That certainly sounds like it should be true. But are there any papers that can actually prove it?
Most of billionaire wealth consists of assets. That isn’t money being stored as assets, assets can’t be turned into food or shelter, and the “money” that they represent doesn’t affect prices or resource allocation, except for in a first order sense (e.g. another person can’t own that particular stock for company X, or that particular land, etc).
But if we take “money” from them and “give it” to the government, from a 10,000 foot view that will just cause price inflation because their “money” isn’t currently competing for goods and services that other people use, but if the government uses their “money” to pay workers, then it would be competing for those things.
So I don’t understand it when people act like billionaires could just buy everyone food or medicine or whatever with their money, that would just cause price inflation because it would represent an injection of money into an area of the economy where it wasn’t previously. Is everybody just economically illiterate, or am I missing something?
> “money” that they represent doesn’t affect prices or resource allocation,
Ownership of assets (primarily stocks) = private ownership of capital = private resource allocation = capitalism. To say that those assets don't affect resource allocation when they are resource allocation is absurd.
As we speak these assets are being allocated towards massive buildouts of data centers. Millions of people will spend billions of hours building them. On top of that, they're inflating the prices of everything else, like energy and electronics.
I'm not saying that these specific examples are necessarily a better use of those resources, but what if those people instead spent those billions of hours on, I don't know, building real world infrastructure? Housing? Solving world hunger? Implementing measures to prevent or reduce the damage caused by climate change to local communities?
If you have a huge amount of money sitting idle in a bank account, and suddenly you start spending it all, this applies upward price pressure wherever you spend it, yes?
Confiscating “money” from people who weren’t going to “spend” it will just cause price inflation.
Confiscating money from people who were going to spend it (most taxes) mostly does not do this (except medicine, education, military companies and infrastructure companies) because the people who were going to spend it and the people who do spend it (after the first round of spending) mostly spend it in the same part of the economy (normal goods and services).
What am I missing here?
The context for people's reaction to this is that he has single-handedly caused the current spike in RAM prices.
That is called "Being greedy as fuck, as greedy as you can possibly get away with. Fuck everyone any anything else."
It wouldn't be immediate of course. Ramping up RAM production does take some time; it's not flipping a switch. But this exclusivity deal almost definitely resulted in a situation where they are making below market returns to lock in guaranteed revenue rather than take their chances with a market that would absolutely pay up for more.
Now, I'm curious if it was the best deal for the memory manufacturers in retrospect.
Sam's a shitty guy, but simply doing his job well isn't why.
And if one person can indeed cause it then blame the system? I go back to the proven legal case of them fixing prices. Now there is just a scapegoat because it feel good?
I don't. When I make decisions that might benefit me but affect others, I consider the impact on others before deciding what to do. Sometimes (often?) I choose the option that benefits me less (or is neutral, or hurts me), if I believe the negatives to others are too high.
I didn't say that means they don't consider others, and I haven't taken a survey of everybody on the planet.
Obviously people believe their interests weigh more.
> Everybody believes their interests weigh more
Fun fact: I'm not a "rare outlier". People like me are pretty common and can be found all over. We usually just don't openly talk about it because we're not looking for a reward. I'm not speaking up now because I'm looking for self-gratification or anything. I'm speaking up to push back against your claims. I'm speaking up because we live in an increasingly selfish period of time. I'm speaking up because we're also at cultural turning point and many people are saying "enough is enough." I sure as hell don't care how rich you are, but I do give a damn about where the economic floor is. If you take from that floor to lift yourself up, I'm upset. If you do this to lift yourself when you already have more money than you could possibly spend in several generations? I'm furious.
We all tell ourselves stories, but it is more important that people in power tell themselves realistic stories. It is important that we hold people in power accountable. Left unchecked they, like everyone else, will delude themselves. But it is easier for them to delude themselves because they become detached from the lives of the average person.
So I'm sure he does, but what he believes doesn't matter as much as what actually happens.
I'm sorry, I'm not going to buy into this. It's literally a textbook fallacy argument. Don't make lazy arguments. Especially to defend those who clearly live in a completely different world than you and me.
No, not by my logic. I don't think people are necessarily villains for prioritizing their own interests, for being born into fortunate circumstance, for having good fortune along the way, or even for having some self-centered myopia and hypocritical opinions. It's a very normal part of the human condition.
But by your logic, perhaps.
> I'm sorry, I'm not going to buy into this. It's literally a textbook fallacy argument. Don't make lazy arguments. Especially to defend those who clearly live in a completely different world than you and me.
