markstos comments on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says its “terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM” instead of shoving it all in datacentres

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 72 points 1 week ago* (17 children)

If we didn't have RAM in our phones and PC's, how would we use the data centers?
It's almost as if Sam Altman is a moron.
Also a lot of the hardware for data centers is just laying around unused, because the data centers aren't even built.

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[–] markstos@lemmy.world 27 points 1 week ago (12 children)

He’s referring specifically to local RAM used to run local AI models, whichl he argues is unused most of time. Say if you use your local AI for 4 hours a day, it’s idle for 20. Where the same model in a cloud might serve users across time zones 24/7.

It’s a similar argument about private car ownership, where a car might be used 5% of the day for a lot of people while 95% of the time it requires storage space, aka a parking spot somewhere.

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[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 child)

OK thanks for the explanation. Still having it not used at all, because the data center isn't build yet is worse. Also calling it "everybody" is weird. Unless he means phone and PC, and the very specialized AI run on such systems do not require extra RAM.
So he remains a selfish moron.
Companies running their own decentralized AI models on their own servers are the competition. Whining about the competition is also moronic.

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[–] markstos@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

Yes, memory prices are affecting a lot more than people who want to run local models on high-memory desktops. That’s a small minority compared to all computer uses affected by the memory prices.