"People shouldn't be allowed to bicycle for fun. Only utilitarian bicycles should be allowed. For there's too much energy spent manufacturing mountain bikes, tires, converting ski station into bike parks for the summer. That energy and money should instead be directed towards creating more RAM factories and more datacenters for the AI companies".
Where does such an "efficient" argument ends?
P.S: as a bonus question: does anyone know how to differentiate a paid shill from a sycophant?
Altman leaves out of this the fact that OpenAI has basically tried to corner the market on RAM, trying to lock up 40% of the world’s supply without even guaranteeing that it will follow through on the actual purchase orders. I mean, I think that alone would have at least some impact on the current price for RAM, wouldn’t it?
Hes going to lobby the federal government to confiscate all your RAM, like FDR did with the gold. :|
Screw Sam Altman. He's the root cause of this shortage, besides that, how does he justify his car having extra seats that he's not using. Sick and tired of these techbros trying to re-centralize computing all over again whilst stealing left, right and center.
Even putting aside the whole privacy and tuning debates - unless Sam is willing to sell us inference at something near the pre-constrained cost of directly owning the DRAM all he is advocating for is "don't be greedy guys, that's what I'm for. I can be greedy for you!". It's not actually efficient for people to pay huge markups on compute and memory vs letting that same memory site idle some of the time. I mean I guess it's efficient for OpenAIs bank account, but not for anyone else.
the efficiency point is simple. inference providers can use RAM to make money and so they are willing to pay more for it. they don't need to confiscate it. they can outbid consumers and reduce effective consumer demand, which is exactly what they are already doing.
the underlying economics are unescapable. when there was a glut of RAM because no profitable uses existed for it manufacturers shoved it into consumer products because "bigger number is good" but it produces very little utility sitting idle in consumer devices.
Efficiency and resilience are always in trade-off. Even if there was no other argument it would be worth having local inference as a guard against systemic SPOFs in the big providers.
Sam Altman's argument about RAM utilization is reasonable on a first pass, but misses several key points:
1. people aren't using (GPU) RAM [1] for just running LLMs (in the local model sense), they are using it for other things... games, system displays, other models (Text-to-Speech, Speech Recognition, etc.);
2. being able to run models locally allows them to be used when the internet is down, use them on private data (e.g. medical records, proprietary company data, etc.), including training on that data;
3. the big AI companies are already storing unused GPUs on shelves waiting for their roll-out in data centres, as they can't build the capacity fast enough.
With point (3) that goes against Sam Altman's argument about utilization. The big companies have the hardware, but aren't utilizing it themselves.
[1] And if the argument extends to RAM in general you have all sorts of applications, especially on developer hardware -- editing and compiling software; running local servers; running CAD and other applications; etc.
Better analogy might be that instead of everyone having gas powered generators they run for 14 hours a day, we should put them all in one place and run extension cords to peoples homes.
Most of their wealth is committed in stocks or real estate. Any "unused" wealth is just cash-in-hand, ready to be spent on themselves, or to be used in new investment opportunities.
He doesn't miss these things like gaming or edge cases... He's just talking specifically about how local LLM inference is not economical and he is right.
Anyone choosing between a cloud provider vs local specifically for an LLM has likely noticed this already.
Anyone interpreting this as "Altman wants to take DRAM away from me" or "Altman doesn't understand use case X Y or Z" is just strawmanning.
The most honest interpretation of the quote in the article (if you actually read it) is he says:
1. There's a problem which is the shortage
2. People assume the solution to the problem is just everyone has local inference
3. That won't work because if everyone has local inference there's actually a worse problem because it's less efficient (idle time, partial batch sizes etc) so we'd need even more compute
There's nothing that even remotely suggests he wants to do something nefarious from this quote. If you hate him, find a better reason like the weird cornea scanning cryptocurrency ideas.
A problem of both the Altman post and posts that react on him is that they take efficiency/utility in absolute sense instead of in marginal sense.
There is clearly high marginal utility of the first n GB of RAM in your computer, but then its go down probably faster than for RAM in OpenAI's datacenter. And the market just solves for the equilibrium.
