"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. :|

Dead.

Hands.

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.

From a pure efficiency point of view it makes sense to have all our resources pooled and used by whoever needs them at the time. So long as there is always enough to go around, and all the benefits of local computing are kept (though how that works practically if your internet goes offline I don't know) then theoretically, home computers are suboptimal.

But that argument isn't really based on reality. Privacy, offline access, access when you need it, cost... the list goes on. There's many reasons he's wrong, but the core point that it is technically more efficient in the perfect world seems sound.

It's not "sound", because when do we ever have the perfect world? Instead we have a world controlled by self-serving billionaires like Altman. The perfect world is a red herring.

If you're ever tempted to grant the benefit of the doubt to our tech overlords, please read "Careless People" for example.

Will that world ever exist? Probably not due to human nature. Still an interesting thought, even if Altman wants to control said compute or not.

Just to be super clear so you understand my comment: I do NOT agree that Altman should have any control over compute and storage. And neither should it be the only way to use compute and storage.

No? Please explain, step by step, how my logic leads to that conclusion.

But if a blowhard wealthy silicon valley techno-autist does it its just the way of the world. "Don't hate the player, hate the game"

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 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.

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?

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

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 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.

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!