Quite a few variations of this story, if one can call it that, have been posted already. (Edit: I listed them in a collapsed reply to this comment, if anyone cares.)
It's obviously a riler-upper and therefore off topic for Hacker News. In fact, with its revved-up linkbait title and ragepilled content, it's an exemplar of what this site is not for.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
> “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,”
It’s terrible from a global resource utilization perspective for people to fly around in private jets; but I can’t imagine Mr. Altman does otherwise.
So thank you for trying to protect us from the terrible scourge that is personally-owned DRAM, but I’ll take my chances.
The exact same configuration I bought in 2025 for less than $2,000 now costs $24,000. If I didn't need it, I'd be tempted to sell it and buy a used car, or save the money for when the bubble bursts.
I feel like he could sell this as a future where people have super computers at home and when they’re not running they’re generating income, he doesn’t seemed constrained by the truth, just promise everyone that you’re going to replace their jobs and that their home computer will provide for them. This universal basic compute idea here seems consumed with is not appealing to anyone outside of tech.
So a gig economy but for compute? The problem with this, it will be a race to the bottom and will not pay enough to support the people. Not to mention the energy costs and wear and tear on the compute parts.
I agree, if I am saying or doing cartoonishly evil things without any guardrails and with reckless abandon I too hate it when people call it out directly.
> 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. You want maximum utilization in the cloud...
I promise, if you ever have the misfortune of having an article like this written about you, your reaction will not be "yeah, that's basically what I said"
We will give business men a pass for being disingenous constantly, bowing down to fascists if it gets them a little more money, writing laws to enrich themselves more at the expense of the populace, bribing politicians so they can get a few more dollars.
But if a journalist gets a LITTLE snarky about any of that, oh goodness me how irresponsible!
Journalism has a stricter moral code. The whole point of journalism is to spread correct info. The point of business (most of the time) is to make money. These are very different. Also, since when did we give business men a pass?
Maybe Altman can resurrect the SETI@home project, though I would rather have my PC work on finding things among the stars instead of answering dumb AI queries.
Tech company execs are among the stupidest people on Earth. Another article went around recently where the former CEO of Yahoo couldn't think of three positive words to describe her own child[1]. It's baffling that these people who probably put their pants on the wrong way around 50% of the time get as much airtime as they do. Truly breathtakingly stupid people.
I listened to the full podcast, and this is taken completely out of context. His point was entirely logical: if there’s scarcity, it’s important to maximize utilization of the scarce asset, and you do that by putting it in a data centre where it’s serving people constantly.
His point is the highest and best use of the chips is to be full of model weights predicting the next word 24/7 instead of maybe being in a laptop that's off or underutilized sometimes.
It just so happens that the highest and best use is also what makes him the most money.
Nevermind the fact that there was no RAM shortage before he and his buddies decided to hyperscale their word guessers.
It'd be a bit like if an almond farmer came to a town with plenty of water, used up all the water growing almonds, and then tried to argue that growing food for everyone is a higher and better use than townfolk taking baths or watering their vegetable gardens.
It's not just ideologically bankrupt utilitarianism, it's ideologically bankrupt self serving utilitarianism.
According to your basic economic theory, none of us should have ever gotten any inefficient personal goods if they can be pooled into more efficient clusters. We wouldn't get personal computers, because obviously renting time from a large computer is much more efficient. We wouldn't get personal transportation, or non-communal housing, or inefficient small businesses. Are you sure you want to argue this point with all its logical consequences?
Let me know when you're ready to move onto advanced economic theory, including what happens to efficiency and value when a tiny number of entities concentrate an in-demand commodity in their hands and refuse to share.
It does happen to ignore individual property rights and restricting the free market, as well as sapping away consumer welfare from the older market equilibrium to be fed to the frontier lab beasts through increased prices and through utilization by legacy consumers through the LLM mark of the transaction, so there is that.
Like LLMs, insufficient context leads to insufficient answers.
The small snippet, no, you're correct, he doesn't call for expropriation, though on its own it does seem an odd thing to say.
The full podcast, no, you're correct, the interpretation folks make isn't reflected in the podcast itself.
