Sam Altman: All the RAM Should Belong to Me, So I Can Charge People to Use It

hilariously

If he wants to rent my ram I'd let him pay for it.

bronxpockfabz

You'll own nothing and you'll be happy 2030 is soon btw ;)

behringer

How much ram does Sam Altman's computer have?

dudefeliciano

it's 2026 and the only use for RAM is to hold context for LLMs to sycophantically agree with everything I say

nemo1618

Journalists write headlines like this and then get all huffy when people "decline to comment" on their hitpiece

58955995959

The endgame of humanity is small hat renting put everything to you

tartavull

I listened to the full podcast, and this is taken completely out of context. His point was entirely logical: if there’s scarcity, it’s important to maximize utilization of the scarce asset, and you do that by putting it in a data centre where it’s serving people constantly.

paxy

Every day this story gets more exaggerated

hmokiguess

Is it possible to reinvent memory with stuff everyone owns or a separate system? It's been a while since I did hardware and low level stuff, so approach this question from a more "inventive" and perhaps "dreamy" way. Or just educate me on physics again and tell me to stop being dumb.

werber

I feel like he could sell this as a future where people have super computers at home and when they’re not running they’re generating income, he doesn’t seemed constrained by the truth, just promise everyone that you’re going to replace their jobs and that their home computer will provide for them. This universal basic compute idea here seems consumed with is not appealing to anyone outside of tech.

CodingJeebus

> “But 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 and being used 5% of the time,” he added. “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 of that.” Altman not acknowledging that companies like his are creating the conditions that cause the supply constraints is the Dr. Evil cherry on top.

coldpie

Tech company execs are among the stupidest people on Earth. Another article went around recently where the former CEO of Yahoo couldn't think of three positive words to describe her own child[1]. It's baffling that these people who probably put their pants on the wrong way around 50% of the time get as much airtime as they do. Truly breathtakingly stupid people. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/style/marissa-mayer-ai-as...

customguy

His pitch is to investors, and he's continually letting them know where is priorities are, and that he's serious about shitting on people for profit.

kashunstva

> “But 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 and being used 5% of the time,” It’s terrible from a global resource utilization perspective for people to fly around in private jets; but I can’t imagine Mr. Altman does otherwise. So thank you for trying to protect us from the terrible scourge that is personally-owned DRAM, but I’ll take my chances.

TrackerFF

I live in Norway, and had to check how much a top-shelf gaming PC would cost. One with RTX5090, 64GB DDR5, Ryzen 9, 4TB goes for equivalent to $13500, with most of that being the GPU and RAM. A year ago, the same PC would have cost a third or so. In any case, with the combination of expensive GPU, RAM, who the hell can actually afford this stuff.

tomrod

Huh. Why was this flagged?

dewwi

Everyone is making fun of him for this clumsy take, but there is some truce to it. It's essentially how Cloud computing came about. We will have good LLM models that run on local hardware, and that is fine. However, it is foolish to think that it will ever make economic sense to run frontier models on hardware that sits idle 40% of the time.

paulbjensen

If the goal is to maximise the utilisation of RAM in devices for computation purposes, then there might be some value in exploring these items: - https://github.com/exo-explore/exo - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/distributed-gpu-c...

joe_hills

It frustrates me that these AI companies’ hardware grab is aggressively antagonistic to technology enthusiasts. I find it reassuring that the leadership confirms that their intention is to make my hobbies and profession less financially viable, as I would otherwise worry I’m overreacting.

trashb

Maybe Altman can resurrect the SETI@home project, though I would rather have my PC work on finding things among the stars instead of answering dumb AI queries. https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/