Sam Altman's argument about RAM utilization is reasonable on a first pass, but misses several key points:<p>1. people aren't using (GPU) RAM [1] for just running LLMs (in the local model sense), they are using it for other things... games, system displays, other models (Text-to-Speech, Speech Recognition, etc.);<p>2. being able to run models locally allows them to be used when the internet is down, use them on private data (e.g. medical records, proprietary company data, etc.), including training on that data;<p>3. the big AI companies are already storing unused GPUs on shelves waiting for their roll-out in data centres, as they can't build the capacity fast enough.<p>With point (3) that goes against Sam Altman's argument about utilization. The big companies have the hardware, but aren't utilizing it themselves.<p>[1] And if the argument extends to RAM in general you have all sorts of applications, especially on developer hardware -- editing and compiling software; running local servers; running CAD and other applications; etc.
It's really inefficient to let people have access to electricity too.<p>Running all those lines, people don't even use it all that much.<p>Much more efficient to put everybody into camps, and simply have the people take turns using electrical appliances operating at 100% duty cycle.<p>Freight delivery speeds need to be brought down too, 35 MPH maximum.<p>Food? Give me break, get everyone on a Soylent Green diet.
He doesn't miss these things like gaming or edge cases... He's just talking specifically about how local LLM inference is not economical and he is right.<p>Anyone choosing between a cloud provider vs local specifically for an LLM has likely noticed this already.<p>Anyone interpreting this as "Altman wants to take DRAM away from me" or "Altman doesn't understand use case X Y or Z" is just strawmanning.<p>The most honest interpretation of the quote in the article (if you actually read it) is he says:<p>1. There's a problem which is the shortage<p>2. People assume the solution to the problem is just everyone has local inference<p>3. That won't work because if everyone has local inference there's actually a worse problem because it's less efficient (idle time, partial batch sizes etc) so we'd need even more compute<p>There's nothing that even remotely suggests he wants to do something nefarious from this quote. If you hate him, find a better reason like the weird cornea scanning cryptocurrency ideas.
Is #3 true? This seems very inefficient. Aren't futures markets supposed to fix this type of thing?
See e.g.:<p>[1] <a href="https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/what-are-dark-gpus-data-centres-electricity-shortage-ai-boom-amazon-nvidia-126103000350_1.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/what-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/5-gpu-utilization-the-401-billion-ai-infrastructure-problem-enterprises-cant-keep-ignoring" rel="nofollow">https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/5-gpu-utilization-the...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/ai-bubble-update-79-of-companies-say-their-gpus-sit-idle-at-least-half-the-time-yet-most-plan-new-ai-platforms" rel="nofollow">https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/ai-bubble-update-79-o...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.techradar.com/pro/5-utilization-is-a-math-fail-millions-of-gpus-worth-billions-are-mostly-sitting-idle-report-finds" rel="nofollow">https://www.techradar.com/pro/5-utilization-is-a-math-fail-m...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-has-ai-gpus-sitting-in-inventory-because-it-lacks-the-power-necessary-to-install-them/" rel="nofollow">https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-has-ai-...</a> [Nov 2025]
I am unsure, I heard this for the first time today, and now I have heard it multiple times, with varying changes to what is actually being stockpiled.<p>Sources for this would be appreciated.
How would a futures market fix that...?
Where are these shelves? Asking for a friend.
His wealth is also 95% unused, it should be given away.
> Sam Altman's argument about RAM utilization is reasonable on a first pass<p>How so? It's obviously self-serving.
You can be self-serving and reasonable.<p>From a pure efficiency point of view it makes sense to have all our resources pooled and used by whoever needs them at the time. So long as there is always enough to go around, and all the benefits of local computing are kept (though how that works practically if your internet goes offline I don't know) then theoretically, home computers are suboptimal.<p>But that argument isn't really based on reality. Privacy, offline access, access when you need it, cost... the list goes on. There's many reasons he's wrong, but the core point that it is technically more efficient in the perfect world seems sound.
If some Joe guy talks about sharing resources it's "booo get lost u commie". If a billionaire talks about deciding for all how to share your resources, it's suddenly fine and dandy.
Similarly if Joe starts doing cuthroat, unethical, machevillian things to benefit themselves its "antisocial" and to be discouraged<p>But if a blowhard wealthy silicon valley techno-autist does it its just the way of the world. "Don't hate the player, hate the game"
> the core point that it is technically more efficient in the perfect world seems sound.<p>It's not "sound", because when do we ever have the perfect world? Instead we have a world controlled by self-serving billionaires like Altman. The perfect world is a red herring.<p>If you're ever tempted to grant the benefit of the doubt to our tech overlords, please read "Careless People" for example.<p>I find it odd that you're going out of your way to defend an argument as "reasonable" that by your own admission "isn't really based on reality." I think it's actually more charitable to Altman's intelligence to interpret his argument as self-serving than to interpret his argument as somehow just ignorant.