In the full scope of what the public believes it knows about Sam Altman, from allegations of familial abuse, to the board fiasco, to the expropriation of art and other works by humans to train the frontier models with reckless abandon, one sees that the absolute cynicism by the public writ large regarding anything Mr. Altman does or says is probably appropriate.
Perhaps unfortunately for Mr. Altman, as is the case for most public figures, his statements aren't seen as encapsulated logic statements to be taken individually, but in the scope of his broader public persona.
This forum has a hard time championing anything that isn’t “logical” as if ethos and pathos are inferior for some reason.
The man caused a worldwide RAM shortage. Who gives a flip about context?
I’ll take lower utilization for on prem thanks. Should I give my solar panels to my power company so they can overcharge me too in the name of “efficiency”?
>Should I give my solar panels to my power company so they can overcharge me too in the name of “efficiency”?
That doesn't make any sense because solar panels hooked up to the grid already benefits from high utilization. However if there is some national energy crisis, and there's a bunch of solar panels sitting idle, it might very well make sense to at least connect them to the grid so the energy isn't wasted.
I understand from other discussions that Sam has several houses in SF alone (plus other cities). He did not discuss maximizing the utilization of those?
Scarcity is because of AI demand. Data centers are set up to meet that demand. It’s quite rich to say “evil companies are taking up all the ram” when they are serving billions of users and you want to do the exact same thing for yourself.
Is there any evidence that we're short on compute for the AI demand? My impression was that many data centers were being planned to serve hypothetical future demand (with the assumptions that it'll multiply many more times while also not becoming much more efficient) and to facilitate model training, neither of which has much to do with the argument you're making.
It’s not quite that simple. A few small companies are speculatively buying up all the production capacity going on into the future. At the same time they aren’t actually using it all; a bunch is juat sitting in warehouses not doing anybody any good. And there are real questions about whether this represents any sort of consumer demand, or if it’s primarily fueled by billionaires’ desire to lay off all their workers and replace them with chatbots.
So we’ve got rent seeking behavior squeezing everyday people on both sides, and if anyone says, “hey, I don’t like how this is going”, your answer is to say, “So then set up a factory?”
That’s so tone deaf it makes “let them eat cake” sound downright empathetic by comparison.
> At the same time they aren’t actually using it all; a bunch is juat sitting in warehouses not doing anybody any good
Is there any source for this beyond online clickbait? I find it hard to believe that RAM is piling up in warehouses while simultaneously every AI company and every consumer is desperate for it.
That desperation narrative is illusory. Consumer demand is low and has been ever since this stuff stopped being a free fun novelty. And the only people who seem to be claiming AI demand is through the roof are the datacenter operators and frontier model vendors. But claiming high demand for your own products has been a standard part of the pitchman’s playbook for so long that we now have a term for people who will readily believe that sort of thing: “easy mark.”
So let’s not be easy marks. Let’s be a bit skeptical and look for some corroborating evidence. One obvious place is to check whether the AI market actually behaves like what we expect to see when demand outstrips supply. First and foremost, we would expect to see rapidly rising prices and very high profits for suppliers.
But we don’t see that. Anthropic and OpenAI are very much competing on price. Which, funny, is the opposite of what you would expect of companies that are supposedly struggling to keep up with demand. And apparently razor thin if not negative profit margins, too. Why is that? If demand is so high, then why are they keeping their prices so low it hurts? They aren’t running a charity here.
But he's creating the scarcity. If someone corners the market for something simple like cars and creates the economic conditions where consumer cars now cost 500k, does that person also get to go on a podcast and say "normal people shouldn't own cars anymore because they're a scarce resource?" as if it's just an objective reality that they played no part in creating? Because that's exactly what Altman is doing here.
"Scarcity is because of AI demand. Data centers are set up to meet that demand. It’s quite rich to say “evil companies are taking up all the ram” when they are serving billions of users, and you want to do the exact same thing for yourself."
So not very out of context at all? People see through it and are upset because the message effectively comes down to "We, the rich/corporations, deserve it more than you so we can rent it back to you".
