Sam Altman of OpenAI believes that consumers have too much RAM that they don’t even use
, by Thibaut
These latest remarks by Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, have already caused quite a stir. During an interview with Cheeky Pint, the businessman strongly criticized the distribution of RAM supplies around the world.
According to him, consumers have too much memory in their personal computers, even though they use it “only 5% of the time”. Altman believes this DRAM would be put to better use in data centers.
“Many people want to use local inference. In a way, they assume the problem is now solved because we’ll have open-source models, we’ll be able to run them on our computers, and so we won’t need all that equipment in the data center anymore.
But from a global resource allocation perspective, it's quite terrible for everyone to have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, where they’re only used 5% of the time.*
Like, 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."
It is clear that allocating memory largely to data centers would be of particular benefit to OpenAI and its AI models. However, it seems inconceivable at this time to deprive consumers of memory, given how widely it is present in so many devices.