Rendered at 10:21:31 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
legitster 18 hours ago [-]
> "From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and being used maybe 5% of the time"
I don't actually have a massive problem with his logic here ... if he was to put the blame on Windows or Google treating RAM like it's a cheap commodity.
Also, if gamers weren't overbuying RAM this whole time, realistically the small set of manufacturers would have consolidated even further through the 2010s.
It is terrible if you have any infrastructure and you are not 100% dependent of people like Sam Altman.
JojoFatsani 17 hours ago [-]
I think the quote is taken out of context for the headline
AnimalMuppet 18 hours ago [-]
Perhaps he does. But why should I care what Sam Altman thinks?
See, in a free economy, we allocate scarce goods by who's willing to pay for them. If I'm willing to pay more per gig than Altman is, why shouldn't I get that gig?
You want it, Altman? So do we. You're going to have to pay more than any of us can afford in order for you to get it all. You don't want to (or can't) pay that much? Then you don't get it all.
Altman (and those like him) have already made RAM unaffordable for quite a few of us. If that's not good enough for him, frankly, not many of us care.
saltcured 17 hours ago [-]
It smells like delusions of grandeur, to be so shameless about asserting his own enterprise as the highest priority for society.
Whether he truly has these beliefs or just cynically thinks it is a good way to message, it disturbs me. It only makes it worse, seeing how quickly these new platforms can invade and contaminate the fourth estate (or the mass-market communications that have essentially subsumed that role already).
russli1993 17 hours ago [-]
I won't blame Altman here. Memory companies secretly love this. LLM will always be commercialized after people discovered it if it's not Altman it would be another person. And you cannot genuinely say people do not find LLM useful. You cannot genuinely say people will not use LLMs hence there is no demand for compute capacity. OpenAI and others are simply satisfying the compute demand here. Memory companies have secretly loved for an application to drive up the prices of memory chips. And you can't blame them, these foundry workers, physics Phds working at fab companies have worked much harder than your software web app engineers while earning far less. But what they build is a critical enabler of everything digital and much higher barrier to entry. If hyperscaler don't want to pay for exorbitant high memory prices, they can invest and build their own. But why don't they? This is exactly what you are describing free market economy, pricing is based on scarcity. Maybe its time for the world to actually value hardware and semiconductor for their worth.
AnimalMuppet 17 hours ago [-]
They're just satisfying demand? Then let the demand pay for them paying for the memory, at whatever the price has to be for them to get enough of it.
What Altman is doing is claiming that his company should satisfy demand, even at the expense of any competing demand. No, it doesn't work like that. You get what you can pay for, which depends on what your customers are willing to pay you for.
krautburglar 9 hours ago [-]
Dramatic swings like the ones we are experiencing are -- in the long run -- not good. Altman is the mis-allocation. It's like fiber in the late 90s. To be the firstest with the mostest, they are paying tippy-top prices (with other peoples' money) for something that could be done at 1/2, 1/4, 1/10... the cost a year later. There are so many potential scenarios ending a price collapse. Product ends up in warehouses, sold for pennies on the dollar, or in landfills. Suppliers go from record profits to bankruptcy.
And worst of all, most house slaves in this country have their pensions tied up in the limited number of funds offered by their company -- most of which automatically feed into this mis-allocation. The employee is powerless to opt-out of it without sacrificing his company match and/or vestiture.
I don't actually have a massive problem with his logic here ... if he was to put the blame on Windows or Google treating RAM like it's a cheap commodity.
Also, if gamers weren't overbuying RAM this whole time, realistically the small set of manufacturers would have consolidated even further through the 2010s.
See, in a free economy, we allocate scarce goods by who's willing to pay for them. If I'm willing to pay more per gig than Altman is, why shouldn't I get that gig?
You want it, Altman? So do we. You're going to have to pay more than any of us can afford in order for you to get it all. You don't want to (or can't) pay that much? Then you don't get it all.
Altman (and those like him) have already made RAM unaffordable for quite a few of us. If that's not good enough for him, frankly, not many of us care.
Whether he truly has these beliefs or just cynically thinks it is a good way to message, it disturbs me. It only makes it worse, seeing how quickly these new platforms can invade and contaminate the fourth estate (or the mass-market communications that have essentially subsumed that role already).
What Altman is doing is claiming that his company should satisfy demand, even at the expense of any competing demand. No, it doesn't work like that. You get what you can pay for, which depends on what your customers are willing to pay you for.
And worst of all, most house slaves in this country have their pensions tied up in the limited number of funds offered by their company -- most of which automatically feed into this mis-allocation. The employee is powerless to opt-out of it without sacrificing his company match and/or vestiture.