If we want to talk efficiency, the market and investors seem awfully irrational to me. The whole scarcity and costs skyrocketing for other proven and more valuable use cases is because of inefficiency imo.
I’d be more impressed with this scarcity argument if all the RAM companies are buying up were actually getting put online, instead of sitting around in warehouses as currently seems to be the case.
If you are the cause of artificial scarcity due to hoarding, you don’t also get to claim to be the solution to the problem. That’s just running a racket.
Yes. Altman was just pointing out something about economies of scale.
You don't have to agree with his values (e.g. you could believe that individual ownership of computation is more important than overall efficiency) but the statement here is logical and more or less obvious.
An argument can be true in its parts and still mislead by presenting an oversimplified model. The quote below is pointing out that timesharing can obviously be more efficient in theory -- but ignoring the equally obvious objection that data center operators can't be trusted to allocate towards global efficiency in practice.
> A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now. Because, we are going to 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 have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer. And, being used 5% of the time. You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow everyone’s... Many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.
Yes and as a side effect that guy gets unprecedented level of control over who gets to use that RAM for how much and what models will be used and so on.
Even things like decommissioning an old model can be extremely disruptive if all your workloads are tweaked for it. Like when Opus 4.8 dissappear from copilot in one company I work for. Suddenly our PR reviews started missing issues they always caught before.
The issue is that it can be applied to everything else, yet it isn't.
We can maximize utilization of wealth if we distribute it.
We can maximize utilization of land if we build more communal pools/third places and sleep in pods instead of individuals each building their own.
We can maximize utilization of transport if we all stopped having our own cars or private planes and all used public transport.
We can maximize utilization of everything if it was available to everyone at all times.
Humanity just hasn't been interested in maximizing utilization, and I certainly doubt that Altman is. That is the crux.
TL;DR: It's only a fair take if it's a principled take.
Edit: Even constraining it to their specific RAM usage, it's also highly inefficient for each person to individually pay them for their own generations over deduplicating generations into open data stores, where I can just look at previous output instead of regenerating my own.
Maximizing worldwide memory utilization isn’t generally something that people (individual human people) care about. They usually care more about ownership.
Try swapping the subject for something less divisive, like cars. If some calamity hit where we can no longer makes sense to produce cars, it would certainly make more sense to reallocate everyone's private cars (with compensation) to taxi services so each car can be used most efficiently, rather than sitting on a parking lot 23 hours a day.
The problem is that the RAM shortage isn't caused by some "calamity", it's being financially manufactured by companies like OpenAI. The more accurate analogy is that OpenAI starts buying all the cars, jacking up the price on consumer vehicles, and then going on a show acting like he's not influencing market conditions at all.
>it's being financially manufactured by companies like OpenAI
How is this a relevant factor as long as the demand is genuine and not some attempt the corner the market? Otherwise blame all the people/companies buying the tokens.
That would be true if the only use case of RAM was to hold context for LLMs or other cloud based processes. There are many other things RAM is useful for, not only running processes in the cloud.
Or should, for example, gamers all have to stream video games from Geforce Now instead of having their own PC?
While it is out of context, there is truth to his statement. There is something vile about people who become very rich very fast and they lose all sense of self-awareness and humanity. He wants all the resources for himself and his company. We're back to the "You'll own nothing and be happy" statement.
It's a stupid point - the utility of using Sam Altman's body for prostitution is currently zero, and we could use it to increase his economic utility to us all.
How is that not taking things out of context (or rather, leaving them stripped of it)? Scarcity caused by what? For the benefit of who? Utilization for what purpose? "Serving people", heh.
I wouldn't want RAM or a GPU for a decent price to run local models, but to do normal computer stuff. That is what is scarce, RAM and GPU for people. Nobody would give a flying fuck if ONLY data centers had trouble acquiring RAM.
If someone fuckers buys up all the drinking water to make enemas 24/7, and people survive on the rain water they catch in bowls, and then those guys says actually, we should have those too, they're just greedy sociopaths, no need to complicate it.
