89 comments

  • mindwok an hour ago

    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.

    • xlayn an hour ago

      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.

    • nicoburns an hour ago

      > 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.

      • gizmodo59 37 minutes ago

        How? Elon and Dario aren’t responsible? It’s all AI companies and hyper scalers. Let’s not forget how 3 companies in memory industry have got caught in colluding to keep things high.

        • nicoburns 27 minutes ago

          Because he (on behalf of Open AI) made deals with 2 of the 3 major manufacturers of RAM to buy a significant proportion of their output, in the same week, without either of the manufacturers knowing that he was also making a deal with the other one. This directly led to the current RAM shortage.

          • mindwok 16 minutes ago

            This problem is far bigger than one individual. He's making rational decisions is his capacity as CEO of an AI company. If he didn't make large compute deals, all his customers would be upset when they're hitting usage limits 10 times a day and all his investors would be doubting his decisions, especially when competitors are also trying to hoover up all the compute.

          • gizmodo59 15 minutes ago

            Is there actual evidence that these deals caused the RAM shortage? Seems like a stretch to pin a global supply problem on one person when demand is coming from across the entire industry.

            And if one person can indeed cause it then blame the system? I go back to the proven legal case of them fixing prices. Now there is just a scapegoat because it feel good?

    • clintonc an hour ago

      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.

      • stinkbeetle 44 minutes ago

        Everybody believes their interests weigh more. Fortunately we have capitalism, so at the end of the day you have to put your money where your mouth is and pay for what you think your interest is worth.

        • kelnos 26 minutes ago

          > Everybody believes their interests weigh more.

          I don't. When I make decisions that might benefit me but affect others, I consider the impact on others before deciding what to do. Sometimes (often?) I choose the option that benefits me less (or is neutral, or hurts me), if I believe the negatives to others are too high.

        • godelski 29 minutes ago

            > Everybody believes their interests weigh more
          
          I don't. I believe I have to weigh my benefits to collective ones. Sometimes I do things that offer me no benefit whatsoever but does for others. Just the other day I offered to take a picture for a couple who was trying to get a selfie together. Last week I bought an intern lunch. Why? Because they were an intern (grad student) and I'm sympathetic to that.

          Fun fact: I'm not a "rare outlier". People like me are pretty common and can be found all over. We usually just don't openly talk about it because we're not looking for a reward. I'm not speaking up now because I'm looking for self-gratification or anything. I'm speaking up to push back against your claims. I'm speaking up because we live in an increasingly selfish period of time. I'm speaking up because we're also at cultural turning point and many people are saying "enough is enough." I sure as hell don't care how rich you are, but I do give a damn about where the economic floor is. If you take from that floor to lift yourself up, I'm upset. If you do this to lift yourself when you already have more money than you could possibly spend in several generations? I'm furious.

          • mindwok 12 minutes ago

            I believe you. I'd challenge you though to consider Sam Altman would make the same claim about himself. The difference between you is not that you are good and he is bad, it's that you likely have very different beliefs of what the "good" course of action is. He likely believes successful adoption of AI means advances in science, medicine, freeing people up for more meaningful things, etc.

        • mihaic 42 minutes ago

          Not sure if your arguments here is for capitalism. Having 1 vote = $1 is not a system most people would agree with today.

    • gobdovan 34 minutes ago

      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

      • Brian_K_White 21 minutes ago

        The efficiency of centralization is not enough excuse to deny individual agency.

        The argument for saying that ram is put to better use collected into central hands vs distributed among individuals is the same as for any and all other resources, and it's invalid.

        Humans are not ants and should not aspire to the efficiency of ants at the expense of having to be ants.

        You get some centralization, and you get some distribution, and it's completely invalid to be jealous of the portion of all resources that is in distribution.

        This should indeed be "thought out seriously" and the result is either mockery or torches and daggers. Think that out seriously.

        • usef- 15 minutes ago

          I think there's a divide here in people who heard the words "it's more efficent than" and are interpreting that statement on its own (it's a true statement), and people who are assuming the statement also implies "we should only give it to data centers" (which I don't think anyone agrees with)

    • anonymous908213 43 minutes ago

      > 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%.

      • usef- 29 minutes ago

        It's not necessarily "at the expense of" if people want to use those products every day.

        Imagine if we had a shortage of cars: your city only had 20% of its current vehicles. It would be accurate to say "in this global shortage, new cars are more efficiently used by groups/taxis/uber than sitting idle in an individuals home". A car used by a group share would allow more individuals in the city to have access to vehicle transport.

        There simply isn't enough ram in the world for every individual to do local inference right now: one person having a 512GB RAM system means others don't. Data centers can batch the processing and serve many, many more at once.

        That's not to say individuals shouldn't have it! Your org or group could do the same batching! And individuals can buy a 512GB mac right now. But saying "it's more efficiently used" is trivially true

        • Brian_K_White 15 minutes ago

          This falls apart because of the simple fact that the people who had to contribute to create the pooled resource do not get to say how the pooled resource gets used.

          This argument that only considers the one positive dimension of centralization and pooling is never valid.

          • usef- 4 minutes ago

            What model are you suggesting that gives them more access/control?

            Currently AI providers are hyper competitive and almost all of the world has access to it quite cheaply. If people had to buy hardware for local inference, it would only be a tiny percentage of the world's affluent tech enthusiasts with access to AI, wouldn't it?

