“Rent-seeking psychopath desires all the rent”
Literally the mentality of the English land-owning gentry enclosing the ancient commons and driving people off the land into dependency on them. It was bullshit then, and it’s bullshit now.
It’s straight up kleptoparasite mentality.
It’s been the central mentality of the owning class since the ability to individually own the means of production was conceived.
They won’t care about rent-seeking without their brains. There’s a simple solution to these problems, we just have to do it. It’s easy and fun, so I hear. I’m willing to be the first, I’ll accept those dirty hands
It is the cyberfeudal lord’s wet dream. Can we skip the dark ages and go straight to the French Revolution?
Uhh that’s exactly what they want. The French revolution was just more rich assholes taking control. In this case it was the merchant class. The Techbro class definitely wants to take control. Also, the majority of people beheaded in the French revolution were commoners.
Digital Maoism Intensifies
I hate the idea of Sam Altman not being in prison
Funny how »global allocation efficiency« always ends with everyone renting access from the company whose CEO wants to do the allocating. Local AI offers privacy, independence, and no monthly tollbooth. Apparently the real waste of RAM is letting people control what they own.
From an efficiency POV it absolutely is significantly better to concentrate compute power in data centers, because when you’re not using it then somebody else can. When those resources are in your private computer, it sits idle most of the time with all it’s potential wasted.
that being said, he can go eat a hot ball of lead. Fuck him for wanting to take away peoples free access to compute power.
This isn’t necessarily true. You can have your AI machine doing other things or turn it off when you aren’t using it. It could probably increase efficiency if people were affected by how much energy it uses to write their emails, they might only use it for when they actually need it.
when its turned off, the potential is still lost, because it’s not doing anything but the physical resources (the materials) are still spent.
If you have a hammer in your shed, are you depriving your neighbor of a hammer? Your neighbor can get their own hammer, and you’d both be better off than if you had to go rent one from the local hammer monger.
Altman is creating the RAM shortage that he points to as justification for hoarding all the RAM. It’s a circular argument. If he didn’t manufacture scarcity, then everyone would be able to have their own RAM.
He’s the only one in this situation depriving anyone of compute power, and it’s because he wants to rent it all back to them. (Yes, Musk, Zuck, Bezos, and Pichai are guilty here too).
That can apply only to food. Other things mentioned are just stupid. Why we have to use it 100% right now?
I’m sorry, your first statement is a little weird. If there are actually only enough resources to produce 1 hammer, yes, of course you’re depriving your neighbor of a hammer and it’d be better for both of you to share it.
The rest of your argument is obviously fine, just the first part doesn’t make sense.
What if there are enough resources to produce thousands of hammers, but the hammer monger decided to buy up all the production capacity, thereby creating the scarcity being discussed, and then goes on to say that if you own a hammer, you’re depriving your neighbors?
What part of “the rest of the argument is obviously fine” didn’t you understand? :D
Let’s agree to disagree. When off, it’s saving power. I used to be one of those that kept my computer on sleep and only turned it off through a restart for upgrades, or to take it apart and clean it. That was me being lazy and giving 0 fucks about resources and the common good. Not anymore.
I recently started putting my new desktop on suspend, after turning my old one into a server that’s on 24/7. Mustn’t keep two computers on at 24/7 now, right?
I mean it depends. If you got solar and a battery or some other renewable option, run as many computers for as long as you want.
We live in an apartment building so, no direct control over energy source. Although the building does have solar panels on the roof. 😅
Yes that precious silicon, the rarest of earthen elements of which we have so little.
And of course the fabrication of semiconducting integrated circuits, which was always in such high demand that prices kept all the peasants from being able to operate any.
Such powers should be reserved for those with superior power and ways of thinking anyway, don’t you agree?
Are you arguing that advanced chip fabrication is not a limited resource?
It was not before bitcoin and Ai scam. So yes?
lol no
It’s way less thermally efficient though… Individual computers in people’s houses running lighter workloads don’t get as hot, and when they do, they don’t need to stay operating for as long: they can just shut down or slow down after the heavy workload, or finish it more slowly. So they don’t need as much cooling, and will produce less waste heat due to the temperature coefficient of resistance.
