Sam Altman has a message for anyone who felt targeted by his recent remarks on computer memory: he wants you to have as much RAM as you want. The OpenAI chief executive spent Tuesday night on X defending himself against backlash that began last week, when he described the world’s limited supply of memory chips sitting idle in personal computers as “quite terrible”.
The original comments came during an appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast with Stripe co-founder John Collison.
Altman was discussing the idea that open-source AI models could run locally on people’s own machines, reducing the need for massive data centres.
He rejected that logic.
“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,” Altman said.
PC enthusiasts and developers, already frustrated by memory prices driven higher by AI companies buying up supply for data centres, read the remarks as an argument for taking RAM out of their hands and putting it into OpenAI’s servers.
One Reddit user on the r/Technology board wrote that Altman “sees anyone owning something for their own personal use as a resource that he’s being denied”.
Elon Musk joined the backlash and posted on X with a post that did not name Altman directly:
“The people deserve to have their RAM too!”.
By Tuesday night, Altman was in damage-control mode.
A user on X even challenged him to change his display name to “Ram Altman.” He agreed, but used the moment to push back.
“But only because…I actually do want the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers, and it is fucking annoying that this was taken out of context,” Altman wrote.
Replying to another user who asked why he wanted their RAM, Altman said:
“I want you to have so much ram lets build more”.
The name change was brief, just like a joke; as of Wednesday, his display name on X had reverted to “Sam Altman.”
While this was fun and more like a meme-war, AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta have secured long-term memory deals and reserved output for data-centre buildouts, leaving less DRAM for consumer devices, and this made smartphone makers like Samsung, OnePlus and Oppo raise prices, while HP reported a sharp increase in memory’s share of laptop manufacturing costs.
Intel has also warned the shortage could last through at least next year, and memory maker SK Hynix has predicted it could drag on until 2030.
