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OpenAI CEO Argues Home PCs Waste the World's Limited DRAM Supply

What happened

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the Cheeky Pint podcast, hosted by Stripe co-founder John Collison, in an episode released on October 29, that the DRAM inside personal computers would be better used in the cloud. While discussing the memory supply chain and local inference (running AI models on one's own hardware instead of the cloud), he said at roughly the 29-minute mark that, from a global allocation perspective, it is quite terrible for everybody to hold a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM in their own computer and use it only about 5% of the time; in a very supply constrained environment, maximum utilization in the cloud is preferable, noting that many people's intuition is the opposite. This is an individual's opinion and does not constitute any actual capacity, supply or policy change; the source does not state the cause beyond the comments themselves.