As the ongoing memory crisis continues, many consumers can no longer afford PCs, consoles, or phones due to the rise of AI datacentres buying up unprocessed memory. While horrendous for us, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes its worse that everyday people have any DRAM at all.
Over the past year, memory prices have skyrocketed to support the demands of AI. Not only has consumer hardware suffered as a result, but memory manufacturer Micron even announced its departure from consumer memory production as a result. The company claimed that the needs of AI datacentres are “essential” compared to consumer use.
In an interview with Cheeky Pint, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that one of the issues keeping the memory supply chain strained is the want for local compute by everyday people. While large-scale LLMs ran at datacentres by massive companies are the most known forms of AI, Altman believes locally-run models—which are arguably far more sustainable—are an issue.
“A lot of people want local inference,” Altman said. “And somehow, they assume, that the problem is solved now. Because we are going to have open-source models. We’re going to be ablw to run them on our own computers. And so we’re not going to need all the stuff [DRAM] in the data centre.”
The tech billionaire argued that “from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everyone have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer. And be used 5% of the time.” While OpenAI is allowed to buy up 40% of the global DRAM output, Altman believes the 32GB of RAM sitting in your computer is tantamount to public greed.
“You want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very constrained environment,” the AI billionaire continued. “And somehow everyone’s, many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”
On top of the DRAM situation, Altman explained that OpenAI is also designing its own custom AI processor called Jalapeno. The CEO explained that the chip is being designed by AI for AI, and once again argued that his own company’s desires is the correct use for the limited amount of computing hardware the world can manufacture.
“Given that the world is doing to be limited in its silicon capacity, we all have a shared interest,” Altman claimed. The CEO claimed that AI will potentially be able to create something as important as the transistor, or discover major efficiency gains. The question then becomes what is the point of using AI to create new hardware if everyday people don’t get to own, use, and improve that hardware themselves?
As console and PC prices get more and more expensive, many are worried that they will be pushed into a future of cloud computing instead of local computing. 55 years after the first personal computer, it seems that the average person may already be stripped of their technology instead of being able to own it. What a sadness that would be.