            We're currently managing the shortage with a hybrid model, so enthusiasts can still buy (expensive) individual systems and the broader shared hardware goes to many, many providers. OpenAI is something like 15% of data center power in the US I think? That's a lot but we still have choice.

    • 8note 38 minutes ago

      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

    • sift3r an hour ago

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

      • thatsabadlook an hour ago

        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.

        • godelski 37 minutes ago

          Okay? So what's your argument, that we should just ignore them when they are being openly pathological? Sounds like that just let's them continue being crazy.

        • Sharlin 36 minutes ago

          They watched Trump being able to say absolutely anything comes to his mind and figured that maybe they don’t have to pretend to be humans either.

    • eptcyka an hour ago

      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.

    • saturn_vk an hour ago

      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.

    • jimmyjazz14 33 minutes ago

      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).

    • agile-gift0262 37 minutes ago

      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

    • Alwayshasbeeb 30 minutes ago

      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.

    • testing22321 36 minutes ago

      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.

  • bstsb 5 hours ago

    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

    • Brian_K_White 7 minutes ago

      Looks fine to me.

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

    • lobo_tuerto an hour ago

      uBlock Origin + NoScript does the trick.

      • Dwedit an hour ago

        Using uMatrix/nuTensor to block JS from respawnfirst.com also lets you ignore the nasty script.

    • kotaKat 2 hours ago

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

      • Vinnl an hour ago

        I'm not getting it either, nor have I seen it in other sites. I wonder if this is because of Firefox not having neutered uBO?

        • arcanemachiner an hour ago

          That is correct, uBO Lite is A Chrome-only thing since they finally neutured uBO recently.

        • thedday an hour ago

          Interesting. I'm using Firefox Focus and the page loads and is ridiculously free of distractions, err, ads.

    • BrandoElFollito 3 hours ago

      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.

    • Bengalilol an hour ago

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

    • braiamp 2 hours ago

      Or... one run noscript

    • shevy-java an hour ago

      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.

  • e2le 2 hours ago

    I would hesitate to say the memory used by the filesystem cache is unused.

  • Tiberium 5 hours ago
  • badgersnake 5 hours ago

    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.

    • armanckeser 20 minutes ago

      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

    • usui 3 hours ago

      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

      • xg15 2 hours ago

        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.

        • usui 2 hours ago

          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

          • xg15 2 hours ago

            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 originating from 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... )

  • ChrisArchitect 2 hours ago
  • rvz 2 hours ago

    Just what is the point?

    • AnimalMuppet 2 hours ago

      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.

      • ModernTimes an hour ago

        Have you not seen the endless posts pointing out that the RAM story was fake exaggerated nonsense?

        • anonymous908213 an hour ago

          "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.

  • ErroneousBosh 2 hours ago

    I have no unused RAM; if any shows up I spin up some nested Alpine VMs. I got 20 layers deep the other day.

    Fucking Cry Harder, AI bros.

    • Dwedit 44 minutes ago

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

  • tomcatfish 2 hours ago

    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.

    • iAMkenough an hour ago

      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.”

  • leecommamichael an hour ago

    Isn’t this kind of an illegal crowd-sourced DDoS?

    • axegon_ an hour ago

      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.

    • sophacles 43 minutes ago

      No

  • Eliah_Lakhin 29 minutes ago

    > Your country is not allowed to access this resource

    Well, maybe the country where I currently stay in is not allowed to access this resource. But I don't see any connection of this message to me.

  • variety8675 42 minutes ago

    Seller of cloud inference warns you should not have your own local inference

  • Jamesbeam 3 hours ago

    All your RAM are belong to us

    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.

    • kraken_cult 3 hours ago

      This guy knows what's up.

      • spearfish 2 hours ago

        No toner on fax machines, just forever chemical paper that slowly muders their employees.

        • Jamesbeam 2 hours ago

          Obviously you do not know my trusty battle fax. The Brother Laser Fax 2840.

          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.

          • peri-cl 2 hours ago

            > "Broadcast to up to 272 participants."

            256 + 16? How do you get a number like that? Some trick with variable-width binary codes?

            • Jamesbeam 2 hours ago

              Not a binary encoding trick. It's just the sum of the fax machine's recipient capacities.

              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.

    • subarctic 2 hours ago

      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.

  • altcognito 5 hours ago

    What are the chances that they already do this :) Well, probably not given how much memory the harnesses use. (Claude too in fairness)

  • shevy-java an hour ago

    I think Sam owes us money.

    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.

  • dmitrygr 2 hours ago

    I am sad that it is not configured to actually email him by default

  • nekusar 37 minutes ago

    More like SCAM Altman.

  • realist_not 5 hours ago

    Wouldn't unused RAM infuriate him more ?

  • neya 2 hours ago

    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?

    • dofm an hour ago

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

      It's satire.

  • senordevnyc 2 hours ago

    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.

    • leafingensemble 2 hours ago

      It is just one symptom of a push for corporate-controlled infrastructure.

      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.

      • hdgvhicv 27 minutes ago

        Given how popular cloudflare and other centralised infrastructure is on HN, the only thing that’s surprising is the limited pushback.

    • dofm 2 hours ago

      Hey, it's not just the cynical AI haters.

      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.)

      • leafingensemble an hour ago

        Huh. I would reach for "reptilian". Maybe that's too kind: "serpentine".

    • lakeviewterrace an hour ago

      > 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.