Sam Altman says DRAM capacity should go to data centers, not personal computers
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
And that's just one of 3 he owns in SF alone. Also he has 2 kidneys and 2 lungs, while he could get by with just 1 of each, and there are people badly needing them.
I will renounce my hardware when he renounces all homes and bedrooms. Until then he's a hypocrite.
Isn't the view that people having extra homes used 5% of the time a very well-known and common criticism, and there has even been legislation enacted in a number of places to discourage or penalize such homes?
(For SF, it appears:
- Tax rates for >1 homes are higher under the Homeowners' Exemption
- There was also an 'Empty Homes Tax' but it was struck down by the court in Eric and Andrew Debbane v. San Francisco)
Context and amount matters deeply. People like Sam Altman often like to refer to utilitarian principles, when it helps further their goals. Whether that is really their true motivation can be seen in small things like whether they apply the same principles to the same decisions of their lifes.
So... San Francisco?
Not by Sam Altman, surely. Hypocrisy is an individual sin, you don't get out of it because everyone else thinks you're wrong.
To murder the humor: the joke is funny because the idea that we should centrally plan resource usage for the benefit of society as a whole and discourage/disallow individually driven use of those resources for individually popular but socially wasteful applications is... communism, basically.
You can repeat this analysis for pickup trucks or cross-continent travel or desert agriculture, ad nauseum. And we do. And people like Sam Altman tend very strongly to be on one side of the argument. Until they need more DRAM, then it's all "let's pull together comrades".
Altman said that people use all of the computer's 32G of memory at most (pulling a number perhaps out of his ass) 5% of the time.
You referred to using a home at least 5% of the time. If I live in only two rooms totally 150 sq ft of my 3,000 sq ft house for 19 days of the year than I use 5% of the house for at least 5% of the year.
I trust you see those two 5%s are very different things.
Consider if I had a 32 GB desktop w 2GB for OS, set up to donate CPU cycles to a distributed computing project. I 100% of the time use the RAM on the desktop, even when I use just over 5% of the RAM.
Note also that Altman said nothing about how often people use less than their entire RAM. If I have 32 GB because I regularly use 28 GB and want some in reserve, then knowing that I only need the extra 4 GB about 5% of the time doesn't mean it's worthwhile to take away 4GB and have my code crash 5% of the time.
1. No, I think you changed it - I just re-listened to that section, and I don't hear any mention of "at most", nor any mention of "all of the computer's" DRAM, nor any mention of "32G" - what are the timestamps you are referring to? The only other piece he mentioned was that he was speaking in terms of "a global allocation perspective".
> Consider if I had a 32 GB desktop w 2GB for OS, set up to donate CPU cycles to a distributed computing project
2. The scenario you laid out seems incredibly uncommon - are you actually using a 32GB PC w/ 2 GB for the desktop and donating the rest to a distributed computing project, or are even you not doing the scenario you laid out? Are you commenting on HN using a ≤2 GB RAM OS w/ the rest donated? Regardless, the 2GB desktop out of 32GB + donated scenario seems like an incredibly uncommon one that is not at all representative of the norm. I'd guess a far more common scenario than that is a device that was bought but only got a little use before being abandoned, etc.
I chose 32 GB as the high-end of that range, so I could have something concrete.
We are indeed talking the same quote: “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,”
I'm fine with having misinterpreted it, but, what does that 5% number mean for global DRAM allocation, how is it determined, and how do you apply the same measure to extra homes?
I use my bicycle far less than 5% of the time, so what does that say about bicycles from a global allocation perspective, and why should that change anything?
> The scenario you laid out seems incredibly uncommon
I was trying to demonstrate how there are at least two very different ways to define what '5% of the time' means. The inspiration for that was a friend who donated processing time to GIMPS, but I don't know how much memory GIMPS needs these days, and the details were beside the point.
I also don't have a 3,000 sq. ft. house.
If you're looking for a transportation analogy, I think a far better analogy would be if there was an incredible shortage of rubber for vehicle tires, with possible allocations of each tire including either a bus that would be used ~24x7 for a large number of users simultaneously, or for a car that would be used by 1 person a relatively small percent of the time. And I understand that people would disagree about desired outcomes there as well. Also, what do you mean by 'why should that change anything?' - is your question about why someone might say allocating limited resources to a use that is used by large numbers of users simultaneously 24x7 is different than allocating the resource to something to be used 5% of the time by a single user?
(Also, how would the bike analogy work - what's the shortage of and what's the alternate use of the constrained item would serve a large number of users simultaneously ~24x7 if it wasn't instead being used for your bike for 1 person ~5% of the time in the bike example?)
> is your question about why someone might say allocating limited resources to a use that is used by large numbers of users simultaneously 24x7 is different than allocating the resource to something to be used 5% of the time by a single user?
No. The whole point of gruturo's top-level comment which started this thread was that Altman clearly does not apply the same logic to housing, any generic "limited resources" logic cannot be what he is referring to.
Even if it were, I don't know what those numbers are. How many users? Where does the 5% number come from? How does it compare to other forms of allocation (eg, housing, or personal car ownership vs. mass transit) where we've long since decided that an unequal level of access is well within reasonable cultural norms?
As far as I can tell, this is a made up scenario to justify his use of centralized data centers, and it implies a strong centralized planning state should be preferred over a (well-regulated) free market.
