Imlisanen Jamir
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, was asked about the global memory shortage in an interview with the YouTuber Cheeky Pint and Stripe. By the accounts that followed, he said it was quite terrible that scarce DRAM sits in personal computers, where it is used about five per cent of the time. A data centre, he suggested, would put it to better use.
A five per cent rate of use would embarrass a fire station, a lifeboat, a smoke alarm or the spare tyre in a car boot. Each spends nearly all its existence idle and is valued for the minutes when everything else has failed. An accountant who judged a hospital by the share of the year its operating theatres were occupied would recommend selling most of them to someone with a busier schedule.
Readers in Nagaland will recognise the reasoning. The claim that a resource lies idle in the wrong hands has been made about the hills, forests and coal seams of the Northeast for a long time, usually by someone who also holds the definition of productive use and a lease ready for signature. Article 371A was written partly to settle who decides such matters on land and what lies beneath it, so it is a mild surprise to see the doctrine return as a laptop, with a man in San Francisco appointing himself surveyor of other people’s gigabytes.
His alternative also depends on a network that never fails. Mobile data in this region has been switched off by administrative order whenever a district grew nervous, and on those days the ninety-five per cent he calls idle is the part of the machine still working on the desk in Dimapur, waiting with the patience of a lifeboat.
The cost of the shortage falls on the student in Kohima shopping for a laptop and the trader pricing a new billing machine. Nobody asked them about the appetite of the data centres that now compete with them for chips. The remedy on offer is to rent from those same data centres, which would end the shortage by turning every owner into a subscriber.
The remarks were reportedly a reply to the case for running AI models on one’s own machine. Memory used that way produces no monthly invoice, and a customer who owns the hardware needs no subscription, which on the spreadsheets of a company that size makes him a form of idle capacity.
Readers just told that their machines sit unused ninety-five per cent of the time may wonder what share of Mr Altman’s working day goes to the questions he is actually asked, and whether the remainder could be handed to someone who would use it.
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