He says it's 'terrible' to have 'a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM' sitting in people's PCs.
AI data centers have gobbled up so much of the world's RAM supplies that prices of the memory units — and all electronic devices that have them — have skyrocketed as a result. So when OpenAI chief Sam Altman sat for an interview with YouTuber Cheeky Pint and Stripe, the conversation naturally turned to the RAM shortages affecting the whole tech industry. His opinion? He thinks it's "quite terrible" for people to have "a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer" and using it five percent of the time.
He added: "Like, 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." Now, to be fair, he was specifically talking about local inference, which is what you call when you run AI models on your own computer.
Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that he would hold that opinion and talk from a "global allocation perspective," as the head of one of the biggest AI companies on the planet today. But he also shouldn't be surprised if people call him tone-deaf, seeing as OpenAI has tied up roughly 40 percent of the world's RAM output through various agreements.
In addition, he's not taking into account that people buy and use RAM for more than just local inference.
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