Sam Altman calls local inference a 'terrible allocation' of scarce compute, open-source community pushes back
jasonkneen · x · 2026-10-30
Sam Altman argued that local inference is, from a global allocation perspective, a poor use of the world's limited DRAM supply — machines sit idle 95% of the time, and a supply-constrained environment demands maximum cloud utilization. The open-source community pushed back hard, with victormustar quipping that people should instead pool all available compute to co-train an open-weights model. The exchange crystallizes the central-vs-local compute debate.
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