I don't understand the backlash against this interview.
When listening to the interview it sounded clear that it was just in context of local inference.
To me it came across as stating that setting up local inference, when dram is limited, is indeed limiting from a global perspective.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to state that his opinion is that we shouldn't have any ram being used for any local purposes.
Of course he doesn't want anyone 'hoarding' their own RAM, for the same reason institutional landlords usually dislike the idea of the housing supply becoming less constrained and allowing people to escape the rent trap. Altman wants to force us into a landlord-tenant relationship, making alternatives more difficult is in his material interest.
Local inference is like buying a house even if it's more expensive than renting, because you (often quite reasonably) don't want to live under the heel of the landlord-tenant power relationship.
I agree. I mean, his conflict of interest is obvious, but what he was addressing there has been exaggerated. He made no egregious statement. From a utilitarian perspective the distribution of RAM for local inference purposes is indeed inefficient. I still don't want OpenAI or any other company to be able to hoard huge orders of RAM, but the point applies regardless of OpenAI or Anthropic (or any other company). The knee-jerk reaction from a community that's supposed to be bright was disappointing though.
That’s even worse? That sounds like the power company saying that individuals shouldn’t own solar panels because they might not be getting 100% utilization out of them. Or Big Ag making a similar argument about people with kitchen gardens or smallhold farms. For someone in his position, it’s transparently self-serving and anticompetitive. I for one do not feel bad that he has to compete for RAM with other users, not one bit.
> the thought experiment is that if you have a sufficiently powerful AI tool that is told to “maximize” the creation of paperclips, it might decide the best way to do that is to seize control of all resources
Hopefully he doesn't work out either, since that just means he'll have to eat more, which makes him inefficient. He should live on as few calories as he can. Probably get bound to a chair with the computer screen right in front of him, Wall-E-style, and a tube of Soylent delivering it directly to his stomach in the exact measure.
I have been finding this quiye weird, it seems that the real villany was in what was in Sam Altman's mind when he said something that is basically true.
I have seen many explanations of what that was exactly, they are not all agreed on the bad thoughts were, but they are pretty much in agreement that it was a bad thing.
It's like saying 'public transport is more efficient than driving your own car', and the person hearing you say 'you shouldn't own a car, you should use the public transport system I will own.'
But they have not bought everything available. The industry has. No one actor caused the shortage. OpenAI may be the largest single buyer, but they do not make up the majority of the buyers. There is competition for what they provide. So they are not even a sole provider.
If you use the same competitive basis for the public transport advocate analogy, your complaint seems to be that one of the advocates for public transport is building public transport. Not the only one, just one of many.
There is a high demand overall, it is costing people more. What solution do you propose?
Are LLMs the best use
Of ram? Many other extremely beneficial devices for extremely high value use cases are suffering because of this madman trying to corner the market. Show me the value of everything else suffering.
I think the argument being made is fundamentally wrong. It reminds me of the Socialism vs Capitalism models - this idea that centralizing the resources will somehow unlock efficiency. It's also becoming clearly that merely throwing more data, RAM, compute, etc, is not generating significantly better behaviours.
We are far better off with millions of people running lots of little experiments, than a handful of super large companies running a subset of experiments. We really need to get agentic LLMs onto local machines at a reasonable price to really accelerate.
The likes of qwen3.5-0.8b have been super interesting to me, you have this tiny little model that can run on a CPU that can exhibit agentic behaviours (with a lot of tickling) - in the hands of hobbyists is where I suspect we will see some cool updates.
Let's put gaming and all the other uses for compute that require low latency, etc. off the table and just talk about AI compute. People can and do run open models on their own hardware. Altman is, not unseriously, arguing that this hardware would be better utilized if it were concentrated in data centres rather than distributed into smaller, private clusters that might not reach full utlization.
Now, let's take privacy concerns off the table. OpenAI's complete lack of respect for privacy, authorship, copyright, etc. mean that you simply can't entrust private data to OpenAI. Full stop. Anyone with privacy concerns gets a free pass.