Hospitals don’t use generators at 100% capacity so we should probably stop using them there /s
This is not logical because RAM a resource we want to use. There are many uses of RAM that don’t involve LLMs, and to assume that “max utilization” and “max utility” are the same thing is naive at best. The entire reason there’s scarcity is a problem of OpenAI’s own doing (along with the other labs).
> “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.”
Altman not acknowledging that companies like his are creating the conditions that cause the supply constraints is the Dr. Evil cherry on top.
Everyone is making fun of him for this clumsy take, but there is some truce to it. It's essentially how Cloud computing came about. We will have good LLM models that run on local hardware, and that is fine. However, it is foolish to think that it will ever make economic sense to run frontier models on hardware that sits idle 40% of the time.
Indeed. It is like cars vs public transport. Or private planes vs airlines. I am sure Vampire Sam would love to hand over his cars and jets because it is more efficient use of resources to take the bus.
Is it possible to reinvent memory with stuff everyone owns or a separate system? It's been a while since I did hardware and low level stuff, so approach this question from a more "inventive" and perhaps "dreamy" way. Or just educate me on physics again and tell me to stop being dumb.
I would be really interested to know how LLMs are being used globally, how much of it is scientific computing, coding tasks etc vs mundane questions people would have googled (and be satisfied with) 3ish years ago.
I'd argue its probably lower than anticipated unless you count Google's AI search mode in the LLM column instead of the search column. As a forced inject, it could go either way.
It frustrates me that these AI companies’ hardware grab is aggressively antagonistic to technology enthusiasts.
I find it reassuring that the leadership confirms that their intention is to make my hobbies and profession less financially viable, as I would otherwise worry I’m overreacting.
Huh. Why was this flagged?
Quite a few variations of this story, if one can call it that, have been posted already. (Edit: I listed them in a collapsed reply to this comment, if anyone cares.)
It's obviously a riler-upper and therefore off topic for Hacker News. In fact, with its revved-up linkbait title and ragepilled content, it's an exemplar of what this site is not for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sam Altman on local inference and use of RAM [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50325020 - Nov 2026 (1 comment)
Sam Altman says DRAM capacity should go to data centers, not personal computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50324267 - Nov 2026 (78 comments)
Altman says 'quite terrible' for your PCs to have RAM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307635 - Oct 2026 (2 comments)
Sam Altman says the chip supply chain's invisible hand failing and DRAM is why - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307595 - Oct 2026 (1 comment)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says You Having DRAM Instead of Data Centers Is "Terrible" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50306361 - Oct 2026 (9 comments)
Sam Altman Thinks It's 'Terrible' for You to Have RAM in Your Gaming PC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50306197 - Oct 2026 (9 comments)
Sam Altman Thinks You're Wasting DRAM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50305797 - Oct 2026 (115 comments)
Thanks, Dang.
HN has no community notes feature
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https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Every day this story gets more exaggerated
sama actually showed up at my house on halloween asking for dram
It's a simple narrative. The majority of people loves simple narratives.
As long as they don't use borrowed money to purchase all the supplies, it's fine for me.
If most funds are borrowed money, I would say they are just trying to dry up the supply.
You won't be able to do this forever, the faucet won't be on forever.
> “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,”
It’s terrible from a global resource utilization perspective for people to fly around in private jets; but I can’t imagine Mr. Altman does otherwise.
So thank you for trying to protect us from the terrible scourge that is personally-owned DRAM, but I’ll take my chances.
“But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch … being used 5% of the time,”
Who said the above? Was it:
1) the head of the public transportation department in 1930?
2) the CEO of IBM in the 1970's?
3) Sam Altman in 2026?
I live in Norway, and had to check how much a top-shelf gaming PC would cost.
One with RTX5090, 64GB DDR5, Ryzen 9, 4TB goes for equivalent to $13500, with most of that being the GPU and RAM.
A year ago, the same PC would have cost a third or so.
In any case, with the combination of expensive GPU, RAM, who the hell can actually afford this stuff.
The exact same configuration I bought in 2025 for less than $2,000 now costs $24,000. If I didn't need it, I'd be tempted to sell it and buy a used car, or save the money for when the bubble bursts.
