It’s sound reasoning up to a point. It would be far more efficient if everyone gave their RAM to a central collective and used it online. That way the RAM would be in use even when you aren’t using it personally. Everyone would have an effectively infinite amount and it would be cheaper because you only pay for the time that you are using it.
I’m reality, of course, Sam would be in charge of all the RAM and would keep screwing us harder and harder until we started squeaking like a rat in an undersized corset. That’s what separates the theory from reality.
Have you ever had to wait your turn to use the one computer in the library thats the only one that has the specific program you need to use, to finish an assignment, thats due in 30 minutes?
But little Timmy really wants to play the color version of Number Munchers?
Scale that up by a few quintillion times, and you may see how catastrophically stupid it would be to have a single entity gatekeeping all computational capacity on Earth.
You think Musk shutting off Starlink for 48hrs in a active warzone, is bad?
Imagine that even a well intentioned theoretical super LLM just makes a mistake, or an intentional decision along the lines of… 3 months of the entire computational/transactional/book keeping/device regulating capacity/logistical planning and monitoring ability of the entire country and economy of I don’t know, Cameroon, Albania, New Zealand, Thailand, whatever… eh thats less important than this other thing people are doing.
This is madness, in a technologized world, for everyone to relenquish their entire ability to do anything requring RAM, to a single entity.
I think it might not be. Of course, what Sam means is “let us have all the RAM so you can run a ChatGPT client on your Commodore 64”, and if that were the only thing RAM was used for, that would be more efficient. But it’s not and it would be undesirable for things to become like that.
So let’s imagine a general purpose RAM collective. I think for that to be workable at all, it would require a major upgrade to internet infrastructure to make it sufficiently high-throughput and low-latency, which would be very costly and also require a lot of RAM. The cost of all that would probably dwarf the inefficiencies of individually owned RAM not being used maximally.
Additionally, to get the latency low enough, the data centers would have to be pretty physically close to the people using them. But people who live near each other also tend to sleep, work and play at similar times, so the gained efficiency wouldn’t be nearly as high as it could be. And on top of all that, even the lowest achievable latency would still be very slow by RAM standards, so at that point you might as well be using a hard drive as working memory.
There’s vaguely ways around it like scheduled batch jobs in each data center as demand dips locally, but even that can’t maximize usage when demand is variable
You had me up until “cheaper because you only pay for the time that you are using it”.
We don’t really have a good benchmark there, and we’ve seen that tokens are actually much more expensive than companies are leading on as they’re trying to get people hooked. As with on-premise, or anything you own, your usage can far exceed a rented rate and then becomes cheaper and cheaper each use.
I’d be curious if there are any rented mediums that are actually cheaper once you start using them a decent amount? Cars, cloud, video, all of those become more expensive when rented if used too much.
As someone who tried to make a living doing ride share with a rental, it’s never going to be cars without a serious overhaul of our commercial relationships with them. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that principle holds true across the board
Cheaper? BS, the RAM of your PC cost cents to make. If you have the RAM online, you’ll pay for every minute using it + your ISP for the bandwith, and they can leave you with an paperweight instead of an PC at any moment they want. Wrong, not even an PC, it’s only a data terminal you own and pay for, less as an smart TV.
Centralizing Internet even more in the hands of few billonair pedo-assholes and their AIs, with Datacenters in former Woods (see those in Finnland by Google), what can go wrong?
It is a stupid argument even if made in good faith.
It’s sound reasoning up to a point. It would be far more efficient if everyone gave their RAM to a central collective and used it online. That way the RAM would be in use even when you aren’t using it personally. Everyone would have an effectively infinite amount and it would be cheaper because you only pay for the time that you are using it.
I’m reality, of course, Sam would be in charge of all the RAM and would keep screwing us harder and harder until we started squeaking like a rat in an undersized corset. That’s what separates the theory from reality.
Have you ever had to wait your turn to use the one computer in the library thats the only one that has the specific program you need to use, to finish an assignment, thats due in 30 minutes?
But little Timmy really wants to play the color version of Number Munchers?
Scale that up by a few quintillion times, and you may see how catastrophically stupid it would be to have a single entity gatekeeping all computational capacity on Earth.
You think Musk shutting off Starlink for 48hrs in a active warzone, is bad?
Imagine that even a well intentioned theoretical super LLM just makes a mistake, or an intentional decision along the lines of… 3 months of the entire computational/transactional/book keeping/device regulating capacity/logistical planning and monitoring ability of the entire country and economy of I don’t know, Cameroon, Albania, New Zealand, Thailand, whatever… eh thats less important than this other thing people are doing.
This is madness, in a technologized world, for everyone to relenquish their entire ability to do anything requring RAM, to a single entity.
Do you want SkyNet? The Matrix?
Thats how you get them!
I think it might not be. Of course, what Sam means is “let us have all the RAM so you can run a ChatGPT client on your Commodore 64”, and if that were the only thing RAM was used for, that would be more efficient. But it’s not and it would be undesirable for things to become like that.
So let’s imagine a general purpose RAM collective. I think for that to be workable at all, it would require a major upgrade to internet infrastructure to make it sufficiently high-throughput and low-latency, which would be very costly and also require a lot of RAM. The cost of all that would probably dwarf the inefficiencies of individually owned RAM not being used maximally.
Additionally, to get the latency low enough, the data centers would have to be pretty physically close to the people using them. But people who live near each other also tend to sleep, work and play at similar times, so the gained efficiency wouldn’t be nearly as high as it could be. And on top of all that, even the lowest achievable latency would still be very slow by RAM standards, so at that point you might as well be using a hard drive as working memory.
There’s vaguely ways around it like scheduled batch jobs in each data center as demand dips locally, but even that can’t maximize usage when demand is variable
You had me up until “cheaper because you only pay for the time that you are using it”.
We don’t really have a good benchmark there, and we’ve seen that tokens are actually much more expensive than companies are leading on as they’re trying to get people hooked. As with on-premise, or anything you own, your usage can far exceed a rented rate and then becomes cheaper and cheaper each use.
I’d be curious if there are any rented mediums that are actually cheaper once you start using them a decent amount? Cars, cloud, video, all of those become more expensive when rented if used too much.
Only low wear occasional use items really fit in. And it looks more like pools than classical rentals.
As someone who tried to make a living doing ride share with a rental, it’s never going to be cars without a serious overhaul of our commercial relationships with them. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that principle holds true across the board
Cheaper? BS, the RAM of your PC cost cents to make. If you have the RAM online, you’ll pay for every minute using it + your ISP for the bandwith, and they can leave you with an paperweight instead of an PC at any moment they want. Wrong, not even an PC, it’s only a data terminal you own and pay for, less as an smart TV. Centralizing Internet even more in the hands of few billonair pedo-assholes and their AIs, with Datacenters in former Woods (see those in Finnland by Google), what can go wrong?
The Altman User Support Center
None of my RAM is ever unused, because I use linux