Sam Altman has responded to criticism of comments he made about RAM in personal computers, saying his position was misrepresented. The OpenAI CEO said he wants people to have plenty of memory and to install as much as they want in their PCs. He also expressed frustration that his remarks had been taken out of context and said he has long called for increased memory production.
The controversy followed an appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast, where Altman discussed global memory shortages and demand from AI data centers. He argued that, from the perspective of allocating scarce resources, it was inefficient for so much DRAM to sit in personal computers that, by his estimate, are used only 5% of the time. He suggested cloud services could make more intensive use of the available memory.
His comments drew criticism on social media, particularly from PC gamers concerned about rising hardware costs. Altman later clarified his remarks on X, in the context of a discussion about open-source AI models and whether to run them locally or use large data centers. He said data centers can use resources more efficiently, while stressing that he is not opposed to people having large amounts of RAM in their own computers.
Sources: Vandal.