> the idea that all companies will need to buy tokens from a handfull of tech companies to run their businesses or make their products is awful.

To the leadership of these tech companies that actually is the dream. Sam Altman said the quiet part aloud recently: "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 maybe 5% of the time."

And it certainly fits into the neofeudal worldview of other relevant Big Tech leaders. Be it Peter "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" Thiel, or unnamed bigwigs discussing if shock collars are effective to prevent their staff from revolting after a doomsday scenario [2].

We shall own nothing and rent everything, that is the mindset these people believe.

[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/openai-ceo-sam-altman-thinks-it...

[2] https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2025/0511/1512086-doomsday-...

Altman was simply making an accurate observation about DRAM, in the context of a conversation about DRAM shortages and precisely why it is difficult for DRAM manufacturers to respond to the market price incentive to increase DRAM production. Even if you think it is bad that DRAM is currently expensive, as I do, that doesn't change the underlying fact about the world that Altman's comment reflects.

Thiel's comment is also pro-individual-ownership - in context he was talking about the danger that in a mass democracy the people as a whole would vote to have the government restrict the freedom and confiscate the property of successful people (particularly prescient in light of the recent California attempt at a billionaire wealth tax). RAM being expensive is better than RAM being rationed by a democratically-elected government so no one person has too much, as judged by the voting masses.

> Altman was simply making an accurate observation about DRAM

no, he was lying by omission

"it's quite terrible" only if you ignore all the problems with plans they promote and measure it only in metrics Altman wants to measure, as they support his plans

Successful people are not successful without keeping unsuccessful people from success; inflation since Millennials were born is almost 300% and taxes have been slashed; takes 800k/yr now to have the buying power of $200k in the 1980s

Thiel has benefited from wealth being wielded by rich media owners to convince the masses decades long trends in deflation of buying power through inflation of costs are good for them

With such a system giving him a boost he was successful before Millennials and GenZ were adults or even born

Altman came along during ZIRP; being successful when the government is intentionally printing money is not really success

> Altman was simply making an accurate observation about DRAM

Which might be true, I'm willing to accept that, but it does not change the fact his message was incredibly tone deaf.

Cost of living in general is through the roof for years now, many people haven't had the financial ability to meaningfully upgrade their computers for just about the same timeframe - first Bitcoin drove CPU prices through the roof, then GPU prices, once that died down due to ASICs there were a few fads that "mined" RAM, HDD and SSD, and in parallel to the latter Covid hit, disrupting supply chains. After Covid was somewhat over, the Russians invaded Ukraine, then we got the various MENA conflicts after Oct 7th, and now the Iran war is wrecking everything - and ever since AI entered the picture somewhat three years ago, first GPUs and now everything else has exploded in price. Entry level smartphones have all but disappeared. And don't forget our existing computers got less and less useful because first Microsoft pushed the garbage called Windows 11 onto everyone it could and second, everyone and their dog went for Electron resource hog apps.

For Altman to now say "your unused RAM could be of much better use in our servers" is like a giant fat fucking middle finger, telling us to sacrifice even more of our needs just for the opportunity of him and his fellow rich bastard friends to make more money, all while he and his fellow rich bastard friends are executing the setup of a financial crisis that will make 2007 look fucking tame.

> Thiel's comment is also pro-individual-ownership - in context he was talking about the danger that in a mass democracy the people as a whole would vote to have the government restrict the freedom and confiscate the property of successful people (particularly prescient in light of the recent California attempt at a billionaire wealth tax).

Oh for fucks sake. Taxes aren't theft, they provide for the environment that makes these rich fucks able to earn money in the first place. Thiel is worth 38 billion dollars. Even if you'd tax the guy 50% of his wealth, he'd still have more than one single human and their descendants can ever feasibly gamble away.

> RAM being expensive is better than RAM being rationed by a democratically-elected government so no one person has too much, as judged by the voting masses.

At least in a rationed system that allocates supply fairly, ordinary people wouldn't have to run with barely working hardware because they can't afford to buy something new and modern for once as all the new stuff is hoarded by the rich like a LotR dragon hoards his gold pile.

And as evidenced by this week's elections - the people are fed up beyond belief. Either we the people get some relief, the sooner the better, or the situation may indeed devolve into open riots.

> At least in a rationed system that allocates supply fairly

if you assume crazy fairy land that is not going to happen, then you can assume cheap and plentiful RAM for better results

How is that saying the quiet part out loud?

He literally said we'll own nothing and be happy

he said nothing about being happy

Easy: it's an open secret (the quiet part) that the rich fucks want us to rent everything and us own nothing. Real estate was the first to go unaffordable without taking up debt. Then came cars. Then phones. And now it's computers. Hell I've seen kitchen appliances for rent.

And now this mf'er (or to be more precise, alleged sf'er [1]) goes on the record to say it's bad if we the people have RAM.

Fuck him, fuck everything he stands for.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/20/judge-dis...

Maybe so, but unless you imagine a vast conspiracy of rich fucks pulling the strings of hardware vendors and/or governments worldwide, the former will still want to sell to a larger market even if some of their largest customers would prefer otherwise.

> the former will still want to sell to a larger market even if some of their largest customers would prefer otherwise.

Oh hell no. The hardware vendors want to make as much money as possible, with Micron going as far as to fully exit the consumer market entirely so they can suck as much money out of the AI market as possible.

How that one can fly by antitrust enforcement is beyond me.

