Sam Altman says RAM in your PC is a “Terrible” use of supply

Sam Altman thinks your RAM is being wasted, and he’d like it moved to a data centre.

Speaking on Cheeky Pint, the OpenAI CEO pushed back on the idea that open-source models make data centres less necessary. His argument is that people assume local inference solves the problem, but memory in personal PCs sits idle most of the time. He put the usage at “five percent of the time” and called it a “quite terrible” way to allocate the world’s limited DRAM supply. In a supply-constrained market, he says, you want maximum utilisation in the cloud.

He’s got a point on paper. Idle hardware is idle hardware. But I can’t ignore who’s making it. The head of one of the biggest AI companies is telling people that memory belongs in data centres, while those same data centres are a big reason RAM prices keep climbing. That’s a bit like the person buying up all the bread saying you shouldn’t keep a loaf at home.

Altman also said he’d take “1 trillion AIs of slightly superhuman intelligence” joining society over a single AI with a trillion IQ.

Most of us bought that RAM to game, edit and multitask, not to sit idle for his benefit. Frankly, I’d like my 95 percent back.