YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Sam Altman Thinks You're Wasting DRAM

30 points dutchbrit 1 hour ago 39 comments

iugtmkbdfil834 1 hour ago | parent

In a sense, I think everyone knew it was coming. Historically speaking, in US at least, there initially may be a notable number of upstarts, but those numbers quickly dwindle to form oligopolies. That is how we end up with 3 million cereal types, but 2-3 companies controlling them. The same repeats throughout most industries with an annoying consistency.

I actually use both gpt and local qwen and I personally think the question tends to be of what one needs ( speed? privacy? lack of corporate silliness? ).

Still, it is sad that we can predict the future so well based merely on what happened before.

Edit: I certainly hope I don't have to explain to you why the above is relevant. No market participant would dare to argue this if the competition was healthy.

jacobo37 1 hour ago | parent

i think Sam Altman is wasting oxygen

scrumper 1 hour ago | parent

Selfish of him to keep all those nutrients locked up in his flesh prison when there's a climate-induced global food shortage coming. He feeds but one now, he could feed dozens - perhaps thousands, if rendered into fertilizer.

bugake 48 minutes ago | parent

And this is why socialism never works: only you know the value of your RAM. When you "own nothing and be happy," somebody else decides that you are using too much RAM.

233mhz 44 minutes ago | parent

What has socialism to do here lmao, you literally have the PEAK capitalist in the world right now doing the exact thing you complain about and bring an hypothetical SoCiAlIsM as the problem. Man american propaganda is one hell of a drug, I'm surprised you didn't manage to blame cHiNa in the same sentence

porkshoe 25 minutes ago | parent

What are you even talking about?

This is, very literally, capitalism at work. It's the CEO of a massively valuable company jawboning his self-interest.

These massively valuable companies are the ones who want you to "own nothing and to be happy". That's the core tenet of the rental/"sharing" economy.

lrvick 1 hour ago | parent

Got piles of dram and consumer GPUs racked locally generating 100% of my tokens with complete privacy and sovereignty on my own property.

Sam Altman can eat my entire ass.

jwilcoxson 1 hour ago | parent

I love when people say entire ass instead of just ass.

LoganDark 55 minutes ago | parent

This suggests there are tiers to ass. What dictates how much ass someone can eat? Is there anyone who can eat only partial ass?

addaon 52 minutes ago | parent

> What dictates how much ass someone can eat?

90% perspiration, 10% inspiration.

jjtheblunt 27 minutes ago | parent

he might have a donkey, though that's rotten to say if so.

znpy 19 minutes ago | parent

Maybe GP doesn’t like his fractional ass eaten.

grugagag 27 minutes ago | parent

> Sam Altman can eat my entire ass.

Careful what you wish for, Sam may actually be willing to do it.

gdulli 25 minutes ago | parent

All well and good for now until the free lunch of free models ends, and the ones you can "freely" download have weights that tell you to drink Ovaltine or whatever other messaging gets sold.

cheald 21 minutes ago | parent

Abliteration and fine-tuning remain standard operations on open weight models.

fatty_patty89 20 minutes ago | parent

will they ssh into my computer and edit the models i have downloaded in the past?

gdulli 12 minutes ago | parent

Will you be happy when those models are five years old? Ten years? They'll age out in their ability and their cutoff date.

horsawlarway 11 minutes ago | parent

This is an ironic comment, because my read is that open weights are literally the ONLY place this isn't going to happen.

mainly because the thing about open weights is folks will just immediately strip it back out.

But I can guarantee you that openai/anthropic/other will absolutely jump at the chance to monetize users by feeding them paid recommendations.

noncovalence 1 minute ago | parent

Exactly, just like the free operating system known as Linux is famously full of ads, if you don't like ads you have to use Windows

nextaccountic 1 hour ago | parent

The look on his face looks a lot like Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything

perarneng 3 minutes ago | parent

He said he would never decive you though

logancbrown 54 minutes ago | parent

Two statements can be true and he stated one of them. Sam is not wrong.

1. Local inference can cause a large under-utilization of resources from users that do not run local inference hardware at capacity over the hardwares lifespan. This is under-utilization and under-utilization is not optimal from an economics perspective.

2. The concentration of inference hardware to singular providers can aggregate power to single systems or organizations, and their incentives may be at odds with individual users.

