Sam Altman:
A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we’re going to be able to run them on our computers, 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, like, have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time.
Like you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment,
And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that
TL;DR Guy selling product: “Here’s why owning your own product instead of renting it from me is a terrible idea”
No, his analogy is poor for many reasons. One is that people using local models are likely using that computer for other things as well, it is a resource that does many things unlike their slop farms. Also, DRAM wasn’t a “scarce resource” until they devoured the industry with their AI ponzi scheme.
Only very few people have enough processing power to run a proper model.