I get his argument logically, but I wonder how many vacant bedrooms he owns. He should give them to my housing collective so they aren’t sitting idle all the time.
It’s a good argument if it was made in good faith.
But he’s evil, so it’s not in good faith
It is a stupid argument even if made in good faith.
It’s sound reasoning up to a point. It would be far more efficient if everyone gave their RAM to a central collective and used it online. That way the RAM would be in use even when you aren’t using it personally. Everyone would have an effectively infinite amount and it would be cheaper because you only pay for the time that you are using it.
I’m reality, of course, Sam would be in charge of all the RAM and would keep screwing us harder and harder until we started squeaking like a rat in an undersized corset. That’s what separates the theory from reality.
I think it might not be. Of course, what Sam means is “let us have all the RAM so you can run a ChatGPT client on your Commodore 64”, and if that were the only thing RAM was used for, that would be more efficient. But it’s not and it would be undesirable for things to become like that.
So let’s imagine a general purpose RAM collective. I think for that to be workable at all, it would require a major upgrade to internet infrastructure to make it sufficiently high-throughput and low-latency, which would be very costly and also require a lot of RAM. The cost of all that would probably dwarf the inefficiencies of individually owned RAM not being used maximally.
Additionally, to get the latency low enough, the data centers would have to be pretty physically close to the people using them. But people who live near each other also tend to sleep, work and play at similar times, so the gained efficiency wouldn’t be nearly as high as it could be. And on top of all that, even the lowest achievable latency would still be very slow by RAM standards, so at that point you might as well be using a hard drive as working memory.
There’s vaguely ways around it like scheduled batch jobs in each data center as demand dips locally, but even that can’t maximize usage when demand is variable
You had me up until “cheaper because you only pay for the time that you are using it”.
We don’t really have a good benchmark there, and we’ve seen that tokens are actually much more expensive than companies are leading on as they’re trying to get people hooked. As with on-premise, or anything you own, your usage can far exceed a rented rate and then becomes cheaper and cheaper each use.
I’d be curious if there are any rented mediums that are actually cheaper once you start using them a decent amount? Cars, cloud, video, all of those become more expensive when rented if used too much.
As someone who tried to make a living doing ride share with a rental, it’s never going to be cars without a serious overhaul of our commercial relationships with them. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that principle holds true across the board
Only low wear occasional use items really fit in. And it looks more like pools than classical rentals.
Have you ever had to wait your turn to use the one computer in the library thats the only one that has the specific program you need to use, to finish an assignment, thats due in 30 minutes?
But little Timmy really wants to play the color version of Number Munchers?
Scale that up by a few quintillion times, and you may see how catastrophically stupid it would be to have a single entity gatekeeping all computational capacity on Earth.
You think Musk shutting off Starlink for 48hrs in a active warzone, is bad?
Imagine that even a well intentioned theoretical super LLM just makes a mistake, or an intentional decision along the lines of… 3 months of the entire computational/transactional/book keeping/device regulating capacity/logistical planning and monitoring ability of the entire country and economy of I don’t know, Cameroon, Albania, New Zealand, Thailand, whatever… eh thats less important than this other thing people are doing.
This is madness, in a technologized world, for everyone to relenquish their entire ability to do anything requring RAM, to a single entity.
Do you want SkyNet? The Matrix?
Thats how you get them!
Cheaper? BS, the RAM of your PC cost cents to make. If you have the RAM online, you’ll pay for every minute using it + your ISP for the bandwith, and they can leave you with an paperweight instead of an PC at any moment they want. Wrong, not even an PC, it’s only a data terminal you own and pay for, less as an smart TV. Centralizing Internet even more in the hands of few billonair pedo-assholes and their AIs, with Datacenters in former Woods (see those in Finnland by Google), what can go wrong?
The Altman User Support Center
That way the RAM would be in use even when you aren’t using it personally.
None of my RAM is ever unused, because I use linux
ISP has an outage = you’re cut off from everything, can’t even play offline games.
