letting sam altman (or billionaires for that matter) have all the money from our work is a poor allocation of resources.

It's true what he says and not just about RAM but about anything you own.

My car isn't driving most of the time. My drill isn't drilling most of the time and my oven is off most of the time.

That's a huge waste of resources in a macro economic kind of way.

You can't argue with the correctness of his statement. You need other arguments. These arguments exist.

Finally coming out of the bloody closet. Frontier labs and Nvidia are in death dance.

The latter sells mostly to the former, but their growth story needs local inference to keep up with valuation. Nvidia could reduce prices on a whim and boost local inference, but that would make its investment in frontier labs lose too much.

Frontier labs meanwhile need public markets money, and their story really needs local inference to be more expensive/extremely worst than what they offer.

One narrative takes money away from.one side and puts it in the pockets of the other.

But buying up the world's silicon wafers that you don't even have the ability to turn into chips is a much better use of resources, right Sammy?

Please don't run AI for free on your own workstation 😭 it's a very bad use of your computer 😥

STOP LISTENING TO CEOS

Fuck you, Sam.

And who made those resources scarce, Sam? WHO MADE THEM SCARCE???

also screw you for trying to make the answer to 'How should those resources be allocated?' be 'In the way that best enriches me personally'.

you are not getting it, if I have all the ram and I'm just going to charge you the amount I decided for you to be able to perform the most mundane tasks, I can't believe you are not grasping the benefits of this business model

Never felt so proud to have a Local LLM in my router, yes my router of all things... my router which is an old and downgraded Mac Mini I had lying around.

"Raping your own siblings at home is terribly inefficient when we have private islands where we can keep and rape other people's siblings."

There is a national park in Kentucky called Blue Heron that has an outdoor museum of a company owned coal town. Residents were paid in scripts that could only be spent at the company store. Once the lands resources were taken, the company moved on and the town died. This is the America the wealthy always wants. https://www.nps.gov/biso/learn/historyculture/blueheron.htm

Fucking idiot is too stupid to realize that local DRAM can be used for useful shit, as opposed to whatever he wants to use it for.

Yeah no. I will hoard all the computing resources I can. Fuck you Altman.

we lost Captain Picard yesterday, yet this lazy-eyed cardboard human gets to keep using oxygen. there is no justice in this world.

Fuck this loser piece of shit

Oh BROTHER this does this guy suck!

Ahh, right, I forgot we barely survived before AI came along and took over our lives and infected the entire internet with AI slop...oh wait, no...turns out that's not true. Before AI we were perfectly fine.

CEO of Pizza Hut says making pizzas at home is a terrible allocation of resources.

This IS the same argument use for why trains are better then cars.

Maybe your infra needs to become public domain then Sam :)

actually it's quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time.

Why is it terrible for us plebeians to have our own RAM, huh?

Like you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment

WHY IS IT SUPPLY-CONSTRAINED, ALTMAN? WHY IS THERE CURRENTLY A RAM SHORTAGE IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?

Nobody wants the fucking cloud and that's why major tech companies are forcing it on them without asking, and burying the opt-out if it's offered at all.

And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that

Gee I wonder why our intuitions don't align with your "Give me everything and have nothing" philosophy...

They are both telling us we will have a culture of abundance while also telling us RAM is too sacred for any of us plebes to own any.

I don't think anyone should, but if Sam gets to then it should be fair game for everyone because fuck him.

Shovel seller vehemently against you building your own shovel

Sam Altman is a terrible utilization of scarce resources.

I want to use ram for things unrelated to AI you fucking prick.

Not to glaze, but how efficient can it be if it costs less to do on your own than pay per token from him. Even with today's ridiculous hw prices and these services being heavily subsidised by future bag holders.

A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we 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.

We don't need them even without local inference. There was already more than enough total global compute for the most valuable use cases of LLMs (research, development, admin). The datacenter build-up is almost entirely fueled by utterly unrealistic expectations of future capabilities. Before and now the case for local inference is a matter of access, not capacity.

But from a global allocation perspective, actually it’s quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time.

Utilitarianism like this is a disease. By the same logic, it's inefficient that we allow other species of animals to exist and consume usable energy. Hell, why stop at other species? It's inefficient to allow humans to exist - let's kill all humans!

Now, I know that's not what he said, the point was to show that when someone uses utilitarianism as a serious argument, they are no longer worth listening to.

