies
Don't they? Being in debt over the value of their RAM purchases means they are using only borrowed money for it - money is fungible, if not buying any RAM for X dollars would reduce their debt by X dollars, everything else being the same - their RAM is bought entirely on debt - and that's precisely the case for both OpenAI and Anthropic.
Both of them a running a textbook market scalping operation as the OP is suggesting.
62 comments
[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] thread2030 is soon btw ;)
The man caused a worldwide RAM shortage. Who gives a flip about context?
I’ll take lower utilization for on prem thanks. Should I give my solar panels to my power company so they can overcharge me too in the name of “efficiency”?
That doesn't make any sense because solar panels hooked up to the grid already benefits from high utilization. However if there is some national energy crisis, and there's a bunch of solar panels sitting idle, it might very well make sense to at least connect them to the grid so the energy isn't wasted.
Or should, for example, gamers all have to stream video games from Geforce Now instead of having their own PC?
This is not logical because RAM a resource we want to use. There are many uses of RAM that don’t involve LLMs, and to assume that “max utilization” and “max utility” are the same thing is naive at best. The entire reason there’s scarcity is a problem of OpenAI’s own doing (along with the other labs).
His point is the highest and best use of the chips is to be full of model weights predicting the next word 24/7 instead of maybe being in a laptop that's off or underutilized sometimes.
It just so happens that the highest and best use is also what makes him the most money.
Nevermind the fact that there was no RAM shortage before he and his buddies decided to hyperscale their word guessers.
It'd be a bit like if an almond farmer came to a town with plenty of water, used up all the water growing almonds, and then tried to argue that growing food for everyone is a higher and better use than townfolk taking baths or watering their vegetable gardens.
It's not just ideologically bankrupt utilitarianism, it's ideologically bankrupt self serving utilitarianism.
If you are the cause of artificial scarcity due to hoarding, you don’t also get to claim to be the solution to the problem. That’s just running a racket.
How is that not taking things out of context (or rather, leaving them stripped of it)? Scarcity caused by what? For the benefit of who? Utilization for what purpose? "Serving people", heh.
I wouldn't want RAM or a GPU for a decent price to run local models, but to do normal computer stuff. That is what is scarce, RAM and GPU for people. Nobody would give a flying fuck if ONLY data centers had trouble acquiring RAM.
If someone fuckers buys up all the drinking water to make enemas 24/7, and people survive on the rain water they catch in bowls, and then those guys says actually, we should have those too, they're just greedy sociopaths, no need to complicate it.
Even things like decommissioning an old model can be extremely disruptive if all your workloads are tweaked for it. Like when Opus 4.8 dissappear from copilot in one company I work for. Suddenly our PR reviews started missing issues they always caught before.
The issue is that it can be applied to everything else, yet it isn't.
We can maximize utilization of wealth if we distrubite it.
We can maximize utilization of land if we build more communal pools/third places instead of only a few affording their own individual ones.
We can maximize utilization of transport if we all stopped having our own cars and had public transport.
We can maximize utilization of everything if it was available to everyone at all times.
Humanity just hasn't been interested in maximizing utilization, and I certainly doubt that Altman is. That is the crux.
He's not using even one percent of it. I'd love to help maximise the utilisation of his resources.
Why does the rich cunt think his own observations, about scarcity and allocation, don't apply to him?
Then don't buy the hardware in the first place and leave it up to the hyperscalers?
Altman not acknowledging that companies like his are creating the conditions that cause the supply constraints is the Dr. Evil cherry on top.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/style/marissa-mayer-ai-as...
It’s terrible from a global resource utilization perspective for people to fly around in private jets; but I can’t imagine Mr. Altman does otherwise.
So thank you for trying to protect us from the terrible scourge that is personally-owned DRAM, but I’ll take my chances.
Who said the above? Was it:
1) the head of the public transportation department in 1930?
2) the CEO of IBM in the 1970's?
3) Sam Altman in 2026?
One with RTX5090, 64GB DDR5, Ryzen 9, 4TB goes for equivalent to $13500, with most of that being the GPU and RAM.
A year ago, the same PC would have cost a third or so.
In any case, with the combination of expensive GPU, RAM, who the hell can actually afford this stuff.
It's obviously a riler-upper and therefore off topic for Hacker News. In fact, with its revved-up linkbait title and ragepilled content, it's an exemplar of what this site is not for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- https://github.com/exo-explore/exo - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/distributed-gpu-c...
I find it reassuring that the leadership confirms that their intention is to make my hobbies and profession less financially viable, as I would otherwise worry I’m overreacting.
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
If most funds are borrowed money, I would say they are just trying to dry up the supply.
You won't be able to do this forever, the faucet won't be on forever.
Don't they? Being in debt over the value of their RAM purchases means they are using only borrowed money for it - money is fungible, if not buying any RAM for X dollars would reduce their debt by X dollars, everything else being the same - their RAM is bought entirely on debt - and that's precisely the case for both OpenAI and Anthropic.
Both of them a running a textbook market scalping operation as the OP is suggesting.