I don’t think it’s very productive to go on a witch hunt on someone who said something stupid and is being taken out of context (albeit he should have known not to say that).

Would you though? If/when the AI bubble pops and the buildout of data centres either stops or plateaus then they'd suddenly be sitting in a vastly oversaturated market and struggle to make it to the end of the year.

New fabs will be operational in a while, which is too big of a risk to take in these times.

All that bubble popping will do is wipe out some investor's money. Everything else will stay and become more and more important.

But of course, it is more profitable to sell one item for $1000 than it is to sell ten items for $100 each. And even if a competitor shows up, you can just price dump with all the extra money you already made until that competitor goes away.

Considering the profits they've made this year, on average they still wouldn't do too bad. SK Hynix employees got almost $500k for example, I can live on that for a few years. Companies are often also legally required to compete with each other.

But they are scaling up the production, they just conveniently did it a bit late. I also fear if/when the bubble pops, they'll quickly reduce the production to ensure prices stay high. I fear Nvidia could do the same. I think it'll be hard for all of them to go back to a world where they're paid way less per component, so instead of accepting that, they can reduce the supply and keep the prices high. Only antitrust regulators could intervene to stop that.

Many people expect prices to go down after the bubble pops, but it may not happen as much as we would want to.

Good god the internet is so sensitive nowadays

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50400515 for longer comment on that

And "if all current AI users" is a strawman, people using free chatgpt once or twice a day are not going to buy RAM to run own LLMs.

Ah yes Sam Altman is not a real villain despite OpenAI locking up 40% of global DRAM supply.

If a customer ask me to get all my butchery stock for a year, it will make thousands of client unhappy and will make one client happy, so I'll simply refuse.

This is not how business is supposed to be, the world is not supposed to be a B2B chaos.

I know how the business is done "supply demand" bla bla. That does not make it ethical one bit.

If you look outside the tech bro / stock bro / tech worker circles and into the mass left wing populace everyone HATES ai and ai data centers... the Altmans, the Amodeis, the Huangs, they are not the devil himself levels just yet (cough, Musk, cough), but they are climbing up there.

People's jobs being taken (and especially entry/junior jobs, you know, the ones young people, who voted massively blue, need to get started in life), data centers increasing their electric bills or polluting the air with gigawatt level gas turbines (or both), consumer electronics prices rocketing up (~400% increases YoY in RAM and SSD prices) just so the corporate capitalist class can hoard millions of gpus in warehouses.

I mean, if the democrat politicians getting into power keep their promises and step on AI buildout's neck, it could be lights out for the AI bros.

ChatGPT is one of the most used websites in the world. Compared to e.g. Facebook you are not "forced" to use it (because of friends or whatnot) so it's all voluntary usage. There is real demand for AI usage, that's why RAM and GPU prices are skyrocketing, not because of some evil conspiracy.

I don't see this, no. I think HN serves as a sort of Rorschach test for the reader. I get a center-libertarian vibe from HN, definitely not left wing.

I also think while there's a ton of AI articles, there are also very vocal people against it. The sentiment is not universally "AI booster" here, it's a mix.

1) boom and bust cycle in memory industry is a repeated problem

2) companies are not obligated to scale up

> and is being taken out of context

no it is not - Altman is lying by omission by implicating that various important costs are not real

hopefully china does it and hynix burns in hell

Obligatory: "we're curing cancer r-right?" No Nat we're making slop videos with it.

where is the proof?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.[3]

Simple as that.

If I said all donuts are spaceships, readers are not obligated to go and google it.

  * Participating in meetings, conversations, and communications in the United States and elsewhere to discuss the prices of DRAM to be sold to certain customers;

  * Agreeing, during those meetings, conversations, and communications, to charge prices of DRAM at certain levels to be sold to certain customers;

  * Issuing price quotations in accordance with the agreements reached; and

  * Exchanging information on sales of DRAM to certain customers, for the purpose of monitoring and enforcing adherence to the agreed-upon prices.

  * Under the plea agreement which must be approved by the court, Hynix has agreed to cooperate with the government in its ongoing investigation of other DRAM producers.

US DOJ link: https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2005/April/05_at_207....

This is remarkably different than someone claiming donuts are spaceships when the company itself was charged and pleaded guilty, and it's a matter of public record.

