From PC World: Ah, you love to see it. A quote from a billionaire CEO shows just how phenomenally out of touch they are. In a video interview published last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said it’s actually pretty terrible that consumers like you and me get to have a bunch of memory in our computers. Think how much better it would be if that memory was in a gigantic, polluting data center instead.
That immensely quotable moment comes from the Cheeky Pint channel on YouTube, wherein the CEO in control of ChatGPT spoke with Stripe president John Collison. Both men share pints of beer in an empty bar in an attempt to cultivate some “hey look at us ordinary people” vibes. The relevant bit comes at about the 29-minute mark.
“A lot of people want local inference,” says Altman, referring to users running large or small language models on their own hardware. “And somehow they assume that, like, the problem is solved now, because we are going to have open-source models. We’re going to be able to run them on our computers. And so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data center.” For the uninitiated, the data center is where gigantic AI services like ChatGPT operate, on hardware that’s owned, leased, or otherwise utilized by gigantic companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.
Here’s the bit that has Altman’s critics seeing red: “But from, like, a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer. And being used five percent of the time.”
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