Sam Altman Says Your RAM Is Wasted on You and Belongs in His Data Center
Sam Altman: All the RAM Should Belong to Me, So I Can Charge People to Use It
On the Cheeky Pint podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued it's "quite terrible" that ordinary people hold DRAM in their own machines, used only about 5% of the time, when supply is so constrained. Gizmodo reads the remark less as resource optimization than as a pitch for centralizing compute in OpenAI's cloud — where users would pay per use — while the company's $750 billion infrastructure buildout keeps driving memory prices up.
From a global allocation perspective, it's actually 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.
- tomrod
Huh. Why was this flagged?
- paxy
Every day this story gets more exaggerated
- kashunstva
> “But 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,”
It’s terrible from a global resource utilization perspective for people to fly around in private jets; but I can’t imagine Mr. Altman does otherwise.
So thank you for trying to protect us from the terrible scourge that is personally-owned DRAM, but I’ll take my chances.
- TrackerFF
I live in Norway, and had to check how much a top-shelf gaming PC would cost.
One with RTX5090, 64GB DDR5, Ryzen 9, 4TB goes for equivalent to $13500, with most of that being the GPU and RAM.
A year ago, the same PC would have cost a third or so.
In any case, with the combination of expensive GPU, RAM, who the hell can actually afford this stuff.
- caidehen
As long as they don't use borrowed money to purchase all the supplies, it's fine for me.
If most funds are borrowed money, I would say they are just trying to dry up the supply.
You won't be able to do this forever, the faucet won't be on forever.
- hilariously
If he wants to rent my ram I'd let him pay for it.
- paulbjensen
If the goal is to maximise the utilisation of RAM in devices for computation purposes, then there might be some value in exploring these items:
- https://github.com/exo-explore/exo
- https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/distributed-gpu-c...
- werber
I feel like he could sell this as a future where people have super computers at home and when they’re not running they’re generating income, he doesn’t seemed constrained by the truth, just promise everyone that you’re going to replace their jobs and that their home computer will provide for them. This universal basic compute idea here seems consumed with is not appealing to anyone outside of tech.