Sam Altman Says It's 'Terrible' For People To Have RAM For Personal Use, Gets Ripped Apart Online

OpenAI boss Sam Altman is being ripped apart online after arguing that having dedicated DRAM inside personal computers is a "quite terrible" allocation of the world's limited memory supply. Altman pushed back against the idea of running open-source AI models locally at home. He stated that from a global resource standpoint, it is highly inefficient for everyday users to have a bunch of RAM sitting in their own machines, only being utilised five per cent of the time.

Altman made the bizarre comment in an interview with YouTuber Cheeky Pint. The OpenAI chief was talking about the global compute supply problems facing the AI industry right now.

"From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time," said Altman.

"You want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow everyone's, many people's, intuition is the opposite of that.”

OpenAI's primary business is in closed-source models that run in data centres. Altman and other tech overlords fear that people running local AI would mean less subscription money for models like GPT-6 Luna. His comments suggest that the company would prefer more RAM heading to OpenAI's data centres rather than home computers.

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'Most Annoying, Insufferable Person'

As Altman's comments went viral, social media users were furious and accused him of causing the RAM crisis in the first place.

"He really is trying his absolute hardest to be the most annoying, insufferable person of all time," said one user, while another added: "In other words, "own nothing and be happy". These tech oligarchs are out of control."

A third commented: "Unsurprisingly, a billionaire who sucks up all of the world's resources is now demanding that the rest of us get nothing so what little we have left can go to him instead."

A fourth said: "Part of all this data center stuff is that consumers no longer own their own computers. They want us to rent computer access so we own nothing & are forced to hand over all of our data."