So they don’t need as much cooling, and will produce less waste heat due to the temperature coefficient of resistance.
And honestly in areas with colder year-round climates, the increase in ambient temps from running locally might actually reduce heating bills because it’s technically doing double duty of doing a job and heating the place.
Literally had mild winters where the computer running could keep a single room comfortably warm.
It’s getting cold in Canada, but playing civ 6 is my version of getting warm by the fire.
I’m gaming a lot. Can confirm, almost no heating bill, but high electricity bill
Just to introduce another factor: transitioning between hot and cold introduces wear that might be worse that running warm-to-hot constantly.
I don’t think the wear is that significant, unless it has a bad solder defect somewhere.
Sheesh! One unit of computing =one unit of heat. The total units of computing are the same, the concentration differs. Thermodynamics, dude!
Ignorance is not bad, it can be reversed. It’s confident ignorance like yours that scares me.
Efficiency for whom? A thief holding a bank teller up at gunpoint is more efficient than working a 9 to 5.
This is completely unrelated, but I hope I’m dead before using “compute” as a noun sounds normal to me.
I think I’ve seen decentralized computing where you can rent inference that is available somewhere else , which would tackle that problem
Who needs AI on all the time?! Oh, I know. No one! It’s the reason why energy costs are high and resources are being wasted/reallocated on a regular. Most private models would be utilized only when needed and only by those that have a justifiable need for it. Not on for the sake of being on. We don’t need an AI summary of the history and purpose of a fucking saucepan. But we get it whenever someone types it in search to find where to buy one.
If it’s too important to squander resources, it’s too important to privatize.
People…dont want access to ai tho…
People can still use any of the Gpu cloud renting stuff/mining to sell their Gpu function so it can still be utilized efficiently. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
From a hardware utilisation perspective, sure. There was a time where people only had their devices on for a few hours a day. And you know why no-one cared? Because people could buy as much hardware as they wanted. When supply eventually match demand again, no-one will care again.
Isn’t this assuming that we all get unlimited perfect network capacity for free? Most folks have decent connectivity most of the time but moving to a universal thin client model makes a lot of assumptions about our current network infrustructue and our political and financial capacity to improve it. But this out of touch moron hasn’t had to live without multiple redundant commercial quality pipes running to his home and office for decades.
And if many people want to use at same time? Less efficient? E waste wise less efficient too. Cooling wise less efficient too as you have to move all cooling tools to one place from many places, the setting has to be perfect too. And let me tell you that they are not in idle only 18% of time
You’re only thinking about the occupancy part of efficient use of available resources (and even then only partially) and forgetting all about the utility value part.
RAM used 100% of the time is not more efficiently used than RAM used 10% of the time if it’s being used for activities that deliver much lower utility, something made even worse because using RAM consumes additional resources in the form of power hence running it isn’t actually free and you if the utility of it’s use is lower you might actually be destroying value by using that power for a much lower utility use than it could otherwise be used for.
That’s the point others are making by pointing out that if that RAM is in data centers running AI 100% of the time it might actually be in use less efficiently than RAM used for multiple activities in people’s computers at home where it’s idle most of the time.
Yours is basically the same fallacy as the one about how people working more hours per day means they’re producing more.
“More use” is not the same as “more value created” because time is far from the only factor in determining how much value is created.
PS: If you really dig down into the utility value for Mankind of most modern day computing you’ll find that a large fraction if not most of it is basically entertainment, gambling or some for addition and thus doesn’t produce actual economic value. For example, how exactly does social networking such as Facebook produce economic value for Mankind - it’s basically a mix of entertainment and an addiction that directly creates or help create nothing, and instead it mainly wastes people’s time. At best it could indirectly deliver value by improving worker efficiency in activities that actually create value because people were happier with Facebook than without it, but by all indication that’s not even the case as it’s creating epidemics of psychological and social problems especially amongst young people. Those things are extracting value rather than creating value, so the computer RAM running Facebook software is probably a net negative in value creation overall - it creates little or no value overall (it extracts value from some to others but doesn’t actually create any) whilst consuming power to run, and all of those factors put together might mean that in overall value creation terms that RAM being idle or even in the refuse bin would actually be better than being used for Facebook software.
