This isn't necessarily true. You can have your AI machine doing other things or turn it off when you aren't using it. It could probably increase efficiency if people were affected by how much energy it uses to write their emails, they might only use it for when they actually need it.

It's way less thermally efficient though... Individual computers in people's houses running lighter workloads don't get as hot, and when they do, they don't need to stay operating for as long: they can just shut down or slow down after the heavy workload, or finish it more slowly. So they don't need as much cooling, and will produce less waste heat due to the temperature coefficient of resistance.

This is completely unrelated, but I hope I'm dead before using "compute" as a noun sounds normal to me.

If it's too important to squander resources, it's too important to privatize.

People...dont want access to ai tho...

People can still use any of the Gpu cloud renting stuff/mining to sell their Gpu function so it can still be utilized efficiently. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.

From a hardware utilisation perspective, sure. There was a time where people only had their devices on for a few hours a day. And you know why no-one cared? Because people could buy as much hardware as they wanted. When supply eventually match demand again, no-one will care again.

Isn’t this assuming that we all get unlimited perfect network capacity for free? Most folks have decent connectivity most of the time but moving to a universal thin client model makes a lot of assumptions about our current network infrustructue and our political and financial capacity to improve it. But this out of touch moron hasn’t had to live without multiple redundant commercial quality pipes running to his home and office for decades.

Efficiency for whom? A thief holding a bank teller up at gunpoint is more efficient than working a 9 to 5.

I think I've seen decentralized computing where you can rent inference that is available somewhere else , which would tackle that problem

Who needs AI on all the time?! Oh, I know. No one! It's the reason why energy costs are high and resources are being wasted/reallocated on a regular. Most private models would be utilized only when needed and only by those that have a justifiable need for it. Not on for the sake of being on. We don't need an AI summary of the history and purpose of a fucking saucepan. But we get it whenever someone types it in search to find where to buy one.

You're only thinking about the occupancy part of efficient use of available resources (and even then only partially) and forgetting all about the utility value part.

RAM used 100% of the time is not more efficiently used than RAM used 10% of the time if it's being used for activities that deliver much lower utility, something made even worse because using RAM consumes additional resources in the form of power hence running it isn't actually free and you if the utility of it's use is lower you might actually be destroying value by using that power for a much lower utility use than it could otherwise be used for.

That's the point others are making by pointing out that if that RAM is in data centers running AI 100% of the time it might actually be in use less efficiently than RAM used for multiple activities in people's computers at home where it's idle most of the time.

Yours is basically the same fallacy as the one about how people working more hours per day means they're producing more.

"More use" is not the same as "more value created" because time is far from the only factor in determining how much value is created.

PS: If you really dig down into the utility value for Mankind of most modern day computing you'll find that a large fraction if not most of it is basically entertainment, gambling or some for addition and thus doesn't produce actual economic value. For example, how exactly does social networking such as Facebook produce economic value for Mankind - it's basically a mix of entertainment and an addiction that directly creates or help create nothing, and instead it mainly wastes people's time. At best it could indirectly deliver value by improving worker efficiency in activities that actually create value because people were happier with Facebook than without it, but by all indication that's not even the case as it's creating epidemics of psychological and social problems especially amongst young people. Those things are extracting value rather than creating value, so the computer RAM running Facebook software is probably a net negative in value creation overall - it creates little or no value overall (it extracts value from some to others but doesn't actually create any) whilst consuming power to run, and all of those factors put together might mean that in overall value creation terms that RAM being idle or even in the refuse bin would actually be better than being used for Facebook software.