Even putting aside the whole privacy and tuning debates - unless Sam is willing to sell us inference at something near the pre-constrained cost of directly owning the DRAM all he is advocating for is "don't be greedy guys, that's what I'm for. I can be greedy for you!". It's not actually efficient for people to pay huge markups on compute and memory vs letting that same memory site idle some of the time. I mean I guess it's efficient for OpenAIs bank account, but not for anyone else.
the efficiency point is simple. inference providers can use RAM to make money and so they are willing to pay more for it. they don't need to confiscate it. they can outbid consumers and reduce effective consumer demand, which is exactly what they are already doing.<p>the underlying economics are unescapable. when there was a glut of RAM because no profitable uses existed for it manufacturers shoved it into consumer products because "bigger number is good" but it produces very little utility sitting idle in consumer devices.
He's saving the planet, don't you get it? His needs <i>obviously</i> trump ours. /s
<i>Altman leaves out of this the fact that OpenAI has basically tried to corner the market on RAM, trying to lock up 40% of the world’s supply without even guaranteeing that it will follow through on the actual purchase orders. I mean, I think that alone would have at least some impact on the current price for RAM, wouldn’t it?</i><p>Hes going to lobby the federal government to confiscate all your RAM, like FDR did with the gold. :|
A problem of both the Altman post and posts that react on him is that they take efficiency/utility in absolute sense instead of in marginal sense.<p>There is clearly high marginal utility of the first n GB of RAM in your computer, but then its go down probably faster than for RAM in OpenAI's datacenter. And the market just solves for the equilibrium.
I heard someone say it’s inefficient for Sam to have two kidneys
> <i>Altman talks about how they’re working on having robots build “self-replicating data centers” (what?!?)</i><p>Company that cautions against the paperclip maximizer already at work building the paperclip-maximizing hardware themselves.<p>Though I appreciate how this would invalidate the last remaining arguments for the "data centers bring local employment" claim, if the security and construction jobs are automated away as well.<p>Maybe it will be replaced with a new spin: "Data center? What data center? Oh that one... that's just a wild weed, you can't prove it's one of ours..."
Let's all get rid of our personal means of transportation as well, super inefficient to have cars and bikes and such parked for the majority of the time! Some people even buy houses that they're never in! Or they buy kitchen equipment they only use once a month! Or clothes that people only wear for parties! Why even own anything at all!<p>I am pretty sure Sam has already sold the majority of his personal belongings and only rents whatever he needs when he needs it. What a great example for us all.
I have been finding this quiye weird, it seems that the real villany was in what was in Sam Altman's mind when he said something that is basically true.<p>I have seen many explanations of what that was exactly, they are not all agreed on the bad thoughts were, but they are pretty much in agreement that it was a bad thing.<p>It's like saying 'public transport is more efficient than driving your own car', and the person hearing you say 'you shouldn't own a car, you should use the public transport system I will own.'
How many houses owns Sam? How many rooms in those. Maybe he should let homeless people live in them when he's not there.<p>Or maybe he should live in a one bedroom apartment.<p>That would be way more efficient.
Let's put gaming and all the other uses for compute that require low latency, etc. off the table and just talk about AI compute. People can and do run open models on their own hardware. Altman is, not unseriously, arguing that this hardware would be better utilized if it were concentrated in data centres rather than distributed into smaller, private clusters that might not reach full utlization.<p>Now, let's take privacy concerns off the table. OpenAI's complete lack of respect for privacy, authorship, copyright, etc. mean that you simply can't entrust private data to OpenAI. Full stop. Anyone with privacy concerns gets a free pass.<p>Finally, we're dealing just with people doing LLM computations on data that's not sensitive. Why aren't these people doing things in data centres? There are likely a variety of reasons, but one is likely price. If somebody does a lot of stuff with local models, they've probably found an application where a bigger closed model doesn't offer compelling advantages and the cost, purely in terms of filthy lucre, of running a local model is lower. These are the users Sam Altman can legitimately target. What Altman is arguing is that these people are paying too much.<p>How should he target them? Become the Steam of compute. Save them money and time. If Altman wants these people's RAM because he can use it more efficiently, he needs to offer them the same services they can get from their own hardware, cheaper, and with less trouble.
