OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has pushed back against criticism of comments he made about RAM, saying he wants people to be able to put as much memory as they like in their computers. He also said he has argued for increasing memory production for a long time.
Altman’s clarification came on November 3, after he replied “I LOL’d” to an image showing RAM sticks leading to a box trap. When someone joked that he should change his name on Twitter to Ram Altman, he agreed. He then used the name to make the point that he supports people having their own RAM, and said it was “fucking annoying” that his earlier comments had been taken out of context.
The remarks that prompted the reaction came during a podcast appearance the previous week. Altman said that, given limited DRAM supplies, it was “quite terrible” for people to keep large amounts of memory in personal computers when it was being used only five percent of the time. He argued that, in a supply-constrained environment, memory should be used as much as possible in the cloud.
His follow-up did not retract that argument about how limited memory could be allocated. Instead, Altman said he wants global production to grow so that more memory is available for both personal computers and data centers.
Sources: Kotaku.