Sure, but he's also insinuating that the economics of the situation is more important than the other, unmentioned aspects. In short, that his interests weigh more in what "best" means.

Everybody believes their interests weigh more. Fortunately we have capitalism, so at the end of the day you have to put your money where your mouth is and pay for what you think your interest is worth.

Not sure if your arguments here is for capitalism. Having 1 vote = $1 is not a system most people would agree with today.

Sure. Better the capitalism that has Altman complaining about the peasants getting the RAM that he deserves better, than having the corrupt incompetent government and bureaucrats bought and paid for by him decide to allocate it "for the greater good" (i.e., his data centers).

Because these are literally the only two options?

  > Everybody believes their interests weigh more

I don't. I believe I have to weigh my benefits to collective ones. Sometimes I do things that offer me no benefit whatsoever but does for others. Just the other day I offered to take a picture for a couple who was trying to get a selfie together. Last week I bought an intern lunch. Why? Because they were an intern (grad student) and I'm sympathetic to that.

Fun fact: I'm not a "rare outlier". People like me are pretty common and can be found all over. We usually just don't openly talk about it because we're not looking for a reward. I'm not speaking up now because I'm looking for self-gratification or anything. I'm speaking up to push back against your claims. I'm speaking up because we live in an increasingly selfish period of time. I'm speaking up because we're also at cultural turning point and many people are saying "enough is enough." I sure as hell don't care how rich you are, but I do give a damn about where the economic floor is. If you take from that floor to lift yourself up, I'm upset. If you do this to lift yourself when you already have more money than you could possibly spend in several generations? I'm furious.

I believe you. I'd challenge you though to consider Sam Altman would make the same claim about himself. The difference between you is not that you are good and he is bad, it's that you likely have very different beliefs of what the "good" course of action is. He likely believes successful adoption of AI means advances in science, medicine, freeing people up for more meaningful things, etc.

Sure, most people don't view themselves as the villain of their own story, but that's not what my comment was addressing. My comment was narrower

Fair, maybe I should say I think he wouldn't see his actions as taking from the economic floor, he would argue he is raising it. E.g. more effectively utilising resources (like RAM) means RAM is cheaper, which means more people can use it for their businesses and ideas.

Maybe a billion people would view you as having and owning and spending more than several generations of their families, maybe more. Yet you see wealth accumulation as a problem because there are those with much more than you. Are you the villain of your own story?

Well I congratulate you for finally having the courage to speak up about offering to take a picture for some people that's very commendable, but that doesn't really address what I wrote. I didn't say everybody weighs their own interests at 100% and everybody elses' at 0%.

> Everybody believes their interests weigh more.

I don't. When I make decisions that might benefit me but affect others, I consider the impact on others before deciding what to do. Sometimes (often?) I choose the option that benefits me less (or is neutral, or hurts me), if I believe the negatives to others are too high.

> I don't. When I make decisions that might benefit me but affect others, I consider the impact on others before deciding what to do. Sometimes (often?) I choose the option that benefits me less (or is neutral, or hurts me), if I believe the negatives to others are too high.

I didn't say that means they don't consider others, and I haven't taken a survey of everybody on the planet.

Obviously people believe their interests weigh more.

Yes criticizing people for buying computers because they value owning a computer, and blaming them for the "global inefficiency", is ridiculous. Ultimately what he said is that the market doesn't work like he wants it to work.

People at his level are typically mindful of how their words are perceived when doing interviews to the public at large.

That went out the window a few years ago. These tech oligarchs are getting more and more comfy with their optics being full psychoticism. They don't even know how to hide it anymore because all they think about and talk about and plan long short and medium term is extracting capitol at all costs for themselves.

Okay? So what's your argument, that we should just ignore them when they are being openly pathological? Sounds like that just let's them continue being crazy.

I'm not arguing anything. Just talking.