Data center has an outage = same thing
Once they start paying for enterprise level redundancy for all parts of the system (multiple lines for all homes from isp, your data replicated across DCs, all within reasonable distance to you to retain latency), we get to a point where it’s just a worse experience for probably more money, and a constant dependence on a vendor rather than a 1 time dependence. They have tried to make this work many times with the cloud gaming shit, and it failed every time.
IMO, even ignoring the evil part it is a step down from what we currently have (or rather, had before the asshole crew started buying everything so they rot in storage, driving prices to the moon).
This is my issue with everything. I want to own things so i can still do them when there’s a ddos on the servers or php has a backdoor or my certification secret key is 4 or or or or or im a seal
Yeah in this moment we need to be building out our solarpunk homelabs and preparing to be able to integrate into a localized intranet mesh if we choose to, so that once this all comes crashing down we can start rebuilding some semblance of what we had.
Putting all our RAM eggs in one basket would be the fucking stupidest thing I could think of.
Maybe if data centers were run like public libraries.
But even then, no.
Exactly. He could make similar arguments regarding kitchens or food.
“People shouldn’t own food. It’s wasteful. It’s much better utilized in OpenKitchens.”
Extend it further than rooms.
How much MONEY does he have that isn’t currently being utilized for an actual useful purpose? Making himself richer isn’t useful.
How many doctor’s bills could he be paying?
How many mouths could he be feeding?
How many teachers or babysitters could he be paying?
If this ratfuck conman with a messiah complex thinks he can just casually opine that he has a disruptive, new take on property rights, oh well then by all means, lets just entirely drop the pretense and have the totality of this conversation.
He is a power mad socio and psychopath who is to a great degree personally responsible for the coming Greatest Depression.
There is no amount of suffering he can cause that would be too great for a fucked up freak like this who has no morality beyond that which makes him feel satisfied with himself.
Yeah, lets renegotiate the social contract Sam, let’s get right on that.
Do you no longer believe in private property, personal possessions, Sam?
We should all just submit our riches to the false machine god, and trust that its technopriest interpreters will guide humanity unto a new dawn?
Give me a fucking break, its like he wants to be ripped to pieces by a righteous mob.
His billions of dollars arealso sitting unused and out if circulation, I can put them to better use.
So true. It’s wasteful for billionaires to have all that money. Let’s put it into mutual aid collectives so that it can be used by everyone who needs it.
Billionaires are wasteful. Most of their dragon horde sits idle all the time, it should go into public coffers where it will be used.
deleted by creator
“And you have my pity.”
I’m just waiting for the “farewell” myself
We’re all waiting for that “farewell,” I put champagne and a cigar aside for the horrible orange monster, I might have to either change my plans or stock up for whatever comeuppance finally meets the incestuous geek with bad hair
“But not my RAM.”
This one caught me as I’ve just closed Transport Tycoon Deluxe. I played it on a machine with 128GB RAM and a 5070Ti(16GB) … Now I’m ashamed.
Ashamed you didn’t get more RAM.
I thought it would be overkill for Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but as I’ve read Altman’s comments, I’d probably max out the motherboard two years ago, when RAM prices were low. Today I’d probably have to sell one of my kidneys to do that.
I can think of something that’s an absolute waste of computing resources: AI bullshit. Nobody really needs to expend computing resources, electricity, and water to have ChatGPT tell them that they asked the best question ever because they’re so insightful.
He’s promoting his own business by ruining others.
The man is a shill of the highest order.
When the music stops, the bubble will burst.
He just wants to be the last one on the dance floor.
It’s Rhetoric of the highest order.
These assholes deserve to die. They’re a waste of oxygen.
I wonder if he will make the same argument about private wealth?
Sam utilizes 100% of his own asshole, since he talks out of it.
If he wants my graphics card so bad, I’d be more than happy to give my 7900xtx to him via the rectal route, unlubed. I’d hate to give it up but I understand it’s for a good cause. He can have the motherboard too, same way.
Make sure the capacitors are topped up too. It would be rude to give empty capacitors away.
Just remember the pcie port is on the side, it has to go in port first.
