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Sam Altman says DRAM capacity should go to data centers, not personal computers

36 points 0x4e 2 hours ago 46 comments

roscas 2 hours ago | parent

After a few seconds, popup asking me to allow ads on the site. Ya, sure.

Back to Sam, his memory is not as good as it was before, money gets in the eyes and vision get muddy and foggy.

catchnear4321 1 hour ago | parent

> his memory is not as good as it was before

yes that’s what he’s saying, if consumers had less memory, his would be better.

gruturo 16 minutes ago | parent

You, madam, sir or other, win the thread today. Chapeau.

onion2k 2 hours ago | parent

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.

There's a meme for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbreaking:_The_Worst_Perso...

thelastgallon 1 hour ago | parent

To extend this line of thought ..

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.

onion2k 1 hour ago | parent

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.

andyferris 26 minutes ago | parent

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.

(No one is saying the RAM is "enslaved")

EDIT: upon re-reading, maybe we agree

Sharlin 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

0x4e 1 hour ago | parent

I agree with people having excess memory on their computers.

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.

_Microft 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe the right meme would be “Isn’t there someone you forgot to ask” with someone shopping RAM and a picture of Sam Altman?

ZeroGravitas 1 hour ago | parent

You'll own nothing and Sam Altman will be happy.

xscott 1 hour ago | parent

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.

andyferris 31 minutes ago | parent

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)?

xscott 22 minutes ago | parent

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.

xg15 56 minutes ago | parent

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?

maxerickson 53 minutes ago | parent

We should make sure we are allocating travel to the people who enjoy it most also. More efficient you see.

Oh wait, much of the basis of the modern economy is letting individuals make decisions for themselves.

QuadmasterXLII 46 minutes ago | parent

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 done at all. In that case it would come down to a complicated nest of relative efficiencies, incentives, issues of govt corruption etc. However, the individuals with ram largely despise the work done in datacenters so its moot.

impossiblefork 35 minutes ago | parent

I would have agreed if your RAM were equivalent to their RAM.

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.

wolvesechoes 11 minutes ago | parent

They just need more electron crapware from you guys. Problem solved.

gruturo 1 hour ago | parent

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.

no-name-here 34 minutes ago | parent

> By the same line of thinking, his SF home…

Isn't the view that people having extra homes used 5% of the time a very well-known and common criticism, and there has even been legislation enacted in a number of places to discourage or penalize such homes?

(For SF, it appears:

- Tax rates for >1 homes are higher under the Homeowners' Exemption

- There was also an 'Empty Homes Tax' but it was struck down by the court in Eric and Andrew Debbane v. San Francisco)

nmfisher 23 minutes ago | parent

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).

no-name-here 19 minutes ago | parent

I'd replied mentioning housing because that was the comparison that the original commenter specifically focused on.

atoav 21 minutes ago | parent

It isn't generally a problem to hoard unused room. It is a problem to hoard unused room in an environment where room is scarce. It is not a problem to extract wealth from other people's work. It is a problem to extract money from other people's when you pay them wages from which they cannot live. It is not a problem to fill water into swimming pools, but it might be a problem if you are in a desert city and others need to ration water.

Context and amount matters deeply. People like Sam Altman often like to refer to utilitarian principles, when it helps further their goals. Whether that is really their true motivation can be seen in small things like whether they apply the same principles to the same decisions of their lifes.

ajross 19 minutes ago | parent

> 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".

suprjami 1 hour ago | parent

Guy who makes product says that you owning your own product is terrible and you should rent it from him instead.

xscott 56 minutes ago | parent

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.

rmellow 41 minutes ago | parent

Paperclip maximizer enters the chat.

wslh 29 minutes ago | parent

To include in the series after "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" and "640K ought to be enough for anybody".

j3th9n 28 minutes ago | parent

This is a confession from a man losing to personal computers/AI models.

gonzalohm 23 minutes ago | parent

After stealing all personal work from the internet one must say

baal80spam 22 minutes ago | parent

I don't like Sam Altman, but it is really not what he said. But it's Tom's Hardware, I don't expect good journalism from them.

You should watch the talk yourself, it's pretty entertaining.

electric_mayhem 22 minutes ago | parent

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.

zmgsabst 18 minutes ago | parent

That’s only true about material or dollars; it’s less obviously true about, eg, ownership of a company they founded.

whatever1 22 minutes ago | parent

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.

ArcHound 22 minutes ago | parent

If you really want to get these people, tell them that you agree and that trains are more efficient than cars. Usually they implode.

Sharlin 14 minutes ago | parent

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.

lesuorac 8 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, cause everybody gets up to go during halftime.

dist-epoch 17 minutes ago | parent

This is just basic Capitalism - resources eventually get allocated to those who can extract more Profit from them.

Efficient use of Resources for the production of more Capital.

thatsabadlook 10 minutes ago | parent

Capitalism has nothing to do with efficiency. Some resources are most effiently distributed through nonprivitized means.

mathgeek 8 minutes ago | parent

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).

wolvesechoes 13 minutes ago | parent

Enjoy your "democratization" nerds. This is what you have cheered for.

bartread 13 minutes ago | parent

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.

HexnMarcusWolfe 9 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

valeg 10 minutes ago | parent

"Let them eat cake" of our era...

SpyCoder77 10 minutes ago | parent

They cut out the context; Dara says it best here: https://x.com/daradoescode/status/2116654047696708009#m

Nitter: https://nitter.mie.foundation/daradoescode/status/2116654047...

glimshe 4 minutes ago | parent

His fortune should go to Hacker News users, not to his bank account. We'll use it a lot more efficiently.