OpenAI head Sam Altman criticized the proliferation of local AI models, stating that a significant portion of the world’s DRAM sits idle in personal computers.
Altman noted that proponents of local AI expect to run open-source models on their computers, reducing reliance on server infrastructure, but he considers this approach irrational in terms of the allocation of scarce resources.
From the perspective of global resource allocation, it is pretty terrible that everyone has a portion of the world’s scarce DRAM supply in their own computer that is used only 5% of the time.
Instead, Altman suggests maximizing memory utilization in cloud data centers, where computing resources can be used by a larger number of clients.