OpenAI chief says idle RAM belongs in data centres
LONDON, England — Sam Altman has identified the greatest threat facing modern civilisation. It isn't nuclear war, economic collapse or the possibility that the British government might attempt to organise something. It's a man in Birmingham who owns a computer, has installed artificial intelligence on it and has stopped paying a monthly subscription.
The OpenAI chief executive has questioned the efficiency of running AI models on personal machines, arguing that scarce computer memory would be better used in centralised data centres. Britain, which once taught schoolchildren to programme on machines with less memory than an electric toothbrush, has taken the news badly.
Told that Altman considered his RAM underused, Malcolm Pritchard, 72, a retired electrical engineer from Coventry, said: "He can come round and mow my bloody lawn more efficiently while he's at it."
Beneath the argument about memory sits an old question. Who controls the machine? The person who bought it, or the billionaire who'd prefer everyone rent access to his?
Altman's Case for Centralised AI Infrastructure
Altman's comments, reported by Futurism, focused on the shortage of dynamic random-access memory, better known as RAM. His argument was that memory sitting in personal computers for much of the day could be used more intensively in shared cloud infrastructure.
There's a technical rationale for that. There's also an enormous commercial advantage for whoever runs the shared infrastructure, a point several Silicon Valley executives seem to have missed, having grown so used to subscription revenue that they regard ownership as an eccentric hobby of elderly men with sheds.
"You used to pick up a telephone and ask an operator to connect you," said Professor Nigel Underbridge, a technology historian. "Then technology advanced and people could make their own calls. Now Silicon Valley wants to charge you every time your computer thinks. It's extraordinary progress, provided you travel backwards."
Britain Remembers the Home Computer Revolution
The trouble with the centralisation argument is that Britain remembers the last time computing escaped institutional control. In the early eighties, Acorn's BBC Microcomputer arrived as part of a wider movement that put computers in ordinary homes and schools. The Computer History Museum's record of the BBC Micro documents how it supported the BBC's effort to introduce the public to computing. The Sinclair ZX81 and ZX Spectrum followed, bringing affordable machines to a generation of bedroom programmers.
They loaded software from cassette tapes. They endured error messages, temperamental connections and the despair of losing an afternoon's work because somebody unplugged the machine. They loved it anyway, because the computers were theirs. A child could write software without permission from IBM, a university, the Post Office or a man in California with seventeen vice-presidents of monetisation.
Some of those children became engineers and entrepreneurs. Others became accountants. One became a Conservative councillor, proving that education can't prevent every tragedy.
The BBC's Computer Literacy Project archive recalls a period when Britain deliberately encouraged people to understand and use computers themselves. Four decades on, a California billionaire seems worried that they might.
Whitehall's Plan for a National Memory Licence
Britain's bureaucracy, which has never met an activity it couldn't improve with three forms and a processing fee, took an interest. The Department for Responsible Domestic Memory Allocation has published a report recommending a compulsory memory licence.
Under the proposal, households could keep eight gigabytes of RAM without special permission. Sixteen would need a justification. Thirty-two would need proof of employment, a character reference and a statement explaining why the applicant couldn't use an approved cloud provider. Sixty-four would count as suspicious accumulation, and anyone holding 128 would be referred to the National Crime Agency, on the theory that nobody needs that much memory unless he's planning to overthrow the monarchy.
"Unused memory is a national scandal," a department spokesman said. "Millions of British computers spend the night switched off when their resources could be contributing to economic growth."
Asked whether the same reasoning applied to government offices, which sit empty for much of the day, he ended the interview. A briefing note later explained that underused public-sector buildings are strategic national reserves, while underused private computers are selfishness.
The Subscription Economy Comes for Your Laptop and Your Kettle
Britons know an absurd subscription when they see one. They pay astonishing fares to stand beside seats occupied by luggage, pay parking companies for land that was created four billion years before the parking company arrived, and pay annual service-charge adjustments apparently calculated by a man throwing darts at a telephone directory.
Renting one's own intelligence fits right in. A citizen buys a £1,200 laptop, then pays £29.99 a month to ask it questions. For £12.99 more, it remembers the answers. At £49.99 it agrees with him. At £79.99 it disagrees intelligently. The premium tier, Independent Thought Plus, costs £399 a month and lets the computer admit when it doesn't know something. The feature is banned in Westminster.
