More and more, AI appears to be the reason we can’t have nice things on the internet. Beyond generative models gobbling up my own and my fellow creatives’ work in a bid to produce abysmally average output, AI data centres are also devouring all of the available memory. This drives up prices and makes DRAM supply for us PC gamers pretty scarce. CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman argues this is truly for the best.
Appearing on a recent episode of the Cheeky Pint podcast, Altman argued, “From a global allocation perspective, actually it’s quite terrible to have everyone have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and be used 5% of the time.”
Yes, that is steam escaping from my ears. But before I go full screaming tea kettle, let’s take a beat. For one thing, Altman is talking less about PC gamers specifically here, and more about solo AI bros craving compute power and “local inference”.
To be clear, Altman is bemoaning an inefficiency within the AI industry rather than taking aim at us pesky gamers. He goes on to add, “You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow everyone’s… Many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”
Helming the company that made ChatGPT, it still feels a bit rich for Altman to complain about the memory scarcity OpenAI helped create. I could also keyboard warrior my way through several paragraphs about how resource hungry the data centres he’s arguing should enjoy DRAM priority are, not to mention how the rapid AI infrastructure build out has caused many of big tech’s greener energy goals to fall by the wayside—but I’ll spare you. Our planet’s environmental predicament doesn’t begin or end with Sam Altman or OpenAI, after all.
Instead I’m choosing to extract a grim sense of satisfaction from the AI snake eating its own tail instead. For one thing, Google’s AI features appear to be cannibalising ad revenue from Search. For another, Amazon’s big data centre build out has made free cash flow negative, and for just one more thing, investors haven’t been overjoyed with the recent performance of many AI stocks, leading to a big sell-off earlier this month.
The bubble may not have fully burst yet, but the aforementioned snake is looking a little green around the scales.