The same power dynamic and economics struggle has existed nearly everywhere for all of history. For example, if you want to decide to own or rent a piece of heavy construction machinery for business, you will find a long list of do-not's on the rental contractual terms, but you are more than welcome to buy your own and operate your own machinery at several times the price for the hours used and use it however you want.

iugtmkbdfil834 44 minutes ago | parent

Few people will argue with the logic of whether it is technically accurate ( assuming actual deployment will be optimal, because that is hardly a given ). It is just amusingly self-serving. It is almost as if McD got to decide you can only eat there.

logancbrown 38 minutes ago | parent

"Few people will argue with the logic of whether it is technically accurate"

Must why people in this HN thread are throwing out so many ad-hominems instead.

xg15 24 minutes ago | parent

Weirdly, underutilization of hardware was never a problem before. In fact, wastefulness is so ingrained in programming culture that the previous hype - blockchain - was about an explicit race over who could waste the most computing power on nonsensical calculations.

Also, I'd be very surprised if the current rush to build datacenters everywhere is optimal usage of resources. How many companies are building datacenter commons and sharing with other companies to optimize resource usage?

> Two statements can be true

As I general point, because I keep seeing this line on HN: Of course they can in the general case, but more often than not, the reason why this line is written is because there is some tension or contradiction between the statements. In that case, understanding where the tension lies is IMO more useful than shrugging and deciding to "hold two contradictory thoughts in your head" like in 1984.

Sometimes it feels like a rhetoric device to "rescue" an opinion when the opposite opinion is hard to argue against.

arjie 53 minutes ago | parent

It would be interesting if there were some kind of holographic LLM. You could send part of the encoded prompt and receive generated tokens that only you can decode. Then we could use the distributed capacity of the world and everyone could be paid for marginal token generation capacity. Even open models are profitable to run on almost all electricity.

bugake 51 minutes ago | parent

Altman: You are welcome to invest a little bit of your fortune in making major software developers write more efficient code that stops wasting our RAM. Start with internet browsers and the Windows 11 app that wastes one gigabyte showing the weather.

Yizahi 40 minutes ago | parent

What a psycho (in a medical sense of the term of course). Just how many independently despicable deeds and speeches he can produce annually?

feverzsj 38 minutes ago | parent

How? I'm still on ddr3.

TheJCDenton 27 minutes ago | parent

He's right in a such a narrow space on this particular matter that it's just a perfect example of what's wrong with a lot of things lately.

OpenAI triggered this ordeal with its order of 900K DRAM wafers per month on october 2025, making everyone panic because it was around 40% of the world production at the time.

We all know that memory providers know what near bankruptcy feels like when they over invest, but right now SK Hynix have 80% margins (ie TSMC ~60%) and choose to pay their shareholders this year the quivalent of ALL their revenues in 2025. It's now common knowledge thanks to Samsung that the rate of factory buidling is not maxmium to portect their margins. And memory providers have already been fined in 2000 for price fixing.

Supply is short because they all choose to make it that way.

mips_avatar 15 minutes ago | parent

Seems like micron is pulling out all the stops to get their new line open. Source is someone who lives near the micron plant and talked about their insane hiring and work right now.

kjshsh123 8 minutes ago | parent

Everything that has happened is 100% aligned with ECON 101.

Demand has increased for high-bandwidth memory. That increases prices and quantity.

The increase in quantity has happened. Quantity sold has increased. Fabs have increased production and shifted away from other products including consumer products.

Prices increase when there is an increase in price of a substitute in production.

New fabs are planned, consistent with profit-maximizing behavior increasing production in response to increased prices, but they take time.

staminade 25 minutes ago | parent

I mean, he's right: individuals hoarding scarce resources is less efficient that everyone holding them in common. The problem is, how to ensure we all get a fair share of them. We can't leave that up to commercial enterprises, because they also have an incentive to hoard and control them for their own profit. Perhaps what we need is some kind of government that holds them in common for the benefit of the entire populace and. But what to call it? Common-ism...?

wilg 24 minutes ago | parent

He is obviously correct about the specific narrow statement made here and it’s so annoying everyone has to be memey mad about it like a bad reddit thread.

lightedman 21 minutes ago | parent

I think Sam Altman is wasting space - as in he needs to get the hell off this planet.

I use my RAM how the hell I want and nobody else better damn well think about telling me otherwise.

znpy 20 minutes ago | parent

In a way he’s right, but it’s not my fault a lot of the software i use is some web bullshit that ships it’s own chromium runtime.

perarneng 5 minutes ago | parent

Sam Alt-RAM

aunwick 4 minutes ago | parent

Get off my lawn.