Theres never any "proof."

Theres no "proof" on the internet.

All we ever have is "evidence."

just asked about some kind of proof when world is full of conspiracy theories, nothing wrong with that, so stop being aggressive and snarky

and i knew about stuff from 2000, but thought there was something recent

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

If an event happens, and multiple previous times that event happened a cause was identified. It is reasonable to suspect the same cause was responsible this time.

It does not give proof, but it does give reasonable suspicion.

If the USA were a real democracy they would do something about it. After all this even violates capitalism, e. g. free market leading to reduced prices. But the USA is run by a criminal gang, pocketing away money - the TechBros and their cronies. They just make any legislation they want to, with a bit sugar coating on top to not appear too overly evil or greedy. But they are.

> 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 5% of the time. You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment.

That's a ghoulish point of view that puts real living humans on a lower hung than the poor poor corporations who just want RAM to be so expensive that everyone needs to buy compute from them. Convenient for the corporations!

He's an easy target because of who he is, so I understand why the entire Internet ran with the fake story (even LTT!). But on Hacker News you'll definitely get pushback if you post misleading stuff.

Truly an unimaginable and ludicrous suggestion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing#200...

Let's say there are 10 companies that need 1 GB of RAM each in a life-or-death scenario. They would be willing to pay $100,000,000 per GB to get 1 GB of RAM.

At the same time, there are 90 more companies that need 1 GB of RAM each to make certain quarterly targets. They are willing to pay $10,000 per GB to get 1 GB of RAM.

If you make 9 GB of RAM, you can sell it for $900,000,000. If you make 99 GB of RAM, you can only sell it for $990,000, because the 10 life-or-death companies only need to bid high enough to push out a quarterly-target company.

It's a bit of a contrived example, but it shows you how restricting supply can boost total revenue if there is a segment of the market that has inelastic demand. (this is why medicine pricing has to be regulated - in the medical industry, there are lots of inelastic demand scenarios that can lead to predatory pricing)

We have less rich gamers deciding to not upgrade their PCs at most.

Evidence: a friend of mine this month decided that he can't justify dropping $1.6k on a gaming computer.

As a PC gamer since I have memory, this whole situation makes me sad.

that could've been crummy for someone; you should warn that your cute little complaint actually eats ram; half is clearly fiction but the OOM isn't.

Do you also click on the links of the Nigerian princes?

Will we go back to PCs? As in: are we going to get cheap local hackable frontier AIs at some point? I hope so.

:insert Will Smith presenting meme:

The Cloud

Maybe it's a regional thing? I live in Europe.

Lot of people using their office-notebooks at home, even if its not allowed. Most people out of tech do not have big hardware at home anymore.

The AI boom first reversed the trend, to now try to get back to that cycle.

I am using AI now to make a game engine that will run and make 'nice enough' graphics on simpler machines. things like laptops with iGPU and 4gb of ram.

U can still get quite ok graphics, and make very complex and rich gameplay systems using such a machine. It just needs to be the target machine while developing so the right tradeoffs are made.

But yes, it has been a test of just how few tokens you can get by on.

Which would not be all too bad. It would also mean the end of stupid SaaS subscription services, and mass surveillance, adtech. And shitty propaganda.

And your local AI could emulate the good parts of the internet.

Like talking to people?

In fact, it was closer to the opposite.

Forget about AI, the entire PC market is getting killed over this.

As an avid gamer I'm unsure if in 5 years I can even buy a gaming PC anymore. Not even because of cost, but it's unclear if anyone will still make the components anymore.

5 years ago it would have been science fiction

I don't even understand your analogy. I'm not watching the youtube video or reading the book. The model is. And, unlike me, a big computer can watch 20 youtube videos faster than a small computer can watch 1, and do a far better job understanding (bigger model at data center scale is both smarter and faster than smaller model at local scale).

Are you trying to one shot create the Linux kernel?

Also, this reminds me so much of the download more RAM ads back in the day.

I wonder what it would look like if Apple offered a slimmed down shell from the Neo for ~$300 that required a connected iPhone. Maybe as iOS and MacOS converge we'll get there.

Many games that come out still, and are quite successful, do not require such technologies.

1. Indy developer releases a game or trailer of a game. 2. Within an extremely short time (days to weeks at most) there are clones on the market. 3. These games often outperform the original.

