Sam Altman calls local inference "a terrible allocation of scarce resources," community pushes back
ngxson · x · 2026-10-31
A viral r/LocalLLaMA post circulates Sam Altman's interview claim that "local inference is a terrible allocation of scarce resources." His argument: people assume open-source models mean you can run everything on your own machine and skip the data center, but globally it's wasteful for every computer to hold DRAM that's only used 5% of the time.
The local deployment community isn't buying it — the share framing is that the "scarce resource" is money, which Altman would rather see flow into OpenAI's data center inference business. The cloud vs. on-device debate is heating up.
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