Finally, we're dealing just with people doing LLM computations on data that's not sensitive. Why aren't these people doing things in data centres? There are likely a variety of reasons, but one is likely price. If somebody does a lot of stuff with local models, they've probably found an application where a bigger closed model doesn't offer compelling advantages and the cost, purely in terms of filthy lucre, of running a local model is lower. These are the users Sam Altman can legitimately target. What Altman is arguing is that these people are paying too much.
How should he target them? Become the Steam of compute. Save them money and time. If Altman wants these people's RAM because he can use it more efficiently, he needs to offer them the same services they can get from their own hardware, cheaper, and with less trouble.
Let's all get rid of our personal means of transportation as well, super inefficient to have cars and bikes and such parked for the majority of the time! Some people even buy houses that they're never in! Or they buy kitchen equipment they only use once a month! Or clothes that people only wear for parties! Why even own anything at all!
I am pretty sure Sam has already sold the majority of his personal belongings and only rents whatever he needs when he needs it. What a great example for us all.
> Altman talks about how they’re working on having robots build “self-replicating data centers” (what?!?)
Company that cautions against the paperclip maximizer already at work building the paperclip-maximizing hardware themselves.
Though I appreciate how this would invalidate the last remaining arguments for the "data centers bring local employment" claim, if the security and construction jobs are automated away as well.
Maybe it will be replaced with a new spin: "Data center? What data center? Oh that one... that's just a wild weed, you can't prove it's one of ours..."
67 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 60.4 ms ] thread"People shouldn't be allowed to bicycle for fun. Only utilitarian bicycles should be allowed. For there's too much energy spent manufacturing mountain bikes, tires, converting ski station into bike parks for the summer. That energy and money should instead be directed towards creating more RAM factories and more datacenters for the AI companies".
Where does such an "efficient" argument ends?
P.S: as a bonus question: does anyone know how to differentiate a paid shill from a sycophant?
I think that's about where the argument ends.
Hes going to lobby the federal government to confiscate all your RAM, like FDR did with the gold. :|
the underlying economics are unescapable. when there was a glut of RAM because no profitable uses existed for it manufacturers shoved it into consumer products because "bigger number is good" but it produces very little utility sitting idle in consumer devices.
1. people aren't using (GPU) RAM [1] for just running LLMs (in the local model sense), they are using it for other things... games, system displays, other models (Text-to-Speech, Speech Recognition, etc.);
2. being able to run models locally allows them to be used when the internet is down, use them on private data (e.g. medical records, proprietary company data, etc.), including training on that data;
3. the big AI companies are already storing unused GPUs on shelves waiting for their roll-out in data centres, as they can't build the capacity fast enough.
With point (3) that goes against Sam Altman's argument about utilization. The big companies have the hardware, but aren't utilizing it themselves.
[1] And if the argument extends to RAM in general you have all sorts of applications, especially on developer hardware -- editing and compiling software; running local servers; running CAD and other applications; etc.
How so? It's obviously self-serving.
Sources for this would be appreciated.
[1] https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/what-...
[2] https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/5-gpu-utilization-the...
[3] https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/ai-bubble-update-79-o...
[4] https://www.techradar.com/pro/5-utilization-is-a-math-fail-m...
[5] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-has-ai-... [Nov 2025]
Running all those lines, people don't even use it all that much.
Much more efficient to put everybody into camps, and simply have the people take turns using electrical appliances operating at 100% duty cycle.
Freight delivery speeds need to be brought down too, 35 MPH maximum.
Food? Give me break, get everyone on a Soylent Green diet.
Ol’ Mao would like to have a word with you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_commune
A nation that doesn’t care for itself is one incident away from revolt.
Anyone choosing between a cloud provider vs local specifically for an LLM has likely noticed this already.
Anyone interpreting this as "Altman wants to take DRAM away from me" or "Altman doesn't understand use case X Y or Z" is just strawmanning.