[1] https://investors.micron.com/news/press-release/2025/Micron-...

> the idea that all companies will need to buy tokens from a handfull of tech companies to run their businesses or make their products

Did you somehow become incapable of doing things without models? Most of us have not.

Imagine if only KB Home and D.R. Horton had access to power tools while all the other homebuilders big and small had to use hand saws and screwdrivers. Would they be incapable of building houses without power tools? No. Will they be relatively screwed as companies? Yes.

You're changing the goalposts.

The above comment said:

> need to buy tokens from a handfull of tech companies to run their businesses or make their products

That's clearly indicating necessity.

That would indeed be concerning if it was the case, but it's not.

So now the case is just "you can pay more money to do things faster".

And guess what? That's been the case for centuries if not millennia. Nothing special or concerning at all.

And so your analogy is misleading. You're trying to imply that only a tiny number (2-3?) of companies make the tools, and nobody else does. You either pay those companies, or you don't get them.

That's just false. There are hundreds of companies that will sell you tokens - just not for frontier models. The correct analogy is how Samsung, Google, and Apple make the best phones in the world, so you can buy from one of them - or you can buy a still-good but not bleeding-edge phone from another vendor. And everyone is fine with that.

>You're trying to imply that only a tiny number (2-3?) of companies make the tools, and nobody else does. You either pay those companies, or you don't get them.

Correct. I have to pay Anthropic to use Claude models. Open-weight models are significantly worse than frontier cloud models. Their cell phone-equivalent would call your boss when you try to call your spouse, randomly delete photos you took with it, fail to send text messages half the time, power off when it still has 50% battery.

> Their cell phone-equivalent would call your boss when you try to call your spouse, randomly delete photos you took with it, fail to send text messages half the time, power off when it still has 50% battery.

Still incorrect.

Models are always stochastic. They always have a chance of failure. That includes the most expensive frontier models.

You're making an invalid comparison to cellphones by claiming that there are cellphones that spontaneously and regularly do those things (which is wrong) vs flagship phones that don't (which is extremely wrong).

Either that, or you're claiming that the difference between frontier models and open models is the difference between actual flagship phones and these hypothetical ultra-buggy phones. Which is also wrong, because of the above fact that frontier models and open models are both stochastic, and because on many public benchmarks (e.g. Artificial Analysis) the gaps between the best frontier models and the best open models are far smaller than your analogy claims.

The fact is that, while frontier models are better than open models, you can still do a lot of work with open models. You're in no way "screwed" like you're trying to imply either with the incorrect phone analogy or the incorrect power tools analogy above.

This is exactly what I'm seeing all over the place. I'd like to say it's not true for me, but I'd probably be lying a little bit to say so. It is causing some atrophy in my skillset. One could argue that I'm gaining something different through LLM usage like "getting good at asking the model questions" or something, but it doesn't frankly feel like a skill which is all that useful on a going forward basis.

Would be incredibly inefficient and non-competitive to operate without LLMs. It would be an exaggeration to say they are as necessary as the internet or electricity, but it feels kind of close. Can't operate a software business without them.

I've been ripped (on this site) for making this prediction. While the frontier (i.e. The toughest problems) will always push the limits of available computing power, what typical people do with AI won't always be on the frontier, nor will what appears on the frontier necessarily be lucrative. The frontier used to be playing Chess and Atari. These were challenging, but they didn't make a lot of money. Now a phone can do these things.

You're an example of this process. You used to require a frontier model running on a data centre. Algorithms improved and, perhaps, your hardware as well, but your requirements didn't go up. Now you can do what you need to do with local hardware. You're one AI user who might not need to send money to Anthropic going forward unless you find a new frontier application that interests you.

This is why I'm a little bearish when it comes to the valuation of the AI giants. Yes, there are some extremely lucrative things on the frontier right now but, in the future, people may shift a lot of what they're doing now to local hardware while new things on the frontier may not produce the kind of profits that will pay back trillions in debt. AI companies have bet big on themselves being able to constantly and perpetually find new applications, and also that those new applications will make money.

> but your requirements didn't go up.

I am definitely building more and more ambitious projects as models improve. Both personally and at work

I suppose I should have said they just didn't go up faster than the capabilities of local models are improving. I suspect local model/hardware capability will scale up faster than most people's needs when it comes to coding. That's a problem for Sam Altman.

Open weight/local models are important but they do not compete with frontier models like Fable/Astra. They aren’t even close.

I agree with you that if the trends of 2025-2026 continue into 2027-2028 for open weight models and local inference, 120b param open models will be more than good enough for 80% of today's use cases. If so how can you justify OpenAI and Anthropic and the AI buildout?

I think we will see good enough local models, excellent cloud models, and then simpler focused models embedded on silicon running on every small device.

Why only a handfull? There can be (maybe already are) hundreds of LLM API providers.

There’s no way to make that economic.

There are already 80 providers on Openrouter.

And that isn't sustainable. The market will collapse into a small number of players, in exactly the same way that literally every other market has.

Are you sure you're not mixing up companies training their own frontier-ish models with companies providing hosted LLM API? For a close comparison, VPS hosting provider market did not collapse to a small number of players - few companies dominate the market (AWS, GCP), but there are thousands (or tens of thousands) of medium and small players available.

I find it hard to believe that at least a robust hybrid model won't be. There's just too much money to be made selling hardware at relatively high margins to customers with limited market power to keep hardware vendors out of consumer and small business markets indefinitely.