...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.