OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is really gunning for villain-of-the-year status with PC gamers in particular, but owners of pretty much any computing device everywhere.
Altman appeared on Stripe cofounder John Collison’s Cheeky Pint podcast this week, sipping beers and weighing in on the state of AI. Gizmodo covered and analyzed the bulk of Altman’s remarks here, though another moment from the podcast is worthy of a shout-out. Altman thinks it’s “quite terrible” that individual device owners and/or operators of local AIs have access to DRAM, which is already catastrophically expensive due to massive demand from AI data centers like OpenAI’s (and may be nowhere close to peaking).
You see, it’s inefficient not to just let OpenAI handle it. “A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now because we are going to have open- and so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data center,” Altman said
“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,” he added. “You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”
There is an unobjectionable point buried somewhere in there. Perhaps a future utopian society could provide universal access to centralized compute. But there’s a more obnoxious point that doesn’t need excavating: Altman isn’t describing the optimal distribution of resources so much as the distribution of resources optimal to him. That arrangement would entail DRAM manufacturers devote even more capacity to fueling OpenAI’s incomprehensibly expensive <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/openai-raises-planned-ai-infrastructure-134830365.html” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>infrastructure rollout ($750 billion through 2030!) and consumers delegate ever-increasing control of their work and lives to AI assistants. The cost of that rollout is directly driving up prices of DRAM and other components through the roof, even for products like smartphones. Closed-source data centers are OpenAI’s bread and butter, as is platformization and consolidation.
Presumably the dream is that any time someone needs to write a document, call someone, stream media, play a video game, or do pretty much anything else that requires computation, they pay an OpenAI cloud agent based in a data center to do it. But hey, they won’t need to worry about paying for RAM, right?
Anyhow, Altman can pry my RAM from my cold, dead fingers—and he’ll probably have to, because it doesn’t look like 32GB DDR5 will drop below $450 or more anytime soon, or ever.
