Sam Altman:

A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we're going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data center.

But from a global allocation perspective, actually it's quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time.

Like you want maximum utilisation 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

TL;DR Guy selling product: "Here's why owning your own product instead of renting it from me is a terrible idea"

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[–] 8 points 1 week ago (1 child)

He’s technically not wrong, but FUCK YOU for screwing up the market.

It’s also un-optimized to have cars vs busses, non-single payer healthcare, to have citizen gun owners, and anything other than pure socialism…

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    He is technically wrong though. His argument is based on people only using DRAM for model inference. Which is nuts.

    People use DRAM for a lot of things more beneficial than AI inference. And those use cases are also many times more efficient than whatever this Epstein class guy is using it for.

    A CNC machine that produces actual goods that are actually beneficial to humanity does need DRAM. I doubt it needs more than 100MB though. An LLM counting the RS in strawberry eats up a gazillion TB of DRAM to produce nothing of value.

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