My entire point is that we are currently on a path to a duopoly which isn’t just expected to cover training and serving models but the entire knowledge economy. That could be mitigated by limiting their train and inference capacity to a specific percentage of total available compute. That would ensure other operators could compete in the market. Instead we are letting OpenAI literally contract to buy all available ram to the point that Apple can’t buy ram and had to cut their hardware configurations.
Apple could have bid higher but chose not to. Most modern desktop software is extremely memory inefficient. Developers have largely ignored this in recent years because RAM was so cheap. But there's tremendous opportunity for improvement with a little optimization work.
We used to run Microsoft Word and other popular applications with 8 MB RAM and it worked fine.