Altman: 'Memory Is Better Spent in a Data Center Than in Your PC'
He argued that when memory is scarce, data centers shared among many users are the more efficient place to put it. He did not say how he calculated his claim that a personal PC's memory is in use only 5 percent of the time.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that when memory is in short supply, it makes more sense to put that memory in a data center than in a personal computer. The remark came in a Cheeky Pint interview released on October 29. His argument: in a cloud shared by many people, the same memory can be kept busy for far longer.
The comparison he drew was between running AI on your own machine and running it in a data center. Altman claimed that the memory in a personal computer is actually in use only 5 percent of the time. He did not explain in the interview how he arrived at that figure.
Altman also said that even if AI runs on personal computers, that would not make data centers unnecessary. In other words, it is not a matter of picking one approach over the other.
The question that remains for users is where running AI makes better use of a limited supply of memory. Altman put his weight behind the option where many users share the same resources.