The AI bubble continues to inflate and swallow up everything and anything that it needs, even if you, the person, need it more. Now, the chief of OpenAI—the company directly responsible for the shortage in the DRAM market—said it would be better if he had your PC’s RAM, because AI data centers need it.
As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT), said on the Cheeky Pint YouTube channel that RAM sitting in so many personal machines around the world, oftentimes at low or no utilization, is “quite terrible” and that AI data centers would make better use of it.
“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,” Altman said. To combat the constrained supply of DRAM, which his own company caused through mass purchases of undiced wafers, you would need “maximum utilization,” meaning your PC’s 5 percent RAM usage is, put simply, a waste.
“You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that,” he said.
As Tom’s Hardware points out, Altman’s OpenAI makes the most of its money through closed-source software which, surprise surprise, needs a ton of AI data-center horsepower to run. With RAM being generally unavailable to everyone, now even to AI companies since there are so many of them, Altman seems to want to put his hand in your pocket too. Or rather, wants to dig into your PC and grab all the memory he can find, because why would you, the limited, aging, feeble human, ever want to use personal machines when the infinite ethereal CLOUD can do it for you?
What? GLaDOS comes to mind? And Skynet? Pff, those are just stories for little children. Sam Altman and OpenAI would never ever build something that’s inadvertently destroying the planet by siphoning resources, poisoning the Earth, and causing your home state to depopulate rapidly to make more room for RAM utilization.
I can’t wait for the crash. And it might be happening as we speak.