Like you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment,

The supply is only constrained because you keep hoarding more than you need. Maybe it's time for some communization? So communities where data centers are built get most if not all of the profits from it?

new title:

"Man whose company lost $20b in previous year explains how to allocate resources."

"Get these poors off my commons!"

This is what crack heads sound like when explaining why they stole some junk off of someone's porch

That's insanely ironic coming from him. Meanwhile the crazy amount of waste that these companies are producing buying all the GPUs to create artificial scarcity. They are terrified of people being able to run their own local LLMs because it completely destroyed their entire business model, they will never be profitable.

this guy is completely out of his mind

Molotovs are also a scarce resource, I think we need to throw as many as we can at Sam Altman.

Computing for me, not for thee

But Sam, local inference is what would prevent our data from being used by creepy advertisers.

hes kinda like the spokesman czar of the industry+stakeholders interests

Haha yes! And it would so much more efficient if we just like, put all the workers in a big warehouse in between shifts. We can drug them so they can sleep in stacked boxes, and then drug them again so they are ready to work after exactly 8 hours. They will get so much more work done if they don't have to ever leave the factory, especially if we give everyone ostomy bags and catheters so they can empty their waste once before bed!

It's going to be so fucking efficient guys. Like, you have no fucking idea how much more efficient we could make society if we just removed the concept of individual agency and autonomy from our ethical repertoire!

He’s technically not wrong, but FUCK YOU for screwing up the market.

It’s also un-optimized to have cars vs busses, non-single payer healthcare, to have citizen gun owners, and anything other than pure socialism…

Absolutely!

It's also true that anyone but me having wealth is a terrible allocation of scarce resources and I must therefore demand that Sam Altman instantly transfer his entire fortune to me so I can reallocate it according to my whims.

A lot of people want to be billionaires, and somehow they assume the problem is solved because we have unfettered predatory late stage capitalism and oligarchy in America, we're going to be able to amass as much money as we want in our bank accounts, and so we're all going to be rich without oversight, accountability or government interference.

But from a global allocation perspective, actually it's quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world's wealth sitting in a few private bank accounts and being used .05% of the time.

Like you want maximum circulation of currency if you're trying to reduce inequality in this artificial scarcity environment,

And somehow, Americans' intuitions are the opposite of that.

FTFY Sam.

Can we hurry this shit up and get to the part where he kills himself rather than take the stand at his sister's lawsuit?

distributing trust to every person on the planet is so inefficient. All trust should be given to me!

He's not wrong.

Think Solar. Wayyyy more affordable to share a farm than build your own, and less battery required if load is shared when not in use by some. This is an extreme of that, even.

BUT. People want sovereign API because of trust, not efficiency. I don't mind a shared solar farm, but I want my own Safe Deposit Box for my important documents, not one shared with a bunch of smokers who have proven they drop ashes everywhere.

"Peasants eating food and drinking water is such a waste of resources. Those could be hoarded by the rich! What a waste..."

He's absolutely right! This is a great argument for nationalizing it into a public service. I imagine he'll be happy to hand over what he's got so far, and step back going forwards. Thanks Sam!

McDonald’s can probably make hamburgers more efficiently than everyone can at home, but I’m not eating that shit any more than I’m giving Sam Altman my money or data.

How about some optimization instead of swallowing up more and more RAM?

Also, they want more and more RAM, but where is the increase in profits coming with that additional RAM? And they somehow think they can keep this up forever? Kill the AI industry and rebuild it, idgaf.

Funny how there weren't any systemic supply issues until someone decided to buy up all the RAM ...

A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we 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.

We're going to be able to? That's wrong. We already can. Right now.

https://github.com/Niko1221/Strata https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp https://github.com/earendil-works/pi

There's going to be use cases for data centers but I don't think it's going to be consumer LLM inference.

What can be run locally on mid hardware now couldn't be run half a year ago. Imagine one year from now.

Sam Altman and everyone like him are welcome to ingest excrement and expire, doubly so when they themselves are in fact the cause of scarcity. Respectfully.

Edit: Bill said it best over 30 years ago.

Moronic logic. The only reason LLM's work is because they scraped the internet, something only possible because personal computing became available to the wider public.
Next he's going to suggest that we just stop giving people any education and let a handful of elites do the thinking for the masses. What an absolute clown.

It wasn't a scarce resource before. Why is it more scarce now if we're just offloading into the cloud which makes it, supposedly, significantly more efficient? People had RAM before. Now they can't get any [for similar price].