Wait…are you storing a motherboard in your butt? Dude, that’s got corners.
/s, people. Sheesh.
No, I’m saying it would go in his, and for precisely that reason
Is this from the Magical Mystery Tour movie??
Its from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. The guy massively overeats until the frustrated waiter feeds him a tiny bit more and he explodes into organs and vomit. It IS absolute cinema.
Ah… I thought it was the scene from Magical Mystery Tour where John is serving someone massive amounts of spaghetti using a shovel lol. But on second look, clearly that’s not John.
I tried finding a clip, but all of the results I’m getting are hosted on Facebook and I don’t fuck with that.
But on second look, clearly that’s not John.
Actually it is John. Though Cleese, not Lennon.
Yeah it’s hard to tell with the 40 pixels.
Ah search for Mr Creosote!
Keeping Sam Altman alive is wasteful.
tHIEL controls altman through voodoo puppetry, and being the anti-christ just corrupts him from the inside.
Actually, the oxygen that Sam Altman consumes is wasteful.
That begs the question: what tool did dear Sam use to acquire his skills in the first place? Since at least one of his own computers certainly played a role in his career (and he couldn’t possibly have used it to its full capacity for decades) this attitude speaks volumes. Even though his own personal computing power helped him get to where he is now, he denies that same opportunity to everyone else. Fuck you, Sam.
Sam’s primary skill is grifting, you don’t need a PC to develop that skill.
According to rumours he barely knows how to code and he is said to misunderstand basic machine learning concepts. It is however true that he might have needed a PC at some point in his 2 years of studying computer science before dropping out. Even though I remember that at my local university people weren’t even touching a PC in the first year and were being tortured by theory and math by hand instead, to understand the foundation before going anywhere fancy. Maybe that has changed in the meanwhile.
To be fair, you don’t need RAM to code - modern CPUs have ~5MB of cache and that’s enough for an entire Lisp machine.
Also, let’s be real here: any computer from the last 40 years is enough to code on, as is any RasPi or knockoff (or with a bit more than zero effort/expertise, basically any system that can run Doom, which is basically any system). The most expensive parts are the screen, keyboard and mouse.
For compiling it might make a bit of a difference, doesn’t it? Even so, yes, you can probably get some 200 EUR Mini PC and have already way more than you need.
If you’re learning to code on a toaster, just pick a lightweight language that has low compile times. (Or realistically, have someone knowledgeable pick for you.)
Billionaire calls regular people wasteful.
He’s made statement that data centers are cheap to run, compared to human workers, because humans cost 18 years feeding and teaching them.
So he was saying AI can use some electilricity and give same answer as a human, but the humans cost more. People were like, wow, yeah right, he’s amazing.
Um how much did the data center cost to setup? LLM training, workers to clear the land, resource mining, all the labour to manufacture the resources unto data center infrastructure. Food resources to feed the builders, architects, labourers etc. etc. He glossed over that part.
Counterpoint: Amazon is buying billions in Nvidia AI systems it can’t yet turn on
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-nvidia-ai-gpu-data-centers-power-shortages-2026-10?op=1
Before turning to slower RAM, they collectively made VRAM&GPU a luxury by intentionally exhausting supply to everyone else, and leftover components they can’t (or haven’t even planned) to power on collects dust.
There are like tens of ways to ridicule his argument, but I find this one more direct.
Can’t let competition have it. That’s us, we’re the competition.
Most of the money he has aren’t used so it would be better if he give his money to the collective
Is this finally the manifestation of “you’ll own nothing and love it” or whatever it was?
Someone did the same math as SETI in 1999, when they asked people to take idle compute to grind data. At what point does the free tier of ChatGPT grind data on your machine like some sort of bitcoin mining malware?
Let’s extrapolate: Humans are 70% water - Buddy, at what point do to you start trying to dehydrate orphans to cool all the ram you want to harvest from average people?
Let’s extrapolate: Humans are 70% water - Buddy, at what point do to you start trying to dehydrate orphans to cool all the ram you want to harvest from average people?
Orphan-crushing machine lore.
Fuck Sam Altman
