Pylimitics

Sam Altman is generally regarded as a smart guy, right? I mean, he’s got a lot of money, which is the way we measure smarts here in the US. Have a lot of money, say something, and it’ll be featured in the media.

Now he’s claiming that people shouldn’t run open-weight LLMs on their own computers because that’s an inefficient use of random-access memory chips. Like, on a global basis, I guess. It’s much more efficient to just have a small number of giant datacenters where all the processing can use the RAM constantly, which is much more efficient.

I think he’s on to something. Everybody driving their own cars is inefficient. It would be much better to just have a few giant buses to take people around to places. And do you have any idea how many ships there are out there on the oceans ferrying stuff from one place to another? How about just one giant ship for the Atlantic, another one for the Pacific, and a third for the Indian Ocean? Three giant ships would be way more efficient.

And while I’m thinking about it, have you noticed how many different brands of spaghetti sauce are on supermarket shelves?! Talk about inefficiency. Here’s the way to do it: every supermarket sells one brand of the stuff, and everybody buys that one. In fact, maybe everybody just gets an empty jar, which they bring to the market and fill at the spaghetti sauce faucet. That ups the efficiency for glassware usage too. Then you can carry your jar of sauce home on the giant bus. And wait, everybody having their own separate place to live is wildly inefficient…