Sam Altman says PC memory idle rate is about 5%, advocates maximizing utilization of cloud computing power
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview that the world's limited DRAM supply is scattered across everyone's PCs, with utilization possibly only around 5%, which is very bad in the current environment of extremely limited supply, and that the goal should be to maximize the utilization of cloud computing power. He also pointed out that the invisible hand of the market has failed, and that the HBM used by AI chips is different from the DDR4/DDR5 used in PCs; the memory shortage mainly stems from manufacturers shifting production capacity to the more profitable HBM.
Body · AI translation
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in an interview with YouTube host Cheeky Pint, discussed the global compute supply problem currently facing the AI industry. When the conversation inevitably turned to memory, Altman pointed out that the invisible hand of the market has failed, possibly because not every DRAM wafer flows directly to data centers for running AI models. He said: "From a global resource allocation perspective, having the world's limited DRAM supply scattered across everyone's PCs with utilization possibly only around 5% is very bad. In the current environment of extreme supply constraints, we should be pursuing maximum utilization of cloud compute. Yet many people's intuition is exactly the opposite." The memory used by AI chips is mainly HBM, which is different from the DDR4 or DDR5 used in PCs. The main problem with the memory shortage is that memory manufacturers have shifted production capacity to the more profitable HBM.