It's absolutely not something that's gone on for ages.

It might be a novel gameplay idea / twist on a genre, and mere days after launch instead of being able to stand on its own and gather attention it's drowning in a pool of lookalikes. It's no longer distinct.

The speed of being able to slop together something like this is less than 1% of what it used to be.

So yes maybe it happens more often now, but it’s still not new.

Yes, that's literally the point of the people you're responding to. Has HN lost reading comprehension, or are you arguing in bad faith?

It used to happen occasionally. Now it happens instantly. That delta is the problem.

So it's easier than ever to make a game, but it's more difficult than ever to get anyone to try what you've made. I'd say that's just as bad, and in some ways worse, than having your game cloned.

For someone looking to play a new game it will be difficult to sort through all the bad games to find the good ones. And for anyone pouring their soul into a game they will more likely than not have an audience of one.

Our eventual destination is probably going to be a) pick up a device, b) ask your bot to make up a game on the spot, c) play. It sounds so lonely and depressing.

gaming does not equate to only things like the last of us or cyberpunk which need extreme machines. a lot of visual fidelity can be reached still without having such a monster. Just need to not use certain features which are currently pretty much exclusive to Nvidia...

And I assume they will only continue to go up. When it came out, purchasing one seemed like an easy decision. But I paid half as much for one with the same CPU/RAM (and upgraded my SSD for cheap).

If I started today and played 10 games I can emulate every single day for the rest of my life restricting myself to purely emulation, I wouldn't run out of new games for...five and a half years. (assuming my rough calculation of ~20k available games).

Drop it to a game a day and I will likely never run out of games given my life expectancy.

Consider that I will find some games I like to play for more than a day and there are easily well more than enough games in emulation alone to entertain me for the rest of my life on existing entry level hardware.

Will I ever play MODERN SHOOTER {CURRENT YEAR} on this device? Certainly not, but I can't see a reason to bemoan lack of access to such a small portion of the available industry.

Like, suppose you're a reader. You might be right that you might enjoy your favorites in their original languages, but you'd be silly to be worried about your future ability to enjoy books just because you'll likely never get to experience reading 三体 as a chinese citizen fluent in the language.

There should be a big enough back catalog of great games for you to enjoy without having to buy a new gaming rig.

BUT! I feel that lost hope could/will turn into a new forms of "min-maxing" or whatever where we will see people focusing on small, efficient software to make the most of what we have to weather the drought. We got spoiled with cheap hardware. Time to make the most of all that cheap hardware we have.

Though of course, replacing this hardware as it breaks down will be expensive. Perhaps we could go back to 1/2/4 GB RAM sticks and 256/512 GB Disks. Then run minimal Linux installs, minimal GUIs, minimal services, minimal software.

I bought it at the middle/end of 2024, and I paid 3790 NOK (~357 USD at the time).

The lowest price online for the same product new online today is 10233 NOK (~1085 USD)!

270% of what it was before, it’s absolutely bonkers.

I was even considering putting it up for sale a few weeks ago. But of course what I would be able to get for it would be no where near $1000 when selling second hand. Instead I might if I am lucky get slightly more than I originally paid which would be nice and all except that if I then regret selling it it’s still expensive to replace, or I have to also buy it second hand from someone else that may have worn theirs out considerably more compared to what I have done to the one I currently have. Mine is very well taken care of since the start, and although it’s nearing capacity now I haven’t written and deleted data over any over on it.

Been doing that for myself for the past 15 years

Advances in hardware are only impressive and useful for me when I avoid the so-called "tech" company "engineer" BS

The reason I stop using old computers is never due to software. It's always outdated proprietary cables, failing power adapters, screens, hinges, and so on

Sometimes "minimalism" is simply for _speed and reliability_ (that's what I get, anyway) in contrast with prevailing marketed garbage that is bloated and sluggish by commparison

Other times, claims of "minimalism" might be tryinng to capitalise on some silly trend

Personally I like what the computers I own can do for me and learning to make them do more. I have a brain, I don't do much "guessing" and I don't really need "inference" on a daily basis, certainnly not for such a high cost to the environment

I have all the "convenience" I can handle

I have to think, it can’t take much time before the Chinese DUV fabs come online and non-frontier chip prices crater. Sure, you might not be able to get 5090 equivalents, but the 30xx series was DUV and so that should be replicable in a few years.

