Shares of US chipmaker Intel cratered on Friday, plunging almost 30 percent, the worst stock collapse in 52 years. The wipeout, analysts said, could be due to a massive slowdown in the PC market. The market softness shouldn’t come to anybody’s surprise, given the AI boom has made individual components, most notably memory and storage, practically unaffordable.
However, leaders of AI frontier labs aren’t blinking. To OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for instance, having people run their own models at home on their own computers doesn’t make any sense anyway. During a recent interview on the Cheeky Pint podcast, 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.
“A lot of people want local inference,” he said. “And somehow, they assume, that the problem is solved now. Because we are going to have open-source models. We’re going to be able to run them on our own 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 have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of [dynamic RAM] sitting in their own computer,” he added.
Instead of running their own models at home, a trend that has blown up thanks to the emergence of open-weight models from China, Altman argued that the cloud — run by hyperscalers like OpenAI — is the answer.
“You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very constrained environment,” he said. “And somehow everyone’s, many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”
It’s a particularly tone-deaf argument that throws fuel on the fire of tech enthusiasts everywhere, who have watched as individual components have skyrocketed in price. Just earlier this month, Altman argued that the “world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology,” which similarly drew a heated response.
Altman’s latest comments drew the ire of the PC gaming community.
“What a self-centered POS,” one enraged Reddit user wrote. “Cult leader mentality really shining with this one.”
“He seems to not be able to comprehend the idea of people wanting to own their own computers,” another wrote. “Like it’s an alien concept to him.”
“Privately owned companies with the sole interest of profit should not be making monumental decisions that affect the vast majority of the population,” one user argued. “But maybe I’m the crazy one.”
The news comes as the AI industry continues to struggle to commercialize their offerings. It’s a particularly hairy situation as their expenses are still ballooning at alarming rates, terrifying investors.
The concept of running local inference on their own machines undermines the very concept of relying exclusively on expensive cloud services being offered by the likes of OpenAI. In other words, it’s no wonder Altman hates the idea of people owning their own machines.
His latest comments also speak to frontier AI labs desperately trying to secure AI chips as available supplies run low. There’s a massive circuit board shortage as PC makers say they’re already fully booked through the end of 2030.
But to Altman, cutting out individual owners of computers capable of running AI models isn’t a problem. After all, as he argued during the latest podcast appearance, the cloud is a far better use of available hardware.
“Given that the world is doing to be limited in its silicon capacity, we all have a shared interest,” he said.
Infuriated tech enthusiasts, however, are likely to disagree with that sentiment.
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