In war time we know the government decides where rubber goes, how food is rationed, and can enforce travel restrictions. But this ain't war time, and Altman isn't the War Production Board to decide these matters.
If the question really concerns the ~24x7 use for a large number of users, vs. the limited benefit of a few, then use that centralized planning state to cut CO2 emissions so the next generations of humans will not suffer so much. That's another clue how we know this point isn't really about generic concepts of resource allocations.
Is that supposed to be an example of hypocrisy? Or why did you specifically type that up in your comment? Regardless, are people required to not be hypocrites in any other way for it to be acceptable for them to say something else is badly inefficient? Actually, I am not even sure any of your comment is an example of hypocrisy, unless you're saying that someone can't say a completely different thing is badly inefficient, unless that person is personally efficient in (all?) other unrelated dimensions as well (for example, RAM, while being inefficient in terms of kidneys, lungs, and homes)?
His solution is to return us all to an undemocratic model of computing that has been in decline since the 1970s.
I have a phrase in mind that's considerably more appropriate and to the point but, here, out of respect for HN's guidelines, I'll satisfy myself by merely saying: get off my lawn.
Pendulum is swinging against it now though!
Like we have these billions of smartphones just sleeping all the time instead of running at 100% all the time.
But the whole point of personal computing is that you can do whatever you want.
It is the same old argument between centralization and decentralization. Yes, centralization is more efficient, but also the goals of centralized systems are ultimately wrong. So they are efficiently sailing towards the cliff.
Nitter: https://nitter.mie.foundation/daradoescode/status/2116654047...
He could very easily solve the shortage by not buying up the entire supply. Further, the frontier labs could even coordinate in favor of consumers and agree to limit their compute purchases.
* What happens when these services arbitrarily restrict it's usage based on what they deem as unacceptable?
I don't know who Dara is, but they should probably put down that bucket of paint thinner and stop huffing it for a moment.
The stakes Sam is playing for isn’t yachts. It’s power.
I think he lives in enough of a bubble that he’s starting to believe his own hubris.
I don’t think this will end the way he thinks it will.
Bathrooms are even more inefficient, btw. How many hours a day do you really use a bathroom? And some people even have more than one just for convenience.
Back to Sam, his memory is not as good as it was before, money gets in the eyes and vision get muddy and foggy.
yes that’s what he’s saying, if consumers had less memory, his would be better.
"No, sorry, I can't allow more ads 'cause I'm running out of memory. If you want me to allow ads you'll have to give me more memory first."
He should worry, China is actively pursuing AI in such a way to strategically defeat US monopoly on making it a new controlled rent based resource.
As a justification of what he’s already doing this is relatively weak and the real answer is “we will see.” It’s possible his business plan works out and him having all the ram is the best allocation (as he and his backers have already decided).
But it’s also possible this just makes his main “killer app” evaporate. Who is going to make use of these LLMs if common people can’t afford a decent laptop to use for such applications? Cloud isn’t the answer as it competes for the same compute resources that we’ve already declared too precious for common people. It’s essentially a tautological claim, vacuously justifying something that’s already been done with the ends of having done that thing.
This is a far cry from intelligent thought being a universal utility that you can pipe into your house like water or electricity, as I believe was initially claimed.
Efficient use of Resources for the production of more Capital.
Those with inefficient usage of their resources (gamers and RAM) go bankrupt, and release the resources to those which can extract more Value from the same resources.
Oh yeah, here it was:
https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/welcome-to-2030-i-ow...
You should watch the talk yourself, it's pretty entertaining.
There are still reasons for people to have a lot locally, but it shouldn't be the default.
There's a meme for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbreaking:_The_Worst_Perso...
Whats better if all the RAM, CPU and storage of phones went to DCs. People are more productive without phones. They work instead of consuming content. The tens of thousands of hours lost (opportunity cost), even at a minimum wage is >$1 million over a lifetime.
'Enslaving' RAM so we can get the most work from it as we can isn't quite the same.
(No one is saying the RAM is "enslaved")
EDIT: upon re-reading, maybe we agree
What I don’t like is the idea of rationing it and making it more and more expensive when you promise an era of abundance.
In the condo I used to own, I shared 5 out 6 faces of the box with neighbors. Cheapest electricity bills I ever had because you're mutually insulating your neighbors.
However, my HOA fees were more than that savings. The chairman noticed we had a lot of money in the reserves and pushed for a vote to do a multimillion dollar renovation. Popularity contest for things I don't value and HOA fees go up. Want to make a change or need to make a repair, need to get approval from the board.
Anyway, I'm sure the parallels are obvious with a little imagination, but I prefer a standalone house.
Really though, I just wanted to point out that there's a difference between efficient use of limited resources and lower prices and convenience for consumers.
But the elephant in the room is the question of who would control all that RAM and set or change the rules about which usages are allowed, for what price and which aren't allowed.
This against the backdrop of Anthropic just now deciding to block using Claude for reverse-engineering video games.
Or to go with your meme, the person you hate didn't just make a great point, they would also get to control what you do with your computer. Would you be fine with that?
Oh wait, much of the basis of the modern economy is letting individuals make decisions for themselves.
If one could use their RAM in a way that was actually private and without leading to them accumulating huge power it would be different matter.