Sam Altman: “Local inference is a terrible allocation of scarce resources”
Sam Altman stated that "Local inference is a terrible allocation of scarce resources," despite many people desiring it and assuming open-source models would solve the problem by allowing local computer execution, thus negating the need for data centers.
Time & source
Times shown in UTC
Display time zone: UTC
Local time zone unavailable; showing UTC.
PublishedOffset at this time: UTC+0Oct 29, 2026, 23:11 UTC
IngestedOffset at this time: UTC+0Oct 30, 2026, 00:01 UTC
- Published
- Oct 29, 2026, 23:11
- Ingested
- Oct 30, 2026, 00:01
- Source type
- Dev community
- Tier
- Community
- Source status
- Sync delayed
Tier is a per-source editorial setting, not a per-item score.
A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we're going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data centre
but from a global allocation perspective, actually it's quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time
you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment,
TL;DR Guy selling product: "Here's why owning your own product instead of renting it from me is a terrible idea"