HN is a place for thoughtful discussion that gratifies intellectual curiosity. "Just talking" that has no point or argument or anything beyond one's unfounded personal opinion is profoundly boring and has no place here. Not even joking, that's what Reddit is for.

They watched Trump being able to say absolutely anything comes to his mind and figured that maybe they don’t have to pretend to be humans either.

Maybe we should be talking about the global allocation perspective of wealth then. Since Altman is so keep to optimize allocation, perhaps he should start with this aspect first, and then move to RAM, as wealth would impact a wider area of economics than RAM.

Absolutely, I agree that money is better centralized in the goverment where it can be put to use for the benefit of all society instead of being concentrated in billionares.

While I agree there's certainly a better in between, if you go the other way you have moral hazard. If people aren't bearing the risks (or rewards) for how they allocate resources, history shows they allocate them poorly.

> If people aren't bearing the risks (or rewards) for how they allocate resources, history shows they allocate them poorly.

That certainly sounds like it should be true. But are there any papers that can actually prove it?

> IMO his comments are blown way out of proportion

The context for people's reaction to this is that he has single-handedly caused the current spike in RAM prices.

How? Elon and Dario aren’t responsible? It’s all AI companies and hyper scalers. Let’s not forget how 3 companies in memory industry have got caught in colluding to keep things high.

Because he (on behalf of Open AI) made deals with 2 of the 3 major manufacturers of RAM to buy a significant proportion of their output, in the same week, without either of the manufacturers knowing that he was also making a deal with the other one. This directly led to the current RAM shortage.

This problem is far bigger than one individual. He's making rational decisions is his capacity as CEO of an AI company. If he didn't make large compute deals, all his customers would be upset when they're hitting usage limits 10 times a day and all his investors would be doubting his decisions, especially when competitors are also trying to hoover up all the compute.

Is there actual evidence that these deals caused the RAM shortage? Seems like a stretch to pin a global supply problem on one person when demand is coming from across the entire industry.

And if one person can indeed cause it then blame the system? I go back to the proven legal case of them fixing prices. Now there is just a scapegoat because it feel good?

The system shares some blame, but the individual is also the one exploiting a confluence of factors. Should the system prevent one person from purchasing 40% of global RAM production with fake money, yes, it should. But our systems are glacial to respond to edge cases they were not prepared for, and this is an extreme edge case - people who are not Sam Altman could not pull off purchasing 40% of the world's RAM production capacity on an IOU. Only a very few individuals in the world could have exploited this gap in the system, and the one who actually did deserves blame for it.

That just means he bought earlier than others, but there would still be a shortage had he not.

This is typically the best argument for using cloud - it is the environmentally beneficial thing to do. And yet, knowing what I know of spotify, I do believe that me serving my own music library is a tad less wasteful than most commercial music streaming operations are.

RAM in the cloud ends up being used by GitHub actions runners that fetch and install the world anytime a shmuck pushes a commit to his confobulator feature branch for the paper clip factory. Multi-cloud deployments of a service nobody asked for. Enterprise architects deploying a service mesh to deliver what can be done in 50MB of memory on a raspi. Running some vectors representing natural language through gigabytes of noise only made useful by some arcane math only to be unable to count letters in words.

I am sure there's also lots of actually efficient use of memory out there. But when enterprises are willing to burn cash, efficient processes or methods are nowhere to be found.

> he's clearly just talking economics

...just economics that benefit him. The economics of rental for consumers are horrific. It doesn't even have to be about an abstract sense of ownership and freedom, even if it's "just economics" this is still an insanely self-serving to say because he's talking about economics that benefit 00.01% at the expense of the other 99.99%.

It's not necessarily "at the expense of" if people want to use those products every day.

Imagine if we temporarily had a shortage of cars: your city only had 20% of what it needed. It would be accurate to say "in this global shortage, new cars are more efficiently used by groups/taxis/uber than sitting idle in a individuals home". Group drivers allow more individuals in the city to have access to vehicle transport.