Local AI offers privacy, independence, and no monthly tollbooth.
Sam Altman, reading your comment, hissing in agony three times like someone poured holy water on him…
Perhaps we should apply the same theory to petrol and cars. Everyone should take the bus - having a lump of metal rusting outside your front door is a waste.
I wonder how far that logic would work with US republicans?
Altman argued that ongoing memory supply chain woes were because selfish individuals wanted to run their AI models locally instead of leaving the remaining AI chips alone for hyperscalers to hoard in data centers.
Selfish? We’re selfish?
Goooo fuck yourself. You’re the problem you fucking cunt, and you know that.
God that guy needs to be punched in the face.
Somebody kill this cunt on camera and threaten everyone profiting from it that they’re next and man it. People like him deserve to suffer just for our amusement.
That’s the livestream I would actually tune into. Make it a double feature with Trump.
We skip trials when literally everyone already has the evidence.
“But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of [dynamic RAM] sitting in their own computer,” he added.
You mean, like how its been literally this entire time?
It’s not entirely incorrect. It wouldn’t be efficient for us to all purify our own rainwater or generate our own electricity at home either. Centralising stuff is more efficient.
But then it should be treated as a public service and heavily regulated. They can’t have it both ways.
I get where you’re coming from, but rainwater doesn’t hold a trove of personal information and/or influence daily decision making.
To reduce compute down to simply a resource supply issue is ignoring the primary reasons people care about digital sovereignty: privacy, transparency, freedom (i.e. free speech), etc.
There is nothing about sharing computational resources that necessarily includes loss of privacy, transparency or freedom. With the correct systems in place (i.e. not controlled by one capitalistic company, fuck you Altman), that can all be fine.
It creates a single point of failure, which is one of the key reasons for why darkweb/tor arrests tends to happen in waves. As the law enforcement agencies, tends to get a treasure trove of data whenever they hit and loot the main server of a marketplace
Electricity definitely does hold a lot of personal information and cost of electricity very much changes my household behavior. For that matter, so does trash and recycling.
Centralisation doesn’t mean monopoly. We could use legal tools to break down the companies into smaller parts, and let people vote with their wallets to use the compute services which meet their ethical terms. With more eco laws to make sure that it’s not cheaper to be inefficient and externalise all the bad parts.
We can but dream.
Ok my wallet votes for buying components and doing the compute I need at home.
Not some bourgeois-approved libertarian fantasy about renting widgets of functionality.
Ok, but the unregulated tech bros are going to be able to outbid you for those components. I’m not sure what you’re arguing for here, the freedom to be forced to pay more for hardware?
I just want to point out that this particular line of logic deadends in fascism. Look at the US government. Look at all forms of centralization.
The point isn’t efficiency, which is arguable what with how quickly data centers burn through ram sticks and other parts. We burn resources faster when we centralize, in most cases, where applicable.
The point of centralization is always about control. Specifically, the few in control of the many.
It’s a little bit funny to see people talking about the benefits of centralization on a website that was built to be part of a larger decentralized network. As if we’re not here because of the problems with control and censorship in centralization. Reddit has a history of silencing leftist voices, yet those voices are more “free” to speak here on the Fediverse.
The entire point of the original structure of the internet was to build resilient communication networks for the military so if one node went down, a new path could be routed around the broken node.
Centralization absolutely leads to fascism because it gives all the controls to a handful of people who aren’t responsive to democracy.
Our representatives do not represent our interests because they are so far removed from us. We honestly need far more representatives representing far fewer people (like maybe a few hundred per representative) because then a rep has to be on a first name basis with their constituents and understand them because there are so few they represent. Either that or we need to bite the bullet and go direct-democracy and just have senators and house representatives just be figureheads who help write bills, with citizens having the final vote on each bill.
This is why, as an anarchist, the next viable step I see is federated cooperatives. Localized for local needs, connected for national ones.
But that’s if we get socialism off the ground in the US. It’s looking promising.
Yes, exactly, building parallel systems that actually cater to the needs of the local populace. Interconnecting those systems via federation sounds key to making it work!
Our representatives do not represent our interests because they are so far removed from us.
That’s a super simplistic statement. There are many more reasons for that, and this one isn’t even among the top of the list.