Fwiw I game on a MBP M1. Plenty of gaming can be done on cheaper rigs.
I commune with giving more life to old hardware, but why subject yourself to the torture of gaming on a Mac? /s
If he wants to rent my ram I'd let him pay for it.
If the goal is to maximise the utilisation of RAM in devices for computation purposes, then there might be some value in exploring these items:
- https://github.com/exo-explore/exo - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/distributed-gpu-c...
Turns out 640K of RAM was enough for anybody after all.
I feel like he could sell this as a future where people have super computers at home and when they’re not running they’re generating income, he doesn’t seemed constrained by the truth, just promise everyone that you’re going to replace their jobs and that their home computer will provide for them. This universal basic compute idea here seems consumed with is not appealing to anyone outside of tech.
So a gig economy but for compute? The problem with this, it will be a race to the bottom and will not pay enough to support the people. Not to mention the energy costs and wear and tear on the compute parts.
>it will be a race to the bottom and will not pay enough to support the people
Then don't buy the hardware in the first place and leave it up to the hyperscalers?
Journalists write headlines like this and then get all huffy when people "decline to comment" on their hitpiece
I agree, if I am saying or doing cartoonishly evil things without any guardrails and with reckless abandon I too hate it when people call it out directly.
> 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. You want maximum utilization in the cloud...
It is basically what he said.
I promise, if you ever have the misfortune of having an article like this written about you, your reaction will not be "yeah, that's basically what I said"
How do you know parent commentator HASN'T had a negative article written about them?
We will give business men a pass for being disingenous constantly, bowing down to fascists if it gets them a little more money, writing laws to enrich themselves more at the expense of the populace, bribing politicians so they can get a few more dollars.
But if a journalist gets a LITTLE snarky about any of that, oh goodness me how irresponsible!
Journalism has a stricter moral code. The whole point of journalism is to spread correct info. The point of business (most of the time) is to make money. These are very different. Also, since when did we give business men a pass?
Nah, the point of journalism is also commentary, opinion, satire, not just correct info.
So like fox news, right?
Maybe Altman can resurrect the SETI@home project, though I would rather have my PC work on finding things among the stars instead of answering dumb AI queries.
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
Maybe Sam should hand over his cars and take public transport to work. Far better use of resources.
Tech company execs are among the stupidest people on Earth. Another article went around recently where the former CEO of Yahoo couldn't think of three positive words to describe her own child[1]. It's baffling that these people who probably put their pants on the wrong way around 50% of the time get as much airtime as they do. Truly breathtakingly stupid people.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/style/marissa-mayer-ai-as...
I listened to the full podcast, and this is taken completely out of context. His point was entirely logical: if there’s scarcity, it’s important to maximize utilization of the scarce asset, and you do that by putting it in a data centre where it’s serving people constantly.
No we understand his point.
His point is the highest and best use of the chips is to be full of model weights predicting the next word 24/7 instead of maybe being in a laptop that's off or underutilized sometimes.
It just so happens that the highest and best use is also what makes him the most money.
Nevermind the fact that there was no RAM shortage before he and his buddies decided to hyperscale their word guessers.
It'd be a bit like if an almond farmer came to a town with plenty of water, used up all the water growing almonds, and then tried to argue that growing food for everyone is a higher and better use than townfolk taking baths or watering their vegetable gardens.
It's not just ideologically bankrupt utilitarianism, it's ideologically bankrupt self serving utilitarianism.
>It just so happens that the highest and best use is also what makes him the most money.
Something being self serving doesn't make it false, and you don't have to rabidly deny basic economic theory just because you hate the guy.
According to your basic economic theory, none of us should have ever gotten any inefficient personal goods if they can be pooled into more efficient clusters. We wouldn't get personal computers, because obviously renting time from a large computer is much more efficient. We wouldn't get personal transportation, or non-communal housing, or inefficient small businesses. Are you sure you want to argue this point with all its logical consequences?
Let me know when you're ready to move onto advanced economic theory, including what happens to efficiency and value when a tiny number of entities concentrate an in-demand commodity in their hands and refuse to share.
