Altman: it's "quite terrible" for people to keep RAM in their own PCs; post quoting him draws 19,000 likes

"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." An X post quoting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (Shitpost 2077) passed 19,000 likes on Oct. 30.

Tom's Hardware reported Altman said this in an interview over beers with the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, while discussing local inference with open-source models at home (around the 29-minute mark). "You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite," he said, adding the RAM sits idle 95% of the time.

The outlet noted OpenAI's main business is closed models in data centers, so he was defending its business model; if people could run models at home some might pay less in subscriptions. Enthusiasts worry about renting agents and computers instead of owning hardware. foombler called it insulting to relegate users to AI only through subscriptions (280 likes) and Tom Warren (tomwarren) wrote "These people don't want you to own anything" (760).

Another Altman remark drew attention the same day. At Stanford's business school he said "my chronic disappointment with MBA students is that they always want to go do the thing that was cool five years ago," and when the interviewer asked "even if AI is the cool thing right now?" the crowd laughed, Futurism reported, citing Fortune. A DRAM-focused ETF fell 7% that day.