Comment by mattstir
4 hours ago
The quote assumes that all of humanity has the same goals as a corporation does: that every individual person desires maximum utilization of components for the sake of company shareholders. Individual people want a computer and just can't buy them because the entire world's memory chip supply, flash storage supply, and increasingly hard drive supply is being swallowed into the maws of corporations who would love nothing more than to sell you tiny bits of that compute through a monthly subscription in perpetuity.
Not everyone subscribes to the "cloud compute is more important than everything else" outlook, but everyone is affected by it nonetheless.
In that statement, Altman also insinuated that most businesses switching from SAAS provided by OpenAI, Anthropic, or the VC-funded companies that build on top of them to locally-hosted software won't kill both OpenAI and Anthropic.
Given that he was in a fluffy interview at the time, he's not going to say that OpenAI and Anthropic would die, but we all know that -unless the "Pacing The Frontier" garbage succeeds in its goal of creating law and regulations that massively obstruct LLM manufacturers who aren't the four or five currently-largest ones in the US- that's how it'd turn out. Once OpenAI and Anthropic are dead, the VC money pouring into the LLM manufacturing and services industries evaporates, and all that demand for high-speed VRAM vanishes with it.
So, no, switching to locally-hosted software will reduce RAM prices... just not immediately.