I won't blame Altman here. Memory companies secretly love this. LLM will always be commercialized after people discovered it if it's not Altman it would be another person. And you cannot genuinely say people do not find LLM useful. You cannot genuinely say people will not use LLMs hence there is no demand for compute capacity. OpenAI and others are simply satisfying the compute demand here. Memory companies have secretly loved for an application to drive up the prices of memory chips. And you can't blame them, these foundry workers, physics Phds working at fab companies have worked much harder than your software web app engineers while earning far less. But what they build is a critical enabler of everything digital and much higher barrier to entry. If hyperscaler don't want to pay for exorbitant high memory prices, they can invest and build their own. But why don't they? This is exactly what you are describing free market economy, pricing is based on scarcity. Maybe its time for the world to actually value hardware and semiconductor for their worth.

It smells like delusions of grandeur, to be so shameless about asserting his own enterprise as the highest priority for society.

Whether he truly has these beliefs or just cynically thinks it is a good way to message, it disturbs me. It only makes it worse, seeing how quickly these new platforms can invade and contaminate the fourth estate (or the mass-market communications that have essentially subsumed that role already).