Whatever quality bar / process node China gets to you know they will scale it out super hard.

(Some quick investigation suggests that the Yuliangsheng DUV machines currently under construction are 28nm, which would map to 2014’s GTX 900. Perhaps I’m being overly bullish but I assume they will recapitulate/clone the tech faster than the rate it was originally discovered.)

Have an agentic enough setup and they'll do anything that the biggest closed models can. They'll also do more, making them the true frontier.

A sensible point of entry is a 2899$ Mac mini.

If you're not partaking that's only on you.

> If you're not partaking that's only on you.

There's honestly nothing sensible about that for a lot of developer budgets across the globe. Don't assume most folks have $3k to burn.

They absolutely can't do what, or more of what the biggest models can do. There's nothing frontier about small local Qwen or Gemma models.

2899$ gets you a machine that is just good enough to run some small models, slowly, with terrible context, requires a ton of tinkering and fine tuning, managing and constantly downloading a bunch of huge file blobs, etc.

Partaking those $2899 in most of the large cloud models would bring you much more productivity, much less boilerplate and time spent in setup, etc.

So.. just weird accusing people here of "not partaking" in AI when you're just essentially toying around if you're actually comparing local Qwen and Gemma's with frontier models.

Everybody will have a mini PC for the sole purpose of streaming content, with no storage to keep anything on it.

It's just unfortunate that producing a half decent computing platform is significantly more difficult than a rifle (and that in the case of said hardliners, the capital is backing them, here it's working against us).

You might say that this is impossible but look at current trends. A lot of information today is getting shared in the walled gardens of Internet. You have to login to social media to view posts. The Twitter, Reddit threads that were accessible freely now require you to log in. Similar thing is happening across other networks. People are no longer asking questions on Stackoverflow. All those queries are gonig to AI. If someone chooses to not use AI, their options will be limited in future.

The free sharing of information on Internet is I think coming to an end.

Not even talking dictatotship scenarios here. The USA might simply decide it doesn't like your country. Or maybe heavily cripple the models you can use, or censor them, for whatever reason.

I guess this is an argument for local AI. Probably not feasible for the less technically savvy.

So it’s plausible they’ll block me from accessing Mistral since they host DeepSeek models.

New application of computing requires a lot of compute -> compute centralizes -> compute improves, smaller, faster, cheaper -> compute decentralizes -> new application of compute is found -> (return to beginning of cycle)

Maybe arcade games?

- Large centralized compute is more powerful than portable compute

- Wired is better than wireless

- The public wants new things

- The tech industry grows to use/“use” the available processing power

As long as you’re not continuously comparing to AI in large centralized compute, what you’re really looking for is “when does portable compute become powerful enough to run AI models that are capable of meaningful work” and I’d say we’re already there and it’s getting better.

- local latency is lower than network latency

- latency is important for action games

But then it became normal.

The monopolization of knowledge and expertise is the next step. I don't mean as if it were intended, but it is the logical progress given the technological evolution. The cause is inventive structures: the tech is neutral (in my opinion), but the way in which it is used and deployed is subject to and disciplined by capital.

But, the “good enough for most lay people” intelligence bar will for sure miniaturize, especially as inference ASICs get more specialized.

But yes, we both agree that what was the frontier many years ago will fit on your desktop.

On a less sarcastic note, I wonder if a community based compute donation could actually help offset knowledge and compute centralisation.

Incentive is difficult but anti-AI sentiment is still as strong as ever. Maybe an A-v-A (in the spirit of H-v-H) campaign might pull in some.

I would be shocked if it did anything at all.

"Iniital commit"

Lol, little cringe "Look guys, how human I am!!"

Just give us back our RAM prices so that everyone can afford 256GB DDR5 and run their models locally!

This solves the datacenter problem and it's impacts, RAMageddon, SSDgeddon, etc..

and they can just sell us the improved models without the hassle of doing the compute themselves..

What's the problem? With the proper ToC's they would still get our data.. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And Sam's (correct) point is that that doesn't work. If everyone tried to run the same amount of inference locally with the same size models that they're currently doing, the shortage would be even worse.