The memory argument applies to the kettle too. It sits idle most of its life, so a national network of enormous neighbourhood kettles would be more efficient. Residents would request boiling water through an app and pay monthly. The tea would arrive next Thursday. Anyone attempting to centralise the nation's tea-making would be overthrown before breakfast, which is the point: convenience, independence and immediate availability have value that a utilisation spreadsheet can't see.
Local AI With Ollama and llama.cpp Is Already Here
Developers around the world are working to make AI smaller, cheaper and easier to run at home. Tools such as Ollama and the open-source llama.cpp project let users with suitable hardware run compatible language models on their own computers. A £400 laptop won't outperform the largest AI systems. But for writing, document searching, coding help and other bounded tasks, local execution can be perfectly adequate, and every task done locally is one a customer needn't buy from the cloud.
Oliver Finch, 20, of Sheffield, lives with his parents, drinks alarming amounts of tea and has built an assistant that searches local documents and drafts routine letters. His mother uses it for household records and his father for technical manuals. It keeps working when the broadband fails.
"If Mr Altman wants to build a data centre, that's his business," Finch said. "But I'm not going to rent a calculator from him because he bought a bigger calculator."
Training and using a model are different jobs. Training a frontier system takes enormous resources. Running an existing, appropriately sized one is more like reading a book than building the library. The International Energy Agency's research on AI and energy shows why data centres have become part of the electricity debate, though the right answer depends on the task, the hardware and how heavily it's used.
UK Business Data Shows Everyday AI Use, Not Worship
The Office for National Statistics reported that about 30 per cent of UK businesses had used at least one AI technology during September, well up on earlier years. A UK government AI adoption survey found productivity gains were a major benefit, though many companies stayed cautious about cost, accuracy and practical value.
That raises an awkward question for the grandest investment projections. What if millions of businesses need AI mostly for ordinary work, and a small local model can do it? A British accountant would be more impressed by a machine that calculates VAT correctly than by one that writes fourteen pages on the philosophy of taxation. He already knows what taxation is. It's the reason he can't afford a better computer.
The government's AI Opportunities Action Plan is meant to strengthen the country's technological capability, and Parliament has begun asking where that leaves local computing. From the transcript of a committee session with a data-centre executive:
Chairman: If British people can run useful artificial intelligence on their own computers, why should they pay you?
Witness: Because centralised infrastructure may provide greater efficiency.
Chairman: But suppose they don't need your infrastructure.
Witness: Then we would need to discuss the global allocation of memory.
Chairman: Why?
Witness: Because they wouldn't be paying us.
Chairman: Thank you. That's the first time anyone has explained the economics.
The Next British Computing Revolution Won't Ask Permission
Mainframes didn't vanish when personal computers arrived, and cloud services didn't disappear when smartphones got powerful. Different systems serve different needs. But technology has a habit of turning yesterday's indispensable infrastructure into tomorrow's optional service.
Somewhere in Cambridge, Manchester, Birmingham or Sheffield, a developer is working on a local system that makes an expensive cloud subscription unnecessary for some task. No American billionaire's permission is needed, and no cathedral-sized data centre has to be built before the first customer gets an answer. That's the problem with betting an empire on everyone needing access to the castle. Eventually somebody invents a decent house.
The worst outcome for an expensive subscription business isn't a better subscription. It's customers discovering they don't need one. It may arrive when a British teenager closes a browser tab, runs his local model and tells his father:
"Cancel the subscription, Dad. We don't need the bloke in California anymore."
His father will check the screen, consider the monthly savings and deliver the most devastating verdict in the history of artificial intelligence.
"Good. Put the kettle on."
Five Observations on Altman's Plan to Rent Out Your RAM
- He says my computer's idle most of the day. Yes, Sam, because I'm at work earning the money to pay for the computer. That's the arrangement.
- £29.99 a month to ask my laptop a question. I can ask my mum for free. She's wrong more often, but she's never once sent me an invoice.
- Whitehall wants a licence for 128 gigs of RAM. This is the same country that'll sell you a chainsaw if you've got a loyalty card.
- He's got $500 billion and a plan. We've got a teenager in Sheffield and a kettle. I know which of those I'd back in a fight.
- Our whole culture is built on the bloke who says "I'm making one, anyone want one?" You can't put a subscription on that. Well. They'll try. https://prat.uk/?p=54741
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