Rui Ma(@ruima):Apparently Sam Altman is saying local AI is a bad use of the world's DRAM, since the memory in your computer only gets used about 5% of the time. On utilization alone, I don't think he's wrong, although plenty of things we "own" we don't use 95% of the time, eg cars. But OpenAI also signed letters of intent with Samsung and SK Hynix last year for up to 900,000 DRAM wafers a month, so it's not exactly a neutral take. The bigger issue for OpenAI is that open models keep getting good enough to run at home, and every query that stays on a laptop never touches their very very expensive data centers with their uncancellable obligations, so they are understandably very worried about that and eager to negate that behavior from all fronts

2026.10.29 21:59

Apparently Sam Altman is saying local AI is a bad use of the world's DRAM, since the memory in your computer only gets used about 5% of the time. On utilization alone, I don't think he's wrong, although plenty of things we "own" we don't use 95% of the time, eg cars. But OpenAI also signed letters of intent with Samsung and SK Hynix last year for up to 900,000 DRAM wafers a month, so it's not exactly a neutral take. The bigger issue for OpenAI is that open models keep getting good enough to run at home, and every query that stays on a laptop never touches their very very expensive data centers with their uncancellable obligations, so they are understandably very worried about that and eager to negate that behavior from all fronts

ℏεsam@Hesamation

2026.10.29 16:40

WAIT… I can’t believe Sam Altman really said this out loud about local AI: “A lot of people want local inference. And they assume that the problem is solved now because we are going to have open source models. And so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data center. But 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 5% of the time.” this is such a bizarre thing to say in the open. I don’t get why people buying hardware for their own use is framed as a competition with data centers spending billions to buy hardware at scale. if anyone should be complaining about how the world’s memory is allocated, it must be the average consumers facing the skyrocketing hardware prices. it just doesn’t make any sense.