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.

> IMO his comments are blown way out of proportion

The context for people's reaction to this is that he has single-handedly caused the current spike in RAM prices.

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.

Esp. for ML inference he's right, and not just for RAM. I think this should be thought out seriously instead of mocked, or else open models and local inference won't be able to compete with big data centers with exclusive contracts with hyper scalers. There ought to be some sweetspot where one pooled server could serve 50-100 people, with let's say 25 doing concurrent inference and seeing good throughput.

If DeepSeek-sized models will be required in the future to get Opus 5.5 quality, they're not feasible to run for a single person. Pooling usage is necessary to make it efficient.

But even that is pretty painful to sustain efficiently with current hardware prices:

Concurrent requests 25

Aggregate generation 1,000–1,250 tokens/s

Model DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, 552B MoE

Active parameters during decoding 16B

Candidate hardware 4 × H200, 564 GB HBM

Continuous rental at $2.90/GPU-hour $8,352/month

Cost per registered user $84–167/month

> to most people, it's about ownership and freedom, but he's clearly talking economics.

These are not mutually exclusive.

Sam Altman financially benefits if you cannot inference locally and must rely on OpenAI for your agentic workflow.

While his statement can somewhat be true, it's hard to accept from someone who has more money than he can reasonably spend.

The number of Altman apologists in this conversation is ridiculous.

The man who largely created a component shortage, is sitting on unused hardware, and is leading a company with extremely questionable ethics, well… he said some stupid stuff, didn’t he? He does that a lot.

Now, we can try to find angles to apologise for his behavior, or we can be upset and stop making apologies for billionaires, at least for the ones whose actions are more damaging than philanthropic.

kinda bad economica though - the ai bubble eating all the RAM is bad for many industries worth of useful production, including the infrastructure that makes gaming and movie industries possible nowadays

> he's clearly just talking economics

...just economics that benefit him. The economics of rental for consumers are horrific. It doesn't even have to be about an abstract sense of ownership and freedom, even if it's "just economics" this is still an insanely self-serving to say because he's talking about economics that benefit 00.01% at the expense of the other 99.99%.

Yes but the layer beneath that is if ram is centralized then companies like openAI get to decide how they are used. Also centralization doesnt work for anything that needs low latency. Like gaming in third world countries with bad internet

The "you will own nothing and you will be happy" meme struck a chord for a reason. Billionaires want to create a power imbalance and screw regular people and we are jsut expected to be ok with it. Thats not ok. If these people hadnt done thing like made local governments sign NDAs about datacenter contruction, disenfranchising voters from their right to decide on the matter, then people would trust them more

Billionaires are a low trust people. Simple as. I dont want to rent ram from sam altman given the shit these people pull

People at his level are typically mindful of how their words are perceived when doing interviews to the public at large.

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.

There’s a very simple method for allocating RAM: spend money, get RAM. All Sam Altman is doing is complaining about the price of RAM as one of the principals who is buying up RAM & driving up the prices because they buy a lot of RAM.

I don’t begrudge him or OpenAI or Anthropic in any sort of way for that part: spend money & get thing is a pretty neat decentralized allocation mechanism with a long & storied history behind it. It is also callous & clueless horseshit for this guy to be complaining about the price of RAM, which is exactly what he was doing even if he didn’t use those exact words. If he wants to continue getting more RAM than anybody else does (or more than almost anybody else, I’m not keeping score among the large buyers) then he better pay up to Big RAM.

If we the people collectively owned "the cloud", then sure. But since we don't, I can only take it as him tryng to become a RAMlord seeking to extract rent from the rest of us

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.

Yeah, Altman and the people in that world are utilitarians, which you would think they would have learned by now doesn't translate well to public conversation (or reality if we are being honest).

Nah. OpenAI themselves are wasting tons of RAM by doing frivolous stuff like providing ChatGPT for free for millions upon millions of people so they can ask what rocks go well with pizza. And wtf was Sora for.

No, if compute/memory was _that_ scarce that you begin thinking about what a waste it is that a decent chunk of it is sitting in people's homes, then why aren't you dedicating every atom of silicon that you already own to more productive efforts first.

From a global allocation perspective some people have many houses, some have zero. Some have several cars. Some own lots of land, so much that they never stepped on every square meter of it. Some other men have many women... See how detached it sounds?

Centrally planned communist economics.

I'd expect nothing less from the likes of this guy.

Ah yes, I'm sure my RAM would be more economically useful if it were used to generate slop videos for Sora and inappropriate child content bty Grok rather than running VS Code and postman on my laptop.

From a global allocation perspective it's quite inefficient to allocate multiple kidneys inside Sam.

Economically speaking, I’m sure it would be better if all energy were routed to him directly.

Probably water too, even food, money and air.

Obviously better.

uBlock Origin + NoScript does the trick.

Looks fine to me.

Firefox, ublock origin. (on linux but I don't think that matters)

No noscript or special filters.

if you're on ubo lite, move from 'optimized' to full for that page and it shoooould dump adshield out.

I noticed it on several completely unrelated sites since a few days. I've never seen it before.

I was wondering if they're was some kind of consolidation/buyoff of pro-ad-protection services.

Or one could find the original post here <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50412766>, which leads to <https://ram-altman.lol>

Or... one run noscript

Ah, I was complaining about the modal slide-in and other pester-widgets.

I am glad to not be the only one who hates that. Modern websites are so scummy.

The audacity of thinking you need your frequently accessed files cached is… I mean, come on, you can put your files in the cloud!

That's a dupe too. This is the original https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50412766

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

Its interesting that you put it as "don't get to", I am pretty sure "normal people" don't care about having local computational power. We in this forum are not normal people, 80% of people just care about the end value computation brings. The future is likely devices with network chips attached to screens ans that's probably a better outcome for 80% of the world. There is no reason to think we pay the same amount of money to get worse results in the future, we can work towards one where we pay less because centralized computation and devices that are only screens and WiFi chips will be cheaper for everyone

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.

Watch out in case someone wants to SSH into those nested Alpine VMs using any 257 character password.

Is you determining what is and isn’t HN, simply by if it’s “many users” vs “many companies” spamming someone?

Based on your argument, I would assume YC-funded AI crawlers spamming a website with requests is “very HN” and “not DOS.”

No

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.

This guy knows what's up.

If you're going to that trouble you may as well create a DOI number for it so they think it's a rare book and scan and destroy it.

That’s the point.

It doesn't actually email anyone anything, does it?

It's satire.