It's like a highrise developer saying "people think our buildings take up a lot of land, but actually houses are much worse from a land use perspective". Which is objectively true, and yet does not mean the developer thinks the entire world should be turned into houses, or even that they dislike houses!

isn't communal living the most efficient thing resource-wise though?

Not everyone subscribes to the "cloud compute is more important than everything else" outlook, but everyone is affected by it nonetheless.

Given that he was in a fluffy interview at the time, he's not going to say that OpenAI and Anthropic would die, but we all know that -unless the "Pacing The Frontier" garbage succeeds in its goal of creating law and regulations that massively obstruct LLM manufacturers who aren't the four or five currently-largest ones in the US- that's how it'd turn out. Once OpenAI and Anthropic are dead, the VC money pouring into the LLM manufacturing and services industries evaporates, and all that demand for high-speed VRAM vanishes with it.

So, no, switching to locally-hosted software will reduce RAM prices... just not immediately.

But saying people shouldn’t want something that was abundant and you made scarce is an asshole thing to say.

Also, a lot of things are true but what truths you choose to broadcast can tell us what you care about. E.g it's also true that we'd all be richer if sam altman shared is wealth with us, lets take a few seconds to think why he's not saying this truth, after all it's an objectively true fact.

Funny WEB Site!

Not me, I have 2 8G DDR4 sticks sitting in a draw that I purchased a few of years ago when they were cheap. I was going to use them to upgrade my W541 to 32G, but I have one of the first models that the max is 16G. So saving them in case I have RAM issues.

If Sam wants them, he can pay me 5000 USD each for them, otherwise I will proudly hang on to them. If I knew his email I would send him a pic of them saying "hahaha" :)

$15 of serotonin is better than this stuff: https://www.amazon.com/stuff-under-15-dollars/s?k=stuff+unde...

Ok.

Plus it's far more efficient to buy tons of gpu's for the shelves rather than actually use them.

But isn't mister Altman correct in a sense? Why the hell would people need 16 gigabytes of RAM or more to make spreadsheets and type documents? Receive and send e-mail, make travel bookings, listen to music and read the news. Maybe make a posts on social media, or publish on your own website.

Have we forgotten that all of this functioned very well when RAM wasn't even in the gigabytes? And that most of this functioned very well when RAM wasn't even in the megabytes? I remember this time, and certainly must many of you. Of course it is more comfortable today with more powerful machines

There must come a moment when we judge a machine or a system by the results they produce, by the fruits of the tree so to say. And those fruits haven't changed or improved noticeably in decades. There is one big improvement that undeniably requires more memory from the computer that I can think of, which is the much higher resolution of displays of today. Probably there are some more.

Specialized use is of course different, whether that's compiling code, rendering photogrammetry scenes, or playing graphics intensive games.

being correct doesn't mean your reasoning isn't crooked. His implication is "You don't need it, but I do!"

It's a monopoly saying they do not have enough resources. It's the big man saying he needs more food.

Strongly recommend you get Gemma 4 12B QAT on a computer that can run it, and then disconnect the internet and see what it can still do. Even the smaller E4B will show you.

Local AI is the first thing in decades (since editing video, perhaps) that meaningfully changes what a disconnected machine is capable of.

Everything you listed worked for decades with a lot less RAM, but was also more limited and potentially different in substance in critical ways. It's the "Mom I want X ! -> We already have X at home" meme, where the "X at home" is some poor version of what was requested.

I understand some people could still enjoy a retro style experience, but I wouldn't give up on my HDPI displays for instance. Or touch support. Or keeping 40 tabs open instead of hand managing my tabs or rely on some dumb auto-close algo.

Spreadsheets can now have dozens of thousands of line and still be snappy to manipulate, we can play high def videos while doing actual work without freezing the whole system. Photoshop and Lightroom used to be crash junkies for even basic operations and people would baby the settings to aleviate that; with the RAM we have now it has become a somewhat decent situation (still crashes, just way less)

I still have 10~20 years old machines around and boot them occasionally, there's just no way I'd get back to them full time and try to do the same volume of work as I'm doing now.

40 tabs open at once? That doesn't need a lot of RAM if websites were programmed to do what they actually do: Display text and images.

I don't think touch needs any special amount of RAM, would it differ for the operating system than a mouse?