The most honest interpretation of the quote in the article (if you actually read it) is he says:
1. There's a problem which is the shortage
2. People assume the solution to the problem is just everyone has local inference
3. That won't work because if everyone has local inference there's actually a worse problem because it's less efficient (idle time, partial batch sizes etc) so we'd need even more compute
There's nothing that even remotely suggests he wants to do something nefarious from this quote. If you hate him, find a better reason like the weird cornea scanning cryptocurrency ideas.
There is clearly high marginal utility of the first n GB of RAM in your computer, but then its go down probably faster than for RAM in OpenAI's datacenter. And the market just solves for the equilibrium.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to state that his opinion is that we shouldn't have any ram being used for any local purposes.
Local inference is like buying a house even if it's more expensive than renting, because you (often quite reasonably) don't want to live under the heel of the landlord-tenant power relationship.
Hey don't talk about Sam like that!
Or maybe he should live in a one bedroom apartment.
That would be way more efficient.
I have seen many explanations of what that was exactly, they are not all agreed on the bad thoughts were, but they are pretty much in agreement that it was a bad thing.
It's like saying 'public transport is more efficient than driving your own car', and the person hearing you say 'you shouldn't own a car, you should use the public transport system I will own.'
They have no credibility as an impartial analyst.
If you use the same competitive basis for the public transport advocate analogy, your complaint seems to be that one of the advocates for public transport is building public transport. Not the only one, just one of many.
There is a high demand overall, it is costing people more. What solution do you propose?
And sure, they ended up being nonbinding letters of intent to purchase, but it caused a massive market shift, and it seemed like an intentional act.
The solution I propose is that everyone stops listening to Sam Altman.
If the other use cases are extremely beneficial and extremely high value, surely they can happily pay $1000 for 64 GB of RAM?
We are far better off with millions of people running lots of little experiments, than a handful of super large companies running a subset of experiments. We really need to get agentic LLMs onto local machines at a reasonable price to really accelerate.
The likes of qwen3.5-0.8b have been super interesting to me, you have this tiny little model that can run on a CPU that can exhibit agentic behaviours (with a lot of tickling) - in the hands of hobbyists is where I suspect we will see some cool updates.
This is literally one of the world's largest capitalists. The cognitive dissonance is deafening...
If I go check the largest computer shop in my country, it's adding general electronics now, and very few ram, GPU are available.
This is extremely bad. And this asshole says this. It's just infuriating
If Sam wants to buy 16GB of 6 year laptop RAM, he can send me a check for $2000.
Now, let's take privacy concerns off the table. OpenAI's complete lack of respect for privacy, authorship, copyright, etc. mean that you simply can't entrust private data to OpenAI. Full stop. Anyone with privacy concerns gets a free pass.
Finally, we're dealing just with people doing LLM computations on data that's not sensitive. Why aren't these people doing things in data centres? There are likely a variety of reasons, but one is likely price. If somebody does a lot of stuff with local models, they've probably found an application where a bigger closed model doesn't offer compelling advantages and the cost, purely in terms of filthy lucre, of running a local model is lower. These are the users Sam Altman can legitimately target. What Altman is arguing is that these people are paying too much.
How should he target them? Become the Steam of compute. Save them money and time. If Altman wants these people's RAM because he can use it more efficiently, he needs to offer them the same services they can get from their own hardware, cheaper, and with less trouble.
I am pretty sure Sam has already sold the majority of his personal belongings and only rents whatever he needs when he needs it. What a great example for us all.
Company that cautions against the paperclip maximizer already at work building the paperclip-maximizing hardware themselves.
Though I appreciate how this would invalidate the last remaining arguments for the "data centers bring local employment" claim, if the security and construction jobs are automated away as well.
Maybe it will be replaced with a new spin: "Data center? What data center? Oh that one... that's just a wild weed, you can't prove it's one of ours..."
Me: This might well be the understatement of the century.
SAL "Sand-boxing works to a point. Then I think monitoring........ works to a further point."
Me: REALLY? You think you should MONITOR your system of agents while it does its work? GEE I wish I'd thought of that!