There simply isn't enough ram in the world for every individual to do local inference right now: one person having a 512GB VRAM system means others don't. Data centers can batch the processing and serve many at once.

(That's also not to say individuals shouldn't have it! I think they should. You can buy a mac right now. But the price is a signal that only the most dedicated will buy it)

This falls apart because of the simple fact that the people who had to contribute to create the pooled resource do not get to say how the pooled resource gets used.

This argument that only considers the one positive dimension of centralization and pooling is never valid.

What model are you suggesting that gives them more access/control?

Currently AI providers are hyper competitive and almost all of the world has access to it quite cheaply. If people had to buy hardware for local inference, it would only be a tiny percentage of the world's affluent tech enthusiasts with access to AI, wouldn't it?

We're currently managing the shortage with a hybrid model, so enthusiasts can still buy (expensive) individual systems and the broader shared hardware goes to many, many providers. OpenAI is something like 15% of data center power in the US I think? That's a lot but we still have choice.

I'm pretty sure you can find censored results in any AI model. That's probably the control that was being talked about.

kinda bad economica though - the ai bubble eating all the RAM is bad for many industries worth of useful production, including the infrastructure that makes gaming and movie industries possible nowadays

If we the people collectively owned "the cloud", then sure. But since we don't, I can only take it as him tryng to become a RAMlord seeking to extract rent from the rest of us

Economically speaking, I’m sure it would be better if all energy were routed to him directly.

Probably water too, even food, money and air.

Obviously better.

Esp. for ML inference he's right, and not just for RAM. I think this should be thought out seriously instead of mocked, or else open models and local inference won't be able to compete with big data centers with exclusive contracts with hyper scalers. There ought to be some sweetspot where one pooled server could serve 50-100 people, with let's say 25 doing concurrent inference and seeing good throughput.

If DeepSeek-sized models will be required in the future to get Opus 5.5 quality, they're not feasible to run for a single person. Pooling usage is necessary to make it efficient.

But even that is pretty painful to sustain efficiently with current hardware prices:

Concurrent requests 25

Aggregate generation 1,000–1,250 tokens/s

Model DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, 552B MoE

Active parameters during decoding 16B

Candidate hardware 4 × H200, 564 GB HBM

Continuous rental at $2.90/GPU-hour $8,352/month

Cost per registered user $84–167/month

The efficiency of centralization is not enough excuse to deny individual agency.

The argument for saying that ram is put to better use collected into central hands vs distributed among individuals is the same as for any and all other resources, and it's invalid.

Humans are not ants and should not aspire to the efficiency of ants at the expense of having to be ants.

You get some centralization, and you get some distribution, and it's completely invalid to be jealous of the portion of all resources that is in distribution.

This should indeed be "thought out seriously" and the result is either mockery or torches and daggers. Think that out seriously.

I think there's a divide here in people who heard the words "it's more efficent than" and are interpreting that statement on its own (it's a true statement), and people who are assuming the statement also implies "we should only give it to data centers" (which I don't think anyone agrees with)

You misinterpreted my comment. I'm advocating for a middle ground where we may pool hardware in small groups for attacking the hyperscaler moat, specifically for ML inference.

Yeah, Altman and the people in that world are utilitarians, which you would think they would have learned by now doesn't translate well to public conversation (or reality if we are being honest).

Ah yes, I'm sure my RAM would be more economically useful if it were used to generate slop videos for Sora and inappropriate child content bty Grok rather than running VS Code and postman on my laptop.

Nah. OpenAI themselves are wasting tons of RAM by doing frivolous stuff like providing ChatGPT for free for millions upon millions of people so they can ask what rocks go well with pizza. And wtf was Sora for.

No, if compute/memory was _that_ scarce that you begin thinking about what a waste it is that a decent chunk of it is sitting in people's homes, then why aren't you dedicating every atom of silicon that you already own to more productive efforts first.

While his statement can somewhat be true, it's hard to accept from someone who has more money than he can reasonably spend.