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Comment by jordanb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

> 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.

But you're denying both basic economic theory and basic political theory. If RAM is to be allocated, it has to be done in a safe manner too. Something like publicly funded and controlled datacenters, protected against data leaks and spying by private interests who want to use people's research to then steal their credit, ideas and businesses.

Let's now move from basic politics to economics - upwards of a Trillion dollars of debt has been sank into AI, most of it for free, subsidized AI services provided both domestically and internationally - how's that for "basic economics"?

But there's more, for $1 trillion, you could build 100 chip factories for RAM or other chips - 100 of them - 10 times more than we now have. Not building any or not building enough, means you're severely overpaying for RAM and compute - how's that for "basic economics"?

If Sam wants to plan the economy for efficiency, let's do it the way it has to be done, simplistic self-serving BS doesn't cut it.

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