It does happen to ignore individual property rights and restricting the free market, as well as sapping away consumer welfare from the older market equilibrium to be fed to the frontier lab beasts through increased prices and through utilization by legacy consumers through the LLM mark of the transaction, so there is that.
(I say some of this tongue in cheek).
>It does happen to ignore individual property rights and restricting the free market
Does he actually call for expropriation without compensation? That part just feels like people massively extrapolating from what he said.
Like LLMs, insufficient context leads to insufficient answers.
The small snippet, no, you're correct, he doesn't call for expropriation, though on its own it does seem an odd thing to say.
The full podcast, no, you're correct, the interpretation folks make isn't reflected in the podcast itself.
In the full scope of what the public believes it knows about Sam Altman, from allegations of familial abuse, to the board fiasco, to the expropriation of art and other works by humans to train the frontier models with reckless abandon, one sees that the absolute cynicism by the public writ large regarding anything Mr. Altman does or says is probably appropriate.
Perhaps unfortunately for Mr. Altman, as is the case for most public figures, his statements aren't seen as encapsulated logic statements to be taken individually, but in the scope of his broader public persona.
This forum has a hard time championing anything that isn’t “logical” as if ethos and pathos are inferior for some reason.
The man caused a worldwide RAM shortage. Who gives a flip about context?
I’ll take lower utilization for on prem thanks. Should I give my solar panels to my power company so they can overcharge me too in the name of “efficiency”?
>Should I give my solar panels to my power company so they can overcharge me too in the name of “efficiency”?
That doesn't make any sense because solar panels hooked up to the grid already benefits from high utilization. However if there is some national energy crisis, and there's a bunch of solar panels sitting idle, it might very well make sense to at least connect them to the grid so the energy isn't wasted.
Yes please attack my logic!
Not unlike attacking a country and causing diesel shortage, and then blaming another country for that shortage.
I understand from other discussions that Sam has several houses in SF alone (plus other cities). He did not discuss maximizing the utilization of those?
But datacenters are why there's scarcity in the first place
Yeah, so he's creating the scarcity that everyone needs to accommodate now.
All the RAM belongs to me is not too far off…
Scarcity is because of AI demand. Data centers are set up to meet that demand. It’s quite rich to say “evil companies are taking up all the ram” when they are serving billions of users and you want to do the exact same thing for yourself.
Is there any evidence that we're short on compute for the AI demand? My impression was that many data centers were being planned to serve hypothetical future demand (with the assumptions that it'll multiply many more times while also not becoming much more efficient) and to facilitate model training, neither of which has much to do with the argument you're making.
For my part, I’m not looking to run models locally. I just want the price of ereaders not to double overnight.
So then set up a factory? Weird to say "everyone else should stop using X because I want it to be cheaper".
What a strange thing to say when the bulk of consumers are frustrated by a monopsonistic situation.
It’s not quite that simple. A few small companies are speculatively buying up all the production capacity going on into the future. At the same time they aren’t actually using it all; a bunch is juat sitting in warehouses not doing anybody any good. And there are real questions about whether this represents any sort of consumer demand, or if it’s primarily fueled by billionaires’ desire to lay off all their workers and replace them with chatbots.
So we’ve got rent seeking behavior squeezing everyday people on both sides, and if anyone says, “hey, I don’t like how this is going”, your answer is to say, “So then set up a factory?”
That’s so tone deaf it makes “let them eat cake” sound downright empathetic by comparison.
> At the same time they aren’t actually using it all; a bunch is juat sitting in warehouses not doing anybody any good
Is there any source for this beyond online clickbait? I find it hard to believe that RAM is piling up in warehouses while simultaneously every AI company and every consumer is desperate for it.
That desperation narrative is illusory. Consumer demand is low and has been ever since this stuff stopped being a free fun novelty. And the only people who seem to be claiming AI demand is through the roof are the datacenter operators and frontier model vendors. But claiming high demand for your own products has been a standard part of the pitchman’s playbook for so long that we now have a term for people who will readily believe that sort of thing: “easy mark.”
