this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2026
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If we didn't have RAM in our phones and PC's, how would we use the data centers?
It's almost as if Sam Altman is a moron.
Also a lot of the hardware for data centers is just laying around unused, because the data centers aren't even built.
He’s referring specifically to local RAM used to run local AI models, whichl he argues is unused most of time. Say if you use your local AI for 4 hours a day, it’s idle for 20. Where the same model in a cloud might serve users across time zones 24/7.
It’s a similar argument about private car ownership, where a car might be used 5% of the day for a lot of people while 95% of the time it requires storage space, aka a parking spot somewhere.
That argument does make some sense but of course he’s making it purely out of self-interest. It would be interesting to have some kind of open-source distributed system where you can share your compute when you’re not using it. But that’s not what he’s proposing.