In short sound logical argument absolutely zero sense of optics or relatability
Or decency, empathy. Because of his actions, someone passionate about computers might not be able to purchase a computer even.<p>If I go check the largest computer shop in my country, it's adding general electronics now, and very few ram, GPU are available.<p>This is extremely bad. And this asshole says this. It's just infuriating
This keeps getting posted, but it doesn't seem interesting to discuss. Money is the way we decide how scare resources are allocated.<p>If Sam wants to buy 16GB of 6 year laptop RAM, he can send me a check for $2000.
Are LLMs the best use
Of ram? Many other extremely beneficial devices for extremely high value use cases are suffering because of this madman trying to corner the market. Show me the value of everything else suffering.
> if you have a sufficiently powerful AI tool that is told to “maximize” the creation of paperclips, it might decide the best way to do that is to seize control of all resources<p>Hey don't talk about Sam like that!
SA: "Well, first of all, we need to do much better than we are doing now."<p>Me: This might well be the understatement of the century.<p>SAL "Sand-boxing works to a point. Then I think monitoring........ works to a further point."<p>Me: REALLY? You think you should MONITOR your system of agents while it does its work? GEE I wish I'd thought of that!
I don't understand the backlash against this interview.
When listening to the interview it sounded clear that it was just in context of local inference.
To me it came across as stating that setting up local inference, when dram is limited, is indeed limiting from a global perspective.<p>I think it's a bit disingenuous to state that his opinion is that we shouldn't have any ram being used for any local purposes.
Of course he doesn't want anyone 'hoarding' their own RAM, for the same reason institutional landlords usually dislike the idea of the housing supply becoming less constrained and allowing people to escape the rent trap. Altman wants to force us into a landlord-tenant relationship, making alternatives more difficult is in his material interest.<p>Local inference is like buying a house even if it's more expensive than renting, because you (often quite reasonably) don't want to live under the heel of the landlord-tenant power relationship.
I agree. I mean, his conflict of interest is obvious, but what he was addressing there has been exaggerated. He made no egregious statement. From a utilitarian perspective the distribution of RAM for local inference purposes is indeed inefficient. I still don't want OpenAI or any other company to be able to hoard huge orders of RAM, but the point applies regardless of OpenAI or Anthropic (or any other company). The knee-jerk reaction from a community that's supposed to be bright was disappointing though.
What kind of specs would you need on a local machine to be able to run fairly decent (Opus 5.5-level) models on it?
Efficiency and resilience are always in trade-off. Even if there was no other argument it would be worth having local inference as a guard against systemic SPOFs in the big providers.
And if we cared even a little bit about efficiency the world would look very different, so we can just stop listening to him anyways
We don't have to hold up paperclips as theoretical anymore. AI needs RAM. All of it. The real life paperclip maximization is RAM chips.
Why did this post get dropped from the homepage?
His case his "efficient"? What about this one:<p><i>"People shouldn't be allowed to bicycle for fun. Only utilitarian bicycles should be allowed. For there's too much energy spent manufacturing mountain bikes, tires, converting ski station into bike parks for the summer. That energy and money should instead be directed towards creating more RAM factories and more datacenters for the AI companies"</i>.<p>Where does such an "efficient" argument ends?<p>P.S: as a bonus question: does anyone know how to differentiate a paid shill from a sycophant?
Sam just wants to make paperclips.
"It's inefficient for people to have leisure time. They would be more productive if they were chained to their desks/tractors/whatever."<p>I think that's about where the argument ends.
You should expand your paragraph into a 30,000 word blog post. Only then is the message efficient.
A surpisingly good analogy
I think the argument being made is fundamentally wrong. It reminds me of the Socialism vs Capitalism models - this idea that centralizing the resources will somehow unlock efficiency. It's also becoming clearly that merely throwing more data, RAM, compute, etc, is not generating significantly better behaviours.<p>We are far better off with millions of people running lots of little experiments, than a handful of super large companies running a subset of experiments. We really need to get agentic LLMs onto local machines at a reasonable price to really accelerate.<p>The likes of qwen3.5-0.8b have been super interesting to me, you have this tiny little model that can run on a CPU that can exhibit agentic behaviours (with a lot of tickling) - in the hands of hobbyists is where I suspect we will see some cool updates.
Screw Sam Altman. He's the root cause of this shortage, besides that, how does he justify his car having extra seats that he's not using. Sick and tired of these techbros trying to re-centralize computing all over again whilst stealing left, right and center.