So let’s not be easy marks. Let’s be a bit skeptical and look for some corroborating evidence. One obvious place is to check whether the AI market actually behaves like what we expect to see when demand outstrips supply. First and foremost, we would expect to see rapidly rising prices and very high profits for suppliers.
But we don’t see that. Anthropic and OpenAI are very much competing on price. Which, funny, is the opposite of what you would expect of companies that are supposedly struggling to keep up with demand. And apparently razor thin if not negative profit margins, too. Why is that? If demand is so high, then why are they keeping their prices so low it hurts? They aren’t running a charity here.
That doesn't change the fact that it is true
But he's creating the scarcity. If someone corners the market for something simple like cars and creates the economic conditions where consumer cars now cost 500k, does that person also get to go on a podcast and say "normal people shouldn't own cars anymore because they're a scarce resource?" as if it's just an objective reality that they played no part in creating? Because that's exactly what Altman is doing here.
@paxy said it well in a comment in this thread.
"Scarcity is because of AI demand. Data centers are set up to meet that demand. It’s quite rich to say “evil companies are taking up all the ram” when they are serving billions of users, and you want to do the exact same thing for yourself."
So not very out of context at all? People see through it and are upset because the message effectively comes down to "We, the rich/corporations, deserve it more than you so we can rent it back to you".
If we want to talk efficiency, the market and investors seem awfully irrational to me. The whole scarcity and costs skyrocketing for other proven and more valuable use cases is because of inefficiency imo.
I’d be more impressed with this scarcity argument if all the RAM companies are buying up were actually getting put online, instead of sitting around in warehouses as currently seems to be the case.
If you are the cause of artificial scarcity due to hoarding, you don’t also get to claim to be the solution to the problem. That’s just running a racket.
Yes. Altman was just pointing out something about economies of scale.
You don't have to agree with his values (e.g. you could believe that individual ownership of computation is more important than overall efficiency) but the statement here is logical and more or less obvious.
By this logic he should rent out his unused bedrooms because there's a housing shortage.
Make him rent out? No, the equivalent would be to take away all of his homes and rent them back to him.
Woah woah slow down there bud. He wants to rent OTHER people's homes. Not his homes. He needs his homes he's a very important person.
An argument can be true in its parts and still mislead by presenting an oversimplified model. The quote below is pointing out that timesharing can obviously be more efficient in theory -- but ignoring the equally obvious objection that data center operators can't be trusted to allocate towards global efficiency in practice.
> A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now. Because, we are going to 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 have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer. And, being used 5% of the time. You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow everyone’s... Many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.
Yes and as a side effect that guy gets unprecedented level of control over who gets to use that RAM for how much and what models will be used and so on.
Even things like decommissioning an old model can be extremely disruptive if all your workloads are tweaked for it. Like when Opus 4.8 dissappear from copilot in one company I work for. Suddenly our PR reviews started missing issues they always caught before.
What if I create the scarcity by buying all of it? Do you see the problem with the argument?
Sure, but I don't think anyone missed that.
The issue is that it can be applied to everything else, yet it isn't.
We can maximize utilization of wealth if we distribute it.
We can maximize utilization of land if we build more communal pools/third places and sleep in pods instead of individuals each building their own.
We can maximize utilization of transport if we all stopped having our own cars or private planes and all used public transport.
We can maximize utilization of everything if it was available to everyone at all times.
Humanity just hasn't been interested in maximizing utilization, and I certainly doubt that Altman is. That is the crux.
TL;DR: It's only a fair take if it's a principled take.
Edit: Even constraining it to their specific RAM usage, it's also highly inefficient for each person to individually pay them for their own generations over deduplicating generations into open data stores, where I can just look at previous output instead of regenerating my own.
Maximizing worldwide memory utilization isn’t generally something that people (individual human people) care about. They usually care more about ownership.
I don't see that as much better?
Try swapping the subject for something less divisive, like cars. If some calamity hit where we can no longer makes sense to produce cars, it would certainly make more sense to reallocate everyone's private cars (with compensation) to taxi services so each car can be used most efficiently, rather than sitting on a parking lot 23 hours a day.
