Sam Altman:
A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we’re going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data center.
But from a global allocation perspective, actually it’s quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time.
Like you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment,
And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that
TL;DR Guy selling product: “Here’s why owning your own product instead of renting it from me is a terrible idea”
Central planning but by the private sector
On a somewhat related note, the private sector routinely does central planning in areas dominated by few large players. E.g. Walmart. They use a version of the mathematical models the Soviets came up with to do central planning at Gosplan.
Combining the worst parts of capitalism with the worst parts of communism, we’ve basically created the perfect economic system. Well, for the billionaires and oligarchs anyway.
— Benito Mussolini (disputed)