IMO his comments are blown way out of proportion. He says "from a global allocation perspective" it's better to have RAM in the cloud where it can be used much more efficiently. I think there's an argument to be made that this is more than just economics to most people, it's about ownership and freedom, but he's clearly just talking economics.
Absolutely, I agree that money is better centralized in the goverment where it can be put to use for the benefit of all society instead of being concentrated in billionares.
Sure, but he's also insinuating that the economics of the situation is more important than the other, unmentioned aspects. In short, that his interests weigh more in what "best" means.
That went out the window a few years ago. These tech oligarchs are getting more and more comfy with their optics being full psychoticism. They don't even know how to hide it anymore because all they think about and talk about and plan long short and medium term is extracting capitol at all costs for themselves.
This is typically the best argument for using cloud - it is the environmentally beneficial thing to do. And yet, knowing what I know of spotify, I do believe that me serving my own music library is a tad less wasteful than most commercial music streaming operations are.
RAM in the cloud ends up being used by GitHub actions runners that fetch and install the world anytime a shmuck pushes a commit to his confobulator feature branch for the paper clip factory. Multi-cloud deployments of a service nobody asked for. Enterprise architects deploying a service mesh to deliver what can be done in 50MB of memory on a raspi. Running some vectors representing natural language through gigabytes of noise only made useful by some arcane math only to be unable to count letters in words.
I am sure there's also lots of actually efficient use of memory out there. But when enterprises are willing to burn cash, efficient processes or methods are nowhere to be found.
Maybe we should be talking about the global allocation perspective of wealth then. Since Altman is so keep to optimize allocation, perhaps he should start with this aspect first, and then move to RAM, as wealth would impact a wider area of economics than RAM.
the ridiculous "no ad blocker" full-screen modal that's unclosable led me down a rabbit hole there - turns out there's some obfuscated script from "Ad Shield" which replaces the whole site with an iframe if you dare to block their domain, "html-load.com", which proxies ad networks.
fortunately one can just run debugger; to stop it early
Back in the 1800s, we had this idea called Manifest Destiny. There was a famous painting about it, _American Progress_, painted by John Gast in 1872. It depicts Columbia, bringing civilization and liberty - telegraphs and railroads - for creating a great nation. It was devastating for the Native Americans.
I didn’t think we’d get to the point where all compute is headed for the data centre and normal people don’t get to have anything bigger than a phone but here we are.
Kind of inevitable when you realize how much people are naturally willing to give up computational sovereignty for the sake of convenience and psychological safety espousing values claiming the opposite, and it's still the case despite everything that's happened so far
I don't think there is a lot of conscious choice here: If at some point, anything more complex than a phone would be phased out or become unaffordable for consumers, that's not because consumers had somehow collectively voted they only want phones from now on.
Well sure someone could argue that the market isn't an actually reasonable set of choices that people can vote on, but how can it not be considered at least some form of voting? There's been at least 30-40 years in which consumers could try to find out. Unfortunately there's only a finite amount of resources in the market and consumers have to compromise on what takes priority in the tech industry, like getting work done or tackling issues that are visible only in front of them. When people collectively vote for politicians they also have to compromise
I don't feel extremely on either end, but I would prefer if consumers could own their choices and not try to pretend otherwise
Well, ok, what would you do in the current situation to "vote" for affordable RAM?
In a perfectly free and fair market and in a world where companies would plan their product strategy exclusively based on current consumer data, this would be true. But neither holds in the real world: The current AI gold rush is now something that is largely decided between investors, boardrooms and hardware vendors (*) with little input from small everyday consumers. And I wager this has been the case for many "tech trends" before that seem more forced on users than being a reaction on them - such as forced updates, mandatory accounts, subscriptions, in-app purchases etc.
To rub Altman's nose in the fact that we have RAM that he wishes he had.
Or, more likely (since I doubt he's ever going to see one of these emails), to make us feel a bit better about ourselves after Altman said (in effect) that what we want doesn't matter.
"A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that like the problem is solved now. Because we are going to have open-source models. We're going to be able to run them on our computers. And so we're not gonna need all the stuff in the data center. But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer. And being used 5% of the time."
I've seen the video where he says those words out loud, on mic.
Is this a script-kiddy DDOS (when many users run it) of someone's email? This doesn't seem very HN.
Edit: No, the email is blank, so it's just a regular DOS, unless his email is public somewhere and everyone will fill in the same email. Still not very HN, but just bad, not malicious.
I am an old-school guy. I don’t send them emails with unused RAM, I just fax them a printout of the script so they have to physically look at it and remove it before it goes in the trash. Bonus points if you send it to legal. Legal always has a fax machine.
With what people at OpenAI make per hour, every fax costs them thousands of dollars in labor costs, wasting all their precious resources one toner cartridge at a time in the process.
I am just making proper use of all that underutilised toner.
If you do not store a Group on any of your Brother machine's One Touch or Speed Dial locations, you can Broadcast a fax to as many as 272 different numbers.
Which comes in especially handy for keeping their SI from exfiltrating via fax to a remote location one baud at a time. You just keep all their landlines busy until the army flattens the building.
It wasn’t nukes or bombs that saved mankind from Skynet.
It was a single fax machine keeping all of OpenAIs landlines busy for 25 minutes, sending hundreds of pages of hand drawn A4 sized dicks.
lol, it’s so funny watching the cynical AI haters whip yourself into a frenzy over this. I bet 99% of you didn’t even listen to this podcast episode. His comments were so anodyne, y’all are ridiculous.
EDIT: lmao, and now people are going through my history and rage-downvoting things. Imagine being this fragile.