Photoshop and Lightroom <- These I think fall into the category of special use cases for professionals, which absolutely need more RAM than a home user. For somebody who only occasionally wants or needs to do a bit of advanced photo editing, it's okay to wait a bit longer for operations.

> I still have 10~20 years old machines around and boot them occasionally, there's just no way I'd get back to them full time and try to do the same volume of work as I'm doing now.

Are you sure about that? If you actually sat down to only work, without having YouTube videos open or other things going on in the background? If you close your Amazon Black Friday tab you already liberate 500 megabytes of RAM.

> PS: there's also the "people only do email and browsing, perhaps some Word or Excel" fallacy.

No, in this case it is you who didn't understand or didn't want to understand. Nowhere did I say only. But the things I listed are what normal people do mostly. And nobody would want to type a long report or do spreadsheets on their phone.

> So, computer are a lot more niche than before, and the requirement also go higher. People on computer are either power users or doing somewhat intensive things.

Not at all. Most computers are used by office workers at their job, and I'd bet that most home computers are also used for non-intensive purposes. But I think you're right in what direction things are moving.

Technology should be allowed to evolve as needed. Smartphones were also supposed to be phones, and I'm sure I'm not the only to basically ignore the phone app unless forced to.

I'm totally fine with progressive web apps for instance, or how Figma is pushing the boundaries to bypass the whole native Store requirements.

> Lightroom

Photography is a mildly popular hobby. Even as phones are king, around 10 million dedicated cameras were sold last year [0], so having Lightroom as a home user isn't as exotic as you make it sound like.

The issue is not really the wait time, it's the instability and crashes, which are aliviated by less back and forth between the disc and the RAM. It's totally Adobe's fault, but I also think it wasn't a simple problem to begin with.

> only work, without having YouTube videos

I need YouTube and I suspect many do. Currently all of last year's WWDC sessions are on Youtube, as do most video tutorials, business presentations etc. Also work BGMs, podcasts, live streams etc. are resources people also use to keep focus or stay awake through their working day.

People used to listen to their own sound on dedicated devices, IMHO it mostly moved to their computers, especially as bluetooth gives more flexibility to move around.

> office workers at their job

I'd wager most of these workers job involves more than what you're giving them credit for. I've followed CS agents dealing with user requests for instance, one of the lowest job level in our org, and that involved a lot of multitasking, juggling with the ticketing system, and keeping stuff at hand. In particular the agent I was shadowing had a discord call going on about a third of the time, with me in a Meet session. Sure, 20 years ago we would have done it a different way. But nowadays that's just how they're doing it.

Traditional data entry jobs might be different, but how many of them still exist as of now ?

[0] https://www.dpreview.com/articles/2386206926/cipa-data-2025-...

Certainly, you say it yourself: as needed. There is no need for giant amounts of RAM for most productive and entertaining computing tasks.

> The issue is not really the wait time, it's the instability and crashes, which are aliviated by less back and forth between the disc and the RAM.

Very good point! I don't completely recognize this problem, because in the long time I've used Photoshop and such, I haven't noticed a lot of crashes.

> People used to listen to their own sound on dedicated devices, IMHO it mostly moved to their computers, especially as bluetooth gives more flexibility to move around.

Sure, but audio doesn't need a lot of system resources, and neither should video. A feature length film is a couple of gigabytes, and can't take up more RAM than its entire content.

> I'd wager most of these workers job involves more than what you're giving them credit for.

You could do a lot of multitasking between well coded work apps in a well coded operating system. I remember doing that. But if the ticketing system takes a gig of RAM in the browser when it should take a 100 megabytes if made properly...

I remember having video calling fully functioning in Skype with 2 gigs of RAM.

The best outcome of all would be that memory hungry people like Mr Altman started paying home computer users for renting part of their RAM for their AIs to munch on. In the meanwhile, the home user could have the same performance for their computing as before while only using half of their RAM.

And it's already been proven: My Macbook with 8 gigs of RAM is radically faster and more performant than any PC with 16 or 32 gigs of RAM for any kind of task thrown at it.

Altman made things I could buy at a reasonable price unaffordable.

"From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to [let billionaires] have a bunch of the world's limited supply of [money] sitting in their own [stocks] and being used 5% of the time. You want maximum [taxes] if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that."