The increasing demands from data centers powering AI engines has plunged us into a global RAM shortage crisis, and the CEO of one of the companies responsible thinks the memory that is available should be in data centers rather than individual PCs.
Offering up an opinion that’s unlikely to add to his popularity among the general public, OpenAI boss Sam Altman told the Cheeky Pint podcast (via IGN) that “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.”
Individual PCs rarely make full use of their RAM, was Altman’s larger point, whereas data centers often do. “You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment,” the OpenAI CEO continued. “And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”
The PC owners Altman was referring to have had to deal with rising prices, job insecurity, and data center pollution thanks to the rise of AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, so the opinion he’s shared is unlikely to be supported by the masses.
As you would expect, consumers aren’t particularly pleased with what Altman has had to say. A Reddit thread discussing the comments is packed with pushback against AI, data centers, and the RAM shortage.