You have to factor in all the people enjoying that the shitcoin-for-your-iris-scans guy is having his time in the comedy-drubbing barrel. Don't leave us out, we've been waiting a lot longer for this.
FWIW, "anodyne" is not the word I'd reach for when describing things Altman says — I much prefer "banal".
(Not sure you can classify me as a hater, at least not in my day job context. Cynical: it's a fair cop.)
> and now people are going through my history and rage-downvoting things
Classic HN move.
Your first mistake was assuming this site wasn't always overrun with little-dicked Redditors doing Redditor things. It's just the paint's begun peeling off the walls lately.
So, the guy who built an AI company that thrives on your personal information to sell you ads and your idea of fighting the said guy is voluntarily emailing him everyday more personal information?
We should allow it. I have around 15 computers across my home lab, desktop computer and laptop(excluding the toys like pi zeros). Letting him know that I'm not utilizing several hundred GBs of ram seems reasonable.
The context for people's reaction to this is that he has single-handedly caused the current spike in RAM prices.
RAM in the cloud ends up being used by GitHub actions runners that fetch and install the world anytime a shmuck pushes a commit to his confobulator feature branch for the paper clip factory. Multi-cloud deployments of a service nobody asked for. Enterprise architects deploying a service mesh to deliver what can be done in 50MB of memory on a raspi. Running some vectors representing natural language through gigabytes of noise only made useful by some arcane math only to be unable to count letters in words.
I am sure there's also lots of actually efficient use of memory out there. But when enterprises are willing to burn cash, efficient processes or methods are nowhere to be found.
fortunately one can just run debugger; to stop it early
I was wondering if they're was some kind of consolidation/buyoff of pro-ad-protection services.
I am glad to not be the only one who hates that. Modern websites are so scummy.
Back in the 1800s, we had this idea called Manifest Destiny. There was a famous painting about it, _American Progress_, painted by John Gast in 1872. It depicts Columbia, bringing civilization and liberty - telegraphs and railroads - for creating a great nation. It was devastating for the Native Americans.
https://youtu.be/HCZmBMo_jhM
Similar ideas now, though it doesn’t have broad support. People are angry and fighting back against data centers.
I don't feel extremely on either end, but I would prefer if consumers could own their choices and not try to pretend otherwise
In a perfectly free and fair market and in a world where companies would plan their product strategy exclusively based on current consumer data, this would be true. But neither holds in the real world: The current AI gold rush is now something that is largely decided between investors, boardrooms and hardware vendors (*) with little input from small everyday consumers. And I wager this has been the case for many "tech trends" before that seem more forced on users than being a reaction on them - such as forced updates, mandatory accounts, subscriptions, in-app purchases etc.
(* if you want to be provocative, in the US mostly by the people in this photo: https://apnews.com/article/ai-safety-openai-tech-week-32064f... )
Or, more likely (since I doubt he's ever going to see one of these emails), to make us feel a bit better about ourselves after Altman said (in effect) that what we want doesn't matter.
I've seen the video where he says those words out loud, on mic.
Fucking Cry Harder, AI bros.
Edit: No, the email is blank, so it's just a regular DOS, unless his email is public somewhere and everyone will fill in the same email. Still not very HN, but just bad, not malicious.
Based on your argument, I would assume YC-funded AI crawlers spamming a website with requests is “very HN” and “not DOS.”
I am an old-school guy. I don’t send them emails with unused RAM, I just fax them a printout of the script so they have to physically look at it and remove it before it goes in the trash. Bonus points if you send it to legal. Legal always has a fax machine.
With what people at OpenAI make per hour, every fax costs them thousands of dollars in labor costs, wasting all their precious resources one toner cartridge at a time in the process.
I am just making proper use of all that underutilised toner.
22 direct-dial and 200 speed-dial entries. Broadcast to up to 272 participants. Sexy.
Lots of companies still use Laserfax. dr2200 toner cartridge is 40 bucks for 12k pages.
256 + 16? How do you get a number like that? Some trick with variable-width binary codes?
22 One-Touch numbers + 200 Speed-Dial numbers + 50 manually dialled numbers = 272
If you do not store a Group on any of your Brother machine's One Touch or Speed Dial locations, you can Broadcast a fax to as many as 272 different numbers.
Which comes in especially handy for keeping their SI from exfiltrating via fax to a remote location one baud at a time. You just keep all their landlines busy until the army flattens the building.
It wasn’t nukes or bombs that saved mankind from Skynet. It was a single fax machine keeping all of OpenAIs landlines busy for 25 minutes, sending hundreds of pages of hand drawn A4 sized dicks.
Regards,
https://fbi.cults3d.com/uploaders/15196480/photo-file/19c974...
Also - this will probably age as well as Bill Gates and the 640kb statement, which he never stated in that way, but will forever be linked to him.
Sam RAM-boy Altman. Or Sam-RAM-man.
EDIT: lmao, and now people are going through my history and rage-downvoting things. Imagine being this fragile.
A single unencrypted point of access is the dream for watching and controlling your life.
That is the centralized API in a nutshell, a single unencrypted point of access.
You have to factor in all the people enjoying that the shitcoin-for-your-iris-scans guy is having his time in the comedy-drubbing barrel. Don't leave us out, we've been waiting a lot longer for this.
FWIW, "anodyne" is not the word I'd reach for when describing things Altman says — I much prefer "banal".
(Not sure you can classify me as a hater, at least not in my day job context. Cynical: it's a fair cop.)
Classic HN move.
Your first mistake was assuming this site wasn't always overrun with little-dicked Redditors doing Redditor things. It's just the paint's begun peeling off the walls lately.
It's satire.