It's not about resource utilization in the first place. We don't trust you.

Personal computers are a ridiculous idea, you should use our scalable mainframes instead --IBM in the 80s, probably

And there it is.

“We made components scarce, so you have no choice but to use our cloud services where we control everything and you rent the privilege from us.”

Literally called it. Fuck these assholes with everything rusty.

No.. he actually is right. A local machine will sit idle most if the time.

A data center can balance loads globally.

In terms of resources.. data centers ARE cheaper.

However ... there are other reasons to use local interference that might be more important than added cost

Ram is so cheap to make that until the AI demand companies basically had to create new levels of density/speed and sell for less just to keep the business afloat. This is like when cellphone companies tried to claim megabytes were a precious finite resource. We live in a post scarcity society and these billion assholes are like “well that just won’t do”.

It reminds me of that kid we all know who just learned economics from school house rock and then goes “now if I can simply find every evee Pokémon card in the world and burn them all except for the one I have, I’ll be rich!”

It’s just so frustrating to see this sheer stupid amount of greed all of the time. Thanks for coming to my TEDex talk.

Models running on swarms of shitty devices has been done... So this guy doesn't have a case.

I think it's sad that him and his company aren't buying up old devices, cards and hardware and integrating them, giving them a retirement.

Leaving current GPUs to be used by - you know - human beings.

Evil corpo is just mad I can do it good enough at home for free without a trillion in debt.

I bet he owns a car that gets less than 5% usage.

Some of you will have to sacrifice for the greater good, but it won’t be him.

So many people will opt to continuously rent instead of buying though. They think they are too poor to buy so will mortgage their entire future to all the subscriptions they willingly pay billionaires for. Need to go back to a cash economy when credit was hard to obtain because the way it is now those corporations have convinced people that they need everything all the time even if they can't afford it and that the corps will give them credit (indentured servitude) in exchange for all the disposible stuff. I realize that houses are out of reach for many people under 40 however the amount of disposible stuff they can finance (not own) compared to what people 25 years ago could finance is mind boggling.

Sounds like a problem for the sharing economy: kinda like you're able to do https://foldingathome.org/

I'm sure someone will come up with a solution that lets you rent out excess capacity from your gpu cluster.

"sindy swindy shouldn't go out with that guy he's all yucky and gross" says CEO of the "sindy should be blowing ME" corp. in answer to a question on whether he'd ever score, he assured the news dolts that he's gonna score, any day now

Can you imagine everyone carrying around gigabytes of memory, in their pocket? Unthinkable.

Central planning but by the private sector

yeah my computer with all it's computing power is turned off most of the time

and so is pretty much everything I own except my phone

Exclusively pursuing efficiency manifests as intrinsically brittle systems and monocultures. Maximum utilisation is only desirable for strip mining.

Disperse, choreographed capabilities provides reliability and resiliency, slack permits flexibility and predictable maintenance.

All this is orthogonal to the legitimacy of the use and demand of the grift this clown is selling.

ハチロク ハチロク ハチロク ハチロク ハチロク ハチロク

This clearly staged photo op is a interesting choice. I can see how it's meant to humanize Sam, and portray him as a common, ordinary person. But why does it looks like someone just gave him a compliment and made him flustered?

As if the ONLY thing your memory could be used for is running AI models.

Hey buddy, we need this shit to use our BROWSERS or to play GAMES. I have a GPU in my computer that can run most new AI models when quantized at a speed that would be perfectly reasonable for any home user that doesn't want it to literally replace every ounce of their thinking, and I bought that shit before ChatGPT was even a thing, because I wanted to play fucking video games.

I have a NAS with 16 gigs of RAM and a consumer-grade CPU that's a few generations old, and it can still run models with zero GPU or AI accelerator if you give it a little time.

Is it going to be perfectly tuned, and run at the highest possible speed if you design a datacenter just for AI models? Of course it is. But do most people on this planet need that or give a fuck about it? Absolutely not.

CEO said a thing

Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation. In this case, it's both. Sam Altman is a con man.

Well, not everyone can buy tickets to the big rock concert that'll be in town next week. Just a fact of life. This is nothing new. Money guy's gonna grift though, amirite?

See this is why, for most agentic work, I use inference providers that clearly run Open Weights models and have it in their terms that they won’t use my data to train models. Then, for fucking around, or for more sensitive work or my PII stuff, I use local models.