The problem is that the RAM shortage isn't caused by some "calamity", it's being financially manufactured by companies like OpenAI. The more accurate analogy is that OpenAI starts buying all the cars, jacking up the price on consumer vehicles, and then going on a show acting like he's not influencing market conditions at all.
>it's being financially manufactured by companies like OpenAI
How is this a relevant factor as long as the demand is genuine and not some attempt the corner the market? Otherwise blame all the people/companies buying the tokens.
That would be true if the only use case of RAM was to hold context for LLMs or other cloud based processes. There are many other things RAM is useful for, not only running processes in the cloud.
Or should, for example, gamers all have to stream video games from Geforce Now instead of having their own PC?
While it is out of context, there is truth to his statement. There is something vile about people who become very rich very fast and they lose all sense of self-awareness and humanity. He wants all the resources for himself and his company. We're back to the "You'll own nothing and be happy" statement.
He's not wrong, it was just an incredibly tone-death thing to say given the current general public's feelings towards AI.
It's a stupid point - the utility of using Sam Altman's body for prostitution is currently zero, and we could use it to increase his economic utility to us all.
Does that mean... anything?
Technically true and totally devoid of self-awareness.
EXACTLY. Everyone keeps taking it SO out of context.
The things we do with our computers don't work with ram in a data center. Are you disingenuous or a moron?
"if there is scarcity"
How is that not taking things out of context (or rather, leaving them stripped of it)? Scarcity caused by what? For the benefit of who? Utilization for what purpose? "Serving people", heh.
I wouldn't want RAM or a GPU for a decent price to run local models, but to do normal computer stuff. That is what is scarce, RAM and GPU for people. Nobody would give a flying fuck if ONLY data centers had trouble acquiring RAM.
If someone fuckers buys up all the drinking water to make enemas 24/7, and people survive on the rain water they catch in bowls, and then those guys says actually, we should have those too, they're just greedy sociopaths, no need to complicate it.
Hospitals don’t use generators at 100% capacity so we should probably stop using them there /s
This is not logical because RAM a resource we want to use. There are many uses of RAM that don’t involve LLMs, and to assume that “max utilization” and “max utility” are the same thing is naive at best. The entire reason there’s scarcity is a problem of OpenAI’s own doing (along with the other labs).
The endgame of humanity is small hat renting put everything to you
> “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.”
Altman not acknowledging that companies like his are creating the conditions that cause the supply constraints is the Dr. Evil cherry on top.
Everyone is making fun of him for this clumsy take, but there is some truce to it. It's essentially how Cloud computing came about. We will have good LLM models that run on local hardware, and that is fine. However, it is foolish to think that it will ever make economic sense to run frontier models on hardware that sits idle 40% of the time.
Indeed. It is like cars vs public transport. Or private planes vs airlines. I am sure Vampire Sam would love to hand over his cars and jets because it is more efficient use of resources to take the bus.
Is it possible to reinvent memory with stuff everyone owns or a separate system? It's been a while since I did hardware and low level stuff, so approach this question from a more "inventive" and perhaps "dreamy" way. Or just educate me on physics again and tell me to stop being dumb.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50305797
His pitch is to investors, and he's continually letting them know where is priorities are, and that he's serious about shitting on people for profit.
it's 2026 and the only use for RAM is to hold context for LLMs to sycophantically agree with everything I say
My scientific computing and general purpose computing needs beg to differ. Begone, foul stereotype!
I would be really interested to know how LLMs are being used globally, how much of it is scientific computing, coding tasks etc vs mundane questions people would have googled (and be satisfied with) 3ish years ago.
I'd argue its probably lower than anticipated unless you count Google's AI search mode in the LLM column instead of the search column. As a forced inject, it could go either way.
How much ram does Sam Altman's computer have?
You'll own nothing and you'll be happy
2030 is soon btw ;)
It frustrates me that these AI companies’ hardware grab is aggressively antagonistic to technology enthusiasts.
I find it reassuring that the leadership confirms that their intention is to make my hobbies and profession less financially viable, as I would otherwise worry I’m overreacting.