Are you talking about the billion people living in poverty in 3rd world countries? I was not "defending" them or anybody else, just observing a factual reality of the world we live in. I don't know what you think the "lazy argument" was that I was apparently making.
> I didn't say everybody weighs their own interests at 100% and everybody elses' at 0%.
The dollar is a shitty measuring stick though, given that its size is not fixed, and that newly printed dollars mean that those closest to the printer see their dollars count for more than those who are further. See: The Cantillon Effect.
If only we had some form of money with a fixed supply...
If DeepSeek-sized models will be required in the future to get Opus 5.5 quality, they're not feasible to run for a single person. Pooling usage is necessary to make it efficient.
But even that is pretty painful to sustain efficiently with current hardware prices:
Concurrent requests 25
Aggregate generation 1,000–1,250 tokens/s
Model DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, 552B MoE
Active parameters during decoding 16B
Candidate hardware 4 × H200, 564 GB HBM
Continuous rental at $2.90/GPU-hour $8,352/month
Cost per registered user $84–167/month
The argument for saying that ram is put to better use collected into central hands vs distributed among individuals is the same as for any and all other resources, and it's invalid.
Humans are not ants and should not aspire to the efficiency of ants at the expense of having to be ants.
You get some centralization, and you get some distribution, and it's completely invalid to be jealous of the portion of all resources that is in distribution.
This should indeed be "thought out seriously" and the result is either mockery or torches and daggers. Think that out seriously.
...just economics that benefit him. The economics of rental for consumers are horrific. It doesn't even have to be about an abstract sense of ownership and freedom, even if it's "just economics" this is still an insanely self-serving to say because he's talking about economics that benefit 00.01% at the expense of the other 99.99%.
Imagine if we had a shortage of cars: your city only had 20% of its current vehicles. It would be accurate to say "in this global shortage, new cars are more efficiently used by groups/taxis/uber than sitting idle in an individuals home". A car used by a group share would allow more individuals in the city to have access to vehicle transport. If cars instead all went to individuals, only a privileged 20% would have transport.
There simply isn't enough ram in the world for every individual to do local inference right now: one person having a 512GB RAM system means others don't. Data centers can batch the processing and serve many, many more at once.
That's not to say individuals shouldn't have it! individuals can buy a 512GB mac right now. Or that it should go to Open AI. Your org or group could do the same batching (OpenAI is only a minority of compute, still). But saying "it's more efficiently used" is trivially true
This argument that only considers the one positive dimension of centralization and pooling is never valid.
Currently AI providers are hyper competitive and almost all of the world has access to it quite cheaply. If people had to buy hardware for local inference, it would only be a tiny percentage of the world's affluent tech enthusiasts with access to AI, wouldn't it?
We're currently managing the shortage with a hybrid model, where enthusiasts can still buy (more expensive) individual systems and the broader shared hardware goes to many providers. OpenAI is something like 15% of data center power in the US I think? That's a lot but we still have choice.
The man who largely created a component shortage, is sitting on unused hardware, and is leading a company with extremely questionable ethics, well… he said some stupid stuff, didn’t he? He does that a lot.
Now, we can try to find angles to apologise for his behavior, or we can be upset and stop making apologies for billionaires, at least for the ones whose actions are more damaging than philanthropic.
The "you will own nothing and you will be happy" meme struck a chord for a reason. Billionaires want to create a power imbalance and screw regular people and we are jsut expected to be ok with it. Thats not ok. If these people hadnt done thing like made local governments sign NDAs about datacenter contruction, disenfranchising voters from their right to decide on the matter, then people would trust them more
Billionaires are a low trust people. Simple as. I dont want to rent ram from sam altman given the shit these people pull
Your comment is the exact opposite of both of those things. You really belong on Reddit.
RAM in the cloud ends up being used by GitHub actions runners that fetch and install the world anytime a shmuck pushes a commit to his confobulator feature branch for the paper clip factory. Multi-cloud deployments of a service nobody asked for. Enterprise architects deploying a service mesh to deliver what can be done in 50MB of memory on a raspi. Running some vectors representing natural language through gigabytes of noise only made useful by some arcane math only to be unable to count letters in words.
I am sure there's also lots of actually efficient use of memory out there. But when enterprises are willing to burn cash, efficient processes or methods are nowhere to be found.
I'd expect nothing less from the likes of this guy.
No, if compute/memory was _that_ scarce that you begin thinking about what a waste it is that a decent chunk of it is sitting in people's homes, then why aren't you dedicating every atom of silicon that you already own to more productive efforts first.
Probably water too, even food, money and air.
Obviously better.