Phones, laptops and consoles get costlier over memory price hike
Speaking on Cheeky Pint, the podcast hosted by Stripe co-founder John Collison, which went live on October 29, Altman pushed back on the idea that running open-source AI models on personal computers would take the load off data centres.
Now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose AI data centres compete for the same chips, has said that keeping this memory in personal devices is a poor use of a scarce resource. “From a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer,” he said, adding that the memory ends up “being used 5% of the time. Buying a new phone, laptop or gaming console has got noticeably costlier this year, and the reason sits inside the device. Memory chips, the DRAM and storage every gadget relies on, have climbed so steeply that brands across categories have passed the cost on to buyers. “
“You want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment,” he said. He also said he wants a lot more supply in the market. Altman said OpenAI has built its own chip, is learning to build data centres, and plans to point its robotics programme at making more of them. On memory prices, he admitted the market has not corrected itself, saying “the invisible hand is failing right now.”
Altman’s point is about utilisation. Memory in a data centre serves many users through the day, while the RAM in a laptop or phone sits idle for long stretches. “Somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.