In this week’s Sunday Reboot, Sam Altman thinks it’s a waste to have more memory on your Mac. It’s bad enough that you have RAM that he can’t access at all.
Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories in Apple’s reality-warping space from the past seven days. All to start next week with a good first step.
Blissful unawareness
When it comes to CEO statements, they can be a mixed bag. Comments like that of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang being fine with paying a billion-dollar tax are good, giving brief moments of hope that the 1% isn’t entirely filled with out-of-touch rich people.
At least for now, John Ternus hasn’t fallen into the trap of saying anything damaging to the heavily managed Apple CEO’s personality. It’s early in his term, so there’s still plenty of time for that to happen.
That said, there are many business leaders who are outspoken and provide a controversial point of view. Lots of lessons on how not to act like a figurehead for Ternus to absorb.
The latest is from Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, which runs the current AI heavyweight ChatGPT.
I’m not talking about anything to do with the whole Jony Ive hardware thing or the related lawsuit. Nor the tone-deaf response to AI hacking that OpenAI’s tools are used to both facilitate and protect against.
This time it’s the memory. The computing component whose price has skyrocketed to become more valuable than printer ink, thanks to AI’s Borg-like need to consume it all.
Sam Altman in a pub. Or more likely, a pub set. – Image credit: Cheeky Pint/YouTube
In the latest tone-deaf statement, speaking to YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, Altman complained that there isn’t enough memory for the AI. As it turns out, the problem is end users.
“From a global allocation perspective, it’s really terrible that everyone has some of the limited supply of DRAM available globally in their computer,” Altman said. By his estimates, it is only used about “5% of the time.”
He says there should be “maximum use of the cloud if you’re trying to address this supply-constrained environment. And somehow a lot of people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”
Translated, it is saying that the memory used in your Mac would be better used as part of the almighty AI machine to serve you indirectly.
He’s almost right
The immediate gut reaction is that he is wrong, with the emotional side of all of us silently screaming horrible things at him.
Maybe paraphrasing Brave heart declaring, “You can take our money, but you will never take our memory.” Maybe it’s somewhat influenced by being on a set made to feel like a sociable environment and not the robotic side of the Matrix.
Before we get to that, as unpleasant as it is, let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment and see his side.
Altmann [right] and Jony Ive [left] in another bar. – Image credit: OpenAI
For him, the memory market is tough, with many people wanting flash chips and willing to pay for them. If we plebeian users simply didn’t buy more memory, there would be more available for OpenAI and every other AI company to suck and spit out in their infrastructure projects.
This is logic that almost makes sense, but only if you accept his point of view. You are invested in and infatuated with the advancement of artificial intelligence, and this is your unique goal in life.
Of course you won’t care that someone can afford the most expensive PlayStation 5 to play games Grand Theft Auto 6. It would be a waste of resources, when that game console’s memory could be used to further humanity by letting a computer think for it.
This is, for me, the Star Trek fantasy. War between countries has become a “solved problem” and everyone now works together in harmony for the common good, often against their own best interests.
Almost
By stepping out of the role of Lucifer’s assistant, the argument fails in several different ways.
For starters, the memory industry is already leaning heavily in favor of the Big Industrial Machine of Artificial Intelligence. Major memory manufacturers have already shifted production capacity to high-bandwidth data center-grade memory, reducing the amount of DRAM available.
Data centers are already experiencing a massive reduction in DRAM sales, along with device manufacturers, while direct-to-consumer and enterprise memory sales are an afterthought. In fact, competition is so high that, despite stratospheric memory prices, the supply pipeline for 2027 is already booked.
Since it’s so expensive that consumers have to seriously consider how much memory their new purchases contain, Altman has already gotten his wish. The AI is buying most of the new memory anyway, and will do so for some time.
Anyone who wants to buy a new Mac from Apple thinks the same way: whether they can live without RAM or whether it is feasible to engage in the second-hand organ trade.
Sam Altmann. Supposedly, the bar was swallowed up by the void, leaving Altman alone with his thoughts about always wearing brown shirts. – Image credit: Emerson Collective
In my particular case, I upgraded my gaming PC at the beginning of the year. However, since the price of RAM was so damn high, the new build was focused on my existing DDR4 memory instead of buying new DDR5 or even increasing the amount of memory in use.
Even with investments by memory companies in new infrastructure, this will only make a small dent in the issue and will take too long. AI will consume that too.
For consumers, it’s clear that the creation of AI infrastructure is why there is so much demand for memory in the first place. It’s a problem that OpenAI and others have no right to complain about, because their actions caused this situation.
We can’t even propose that OpenAI start its own memory manufacturing effort so that it can secure a private supply of chips to its specific specifications. The problem is, if you spend extremely large sums of money to do so, the simplest option would be to purchase an existing memory manufacturer altogether.
Luckily, this is not a possibility for the moment, since the big three memory manufacturers have extremely high values, precisely because of this supply and demand problem. That is to say, they are benefiting from the misery of the rest of the tech manufacturing sector.
At this point, Altman’s comments are annoying and effectively mock an angry tech industry and budget-conscious users because AI is consuming almost everything and is not satisfied.
It could be an altruistic proposal for the sake of the future of humanity made to Altman. For everyone else, it’s a misleading statement that ignores everyone else’s profound unhappiness over the resulting price increase of all electronics.
Maybe Sam really doesn’t see the impact of his comment on observers because he’s so busy in his AI bubble. For me, I can’t decide between imagining him as the Grinch or Blofeld.
Last week’s Sunday Reboot discussed the physical beauty of the Apple Music rebrand, as well as the stupidity in terms of security.