Well… sometimes, in my view at least, centralization (or relatedly, government-run) things can be beneficial for society; specifically the things that aren’t easily profitable, yet are a net benefit to all.
Medical research (into cures, not profitable ‘treatments’ requiring a lifetime prescription); public roads; food safety standards-enforcement. These things might not be profitable, but we all want them, so it makes sense that government might run them on our behalf, eg. centralized rather than all of use needing to do our own medical research, or maintain our own roads, or check our food in case it’s been adulterated because no one sees a profit in keeping it healthy.
I agree with you. But the abuses are still there, they just aren’t being exploited. Yet. Still, it may be the best we can do. I honestly don’t know.
Ultimately, I believe one good king does not justify a succession of bad ones. I rather we not deal with kings at all.
We burn resources faster when we centralize, in most cases, where applicable.
Centralisation is generally more efficient due to various economies of scale such as fixed capital costs, greater division of labour and larger R&D budgets. Since centralised facilities are more efficient, they will gradually outcompete and buy out / drive out smaller competitors. There are two ways to deal with the negative consequences of this tendency - (1) give smaller competitors an advantage by breaking up / penalising the largest ones, or (2) bringing the largest competitors under public control through nationalisation. But the centralising tendency itself is a sort of natural economic law that applies under most conditions.
The point of centralization is always about control.
This is a consequence, not a cause.
Getting your CPU cycles from The Cloud works for many use cases, but not for consumer electronics yet. One day, of course, but that day is not here yet.
Well, don’t tell my father that coz he’s been doing both
Dynamic ram didn’t seem to be in limited supply until this asshole started trying to corner the market on it.
Trying?
And why is it limited, Sam? We all had plenty of affordable RAM before some asshole bought it all to rent back to us.
I mean, I get it. If I was ONLY using that 32GB for local AI models then we could take about efficiency and centralization but that’s not the case for most people. When I run local models, I am not running my music DAW with tons of plugins, I’m also not gaming or doing video editing. When I shutdown the local model, I’m usually starting up a game or a recording session. I could just be in the middle of a workday with a lot of teams, Firefox, and vs code running. It could be a video editing day. His concept could be accurate if that memory was used for one thing only on my machine but that’s not the case.
Not the entire time. The original computer architecture was big central processors that took commands from remote consoles.
Personal Computing wasn’t a thing until the late 1980s. Even then, it only lasted 20 years before the Internet enticed people back into Cloud Computing and SaaS.
Ffs, the whole appeal of the Internet browser window is that you just make requests from foreign systems and they do all the work, returning you the finished result. Client side code has been bad system design for decades.
Client side code is the only code you can have control over.
Viruses are client side
“Can have” != “Have all the time in every case”
why do these so called captains of industry always sound like whiny little bitches? if they’re so smart, come up with a better solution
Ok Sam, give your computers up first and then we will negotiate.
So we’d own a basic terminal, and pay a subscription for our computing needs.
Gosh, who’d’a thunkit? Never saw that one coming.
On contrary, we should run all our models locally.
The problem isn’t the AI, the issue is that the elites are trying to horde it and keep it from us little people. If we are to have agency, having personal ownership over local AI, collectively owned AI, and regulations, are all key to ensuring that democracy and egalitarianism is secure.
The elite will not willingly surrender power, especially there is a void that they can colonize. Ordinary people like us should fill the vacuum, to deny the elite from having total control over AI.
“Don’t get tap water at home. Drink the water I sell”
Fuck this guy
Pipes are inefficient. If you want water, you should buy it from my big lake. Also, I should be able to set the price of water. Also, fuck these three people in particular, for using water in a way I don’t like.
Cory Doctorow predicted this fifteen years ago, although in a different context (transcript here).
I mean the analogy he’s making is more like “nobody should pump their own water, all water should be gotten from the municipal circuit”, but it’s obviously a faulty comparison that falls apart when you realise that 1. OpenAI is for profit and 2. different AI is not equivalent the way water is
Soo-soo sook!
Uuuummm… Tap water is literally pooled resources.
Said CEO of a company from USA that started wars and killed kids. Fuck USA, fuck their AI companies, fuck them and stop using their products.
