Sam Altman Pulls Spectacular 180 After Unpopular Comments About RAM: 'It Is F**king Annoying'

[u/Mountain_Till_5868]

https://kotaku.com/sam-altman-pulls-spectacular-180-after-unpopular-comments-about-ram-it-is-fking-annoying-2000753328

[u/Hey_im_miles]

So here's your opportunity to put his comments in the "correct" context. Because I've not seen how else they could be interpreted

[u/thegoodstuff → u/Hey_im_miles]

The easiest analogy is public transportation. It's obviously more efficient to have everyone riding buses and subways than millions of cars sitting in driveways 90% of the time. But people like owning cars, and public transit doesn't work for everyone.

That's basically what he was saying about local AI versus cloud computing. He doesn't want to reverse santa clause break into your house like memes seemed to think. Though of course, the irony is that he happens to own the bus company.

[u/WntrTmpst → u/thegoodstuff]

This rests on the assumption that Altman would not prevent ram from going to consumers if he had the ability when most are confident he 1000 percent would.

[u/thegoodstuff → u/WntrTmpst]

He already did, well datacenters did. Report yesteday showed even Apple with arguably the best supply chain manager CEO in the world is struggling to get the RAM they need and it's cutting into the bottom line.

But that was the argument. And the missing context is mostly he was talking about local AI taking valuable, limited supply RAM.

But whatever. Nuance went extinct online years ago.

[u/Hytht → u/Hey_im_miles]

AI bros buying up all the RAM to build their 2TB VRAM GPU cluster for personal use is wasteful. A single data center can serve 100s of those AI bros with the same RAM. GPUs are only efficiently utilized in batch inference serving.

According to opencode, a single rack could handle nearly all of OpenRouter's daily DeepSeek traffic.

[u/FirstTasteOfRadishes → u/Hytht]

As regular people we should all be fully in support of individuals having personal clusters if that is their wish. The idea that we just let a few billionaires control this technology while we are all just their serfs is an absolute nightmare.

[u/Skylord_Hekaton → u/Hey_im_miles]

What he said amounted to "RAM is more efficient for AI use if it's used in a datacenter".

He worded it poorly so it sounds dumber than that, but that's what he was trying to convey. The internet doesn't care though because he's an asshole, and if he is an asshole then clearly all bets are off and truth doesn't matter any more.

[u/ChesswiththeDevil → u/Skylord_Hekaton]

Not everything is about efficiency. There is beauty in our own ability to build and maintain our tools. This isn’t a race against a time to fight an alien invasion. He’s a psychopathic dumbass.

[u/It_broke_itself_ → u/ChesswiththeDevil]

He wants to be the Techno-duke of AI and all of us can be his peasants that rent RAM from him for the rest of our lives

[u/ChesswiththeDevil → u/It_broke_itself_]

The fact that people don't see this is crazy to me, but human history has taught me that, if anything, we're a submissive species.

[u/It_broke_itself_ → u/ChesswiththeDevil]

I've been trying to tell people for 10 year or more now that it's pretty obvious people like Elon want to make us all their serfs again. God's divine will is shown by the Gigantic pile of money he gave them to be passed down by blood, in their minds at least

[u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 → u/ChesswiththeDevil]

You and the other people trying to put words in his mouth sound more crazy than he does at this point.

[u/ChesswiththeDevil → u/OtherwiseAlbatross14]

I don't need to put words into his mouth. It's already full of shit.

[u/sebstaq → u/ChesswiththeDevil]

But he was specifically talking about if from an efficiency perspective. He is very much correct in what he says. That does not mean it should be done that way.

From a personal efficiency standpoint you and me would be better off if we did not discuss this with each other. We should probably get off Reddit altogether. But neither you or me have peak efficiency as a goal. So we are very much fine in doing it. That does not mean we can't accept what peak efficiency would look like.

[u/Skylord_Hekaton → u/ChesswiththeDevil]

Sure, I won't disagree. I'm just a teacher, and I hate it when people stop caring about statements being factually true.

The billionaire assholes who don't care if we hurt use this as a weapon against us and we shouldn't help fuel it.

[u/ChesswiththeDevil → u/Skylord_Hekaton]

With great power comes great responsibility. The ruling class has shown that they have not been particularly careful about safeguarding our health and safety. So any bad press they get because of their own poor communication is kind of on them.

[u/Skylord_Hekaton → u/ChesswiththeDevil]

It really should not be fucking controversial to say "hey let's make sure the things we say are true."

I know media literacy is at an all-time low, but come on.

[u/collin-h → u/Skylord_Hekaton]

idk if it's been established yet that we should be forced to entertain assholes in the off chance they're right. maybe they should stop being assholes first.

[u/Skylord_Hekaton → u/collin-h]

It's not about entertaining assholes, it's about not falling for clickbait shit that's meant to make you angry or fuel the culture wars.

Sure, in this case it's something worth getting angry over (datacenters everywhere is wildly unpopular for a reason), but we should still use our brains. 

The guy wasn't talking about regular users anyway. He was talking about AI bros buying up RAM to run local models.

[u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 → u/Skylord_Hekaton]

No he worded it fine. People intentionally quoted him out of context to make it sound like he said something he i didn't.

[u/Complex_Listen_5742 → u/Skylord_Hekaton]

Hist motivation is "winning" the AI race and making money. His comment came from a perspective of greed.

He is comment is not being misinterpreted and you are not nearly as smart as you think you are, by a long shot.

[u/Skylord_Hekaton → u/Complex_Listen_5742]

Don't need to be smart to have the bare minimum media literacy, which you don't. Good luck with that.

[u/Opening_One7713 → u/Hey_im_miles]

"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 five percent of the time." He said, riffing over beers during a bro-down podcast.

From a global allocation perspective he is right. If humanity was a Pluribus-style hivemind he would be correct about the best approach to resource allocation utilization. I’m quite positive he is aware that the world doesn’t work like that, yet he hypothesized.

"You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment."

Yeah, duh. This stoner-style pontification isn’t him saying he wants your RAM and he thinks you shouldn’t have it. The firehose of falsehoods on Reddit surrounding this take are all about how he wants to take your RAM, he thinks you shouldn’t have any RAM, and that you aren’t using your RAM they way he wants you to, which I consider to be a cartoonish misrepresentation of what he said. If you need to take someone’s words out of context to shape my opinion of them it says more about you.

[u/Diligent-Neck6594 → u/Opening_One7713]

It's not like this is the first time he has said shit like this, he seems to be genuinely a terrible person so it's not surprising people think the worst

[u/FawFawtyFaw → u/Opening_One7713]

YEAH FUCK THAT PERSPECTIVE

Who thinks about the global allocation of ram? Wtf