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Comment by petervandijck | Hacker News Reader

The quote in context really wasn’t that weird https://sputnikintelligence.com/things/quote/6vqm-hkv5-qm1d

The quote assumes that all of humanity has the same goals as a corporation does: that every individual person desires maximum utilization of components for the sake of company shareholders. Individual people want a computer and just can't buy them because the entire world's memory chip supply, flash storage supply, and increasingly hard drive supply is being swallowed into the maws of corporations who would love nothing more than to sell you tiny bits of that compute through a monthly subscription in perpetuity.

Not everyone subscribes to the "cloud compute is more important than everything else" outlook, but everyone is affected by it nonetheless.

In that statement, Altman also insinuated that most businesses switching from SAAS provided by OpenAI, Anthropic, or the VC-funded companies that build on top of them to locally-hosted software won't kill both OpenAI and Anthropic.

Given that he was in a fluffy interview at the time, he's not going to say that OpenAI and Anthropic would die, but we all know that -unless the "Pacing The Frontier" garbage succeeds in its goal of creating law and regulations that massively obstruct LLM manufacturers who aren't the four or five currently-largest ones in the US- that's how it'd turn out. Once OpenAI and Anthropic are dead, the VC money pouring into the LLM manufacturing and services industries evaporates, and all that demand for high-speed VRAM vanishes with it.

So, no, switching to locally-hosted software will reduce RAM prices... just not immediately.

It sort of is, no? To agree with it, you need to share the goal of maximum utilization. Sam Altman seems to take that as a given. But clearly people disagree and not just with RAM. Most kitchens and bathrooms are unused most of the time, but that doesn't mean every home having one is bad.

No, he was not saying that was his goal! That's what everyone seems to misunderstand about this quote.

It's like a highrise developer saying "people think our buildings take up a lot of land, but actually houses are much worse from a land use perspective". Which is objectively true, and yet does not mean the developer thinks the entire world should be turned into houses, or even that they dislike houses!

Except he was the developer who signed a deal with land owners to buy 40% of the land with the intention of building houses to rent and caused condo prices to 5x.

No, it's more like he was just clearing up the misconception that "cities would be better places to live without all the highrises in them".

> Most kitchens and bathrooms are unused most of the time, but that doesn't mean every home having one is bad.

isn't communal living the most efficient thing resource-wise though?

I think that's exactly the point OC was making, it's the most efficient resource-wise but that doesn't make it the objectively best form of living

Not sure it is "weird".

But saying people shouldn’t want something that was abundant and you made scarce is an asshole thing to say.

Sam Altman's argument is very conveniently self-serving.

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