Sam Altman Says Your PC's RAM Is a Waste of the World's Memory
Sam Altman Thinks You're Wasting DRAM
Speaking on the Cheeky Pint podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that letting ordinary people keep DRAM in their own machines is a poor use of a scarce global resource, since local hardware sits idle most of the time. He favors pooling memory in datacentres for maximum utilization, even as OpenAI has secured rights to buy up to 40% of global DRAM output. He also revealed OpenAI is designing a custom AI chip called Jalapeno.
From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everyone have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer. And be used 5% of the time.
- logancbrown
Two statements can be true and he stated one of them. Sam is not wrong.
1. Local inference can cause a large under-utilization of resources from users that do not run local inference hardware at capacity over the hardwares lifespan. This is under-utilization and under-utilization is not optimal from an economics perspective.
2. The concentration of inference hardware to singular providers can aggregate power to single systems or organizations, and their incentives may be at odds with individual users.
The same power dynamic and economics struggle has existed nearly everywhere for all of history. For example, if you want to decide to own or rent a piece of heavy construction machinery for business, you will find a long list of do-not's on the rental contractual terms, but you are more than welcome to buy your own and operate your own machinery at several times the price for the hours used and use it however you want.
- VariousPrograms
Guy with the most DRAM in the world thinks it's terrible he doesn't have all of it.
It would be more efficient to ban cars in favor of mass transit. It would be more efficient if people only lived in apartment complexes rather than standalone houses. Tons of things can be more "efficient" if you take away people's desire for privacy and ownership.
- lrvick
[flagged]
- TheJCDenton
He's right in a such a narrow space on this particular matter that it's just a perfect example of what's wrong with a lot of things lately.
OpenAI triggered this ordeal with its order of 900K DRAM wafers per month on october 2025, making everyone panic because it was around 40% of the world production at the time.
We all know that memory providers know what near bankruptcy feels like when they over invest, but right now SK Hynix have 80% margins (ie TSMC ~60%) and choose to pay their shareholders this year the quivalent of ALL their revenues in 2025. It's now common knowledge thanks to Samsung that the rate of factory buidling is not maxmium to portect their margins. And memory providers have already been fined in 2000 for price fixing.
Supply is short because they all choose to make it that way.
- bugake
Altman: You are welcome to invest a little bit of your fortune in making major software developers write more efficient code that stops wasting our RAM. Start with internet browsers and the Windows 11 app that wastes one gigabyte showing the weather.