After a week of being roasted by PC gamers, the OpenAI boss has renamed himself "Ram Altman", says he wants you to have "so much ram", and reckons his comments were taken out of context.
Sam Altman has responded to the backlash over saying it was "quite terrible" for scarce DRAM to sit in home PCs.
On X he posted "i want you to have so much ram" and "lets build more", and renamed his account "Ram Altman".
He said it was "f***ing annoying" his comments were taken out of context, and that he's long pushed for more memory production.
He hasn't walked back the core point: when supply is tight, he reckons memory is better used in the cloud.
RAM prices are still soaring, with consoles getting dearer and Nvidia's RTX 5080 gone from its own store.
Sam Altman has finally noticed that PC gamers want to run him out of town over his RAM comments. His response? He changed his X name to “Ram Altman”, said he wants you to have “so much ram”, and complained it was “f***ing annoying” that he’d been “taken out of context”.
Nice try, Sam. We all heard the podcast.
If you missed our original story, here’s what kicked it off. On the Cheeky Pint podcast with Stripe co-founder John Collison, the OpenAI boss said that “from a global allocation perspective” it was “quite terrible” for the world’s limited supply of DRAM to be sitting in people’s own computers, being used, by his reckoning, about 5 per cent of the time. What you want, he said, is “maximum utilization in the cloud”.
PC gamers, who have been paying through the nose for memory all year because AI companies are hoovering it up, did not take that well. Neither did Elon Musk, who posted an Inglourious Basterds meme declaring “The people deserve to have their RAM too!” We also had a crack at it ourselves. Sam, you bought it all.
On Tuesday, US time, Altman started replying on X. First came a short one: “i want you to have so much ram”, followed by “lets build more”.
A few hours later, when someone suggested he rename his account “Ram Altman”, he replied “ok yeah” and actually did it. Then came the bit that’s really got people going. He said it was “only because” he actually does want the world to have tons of memory and for people to put as much as they want in their computers, and that it was “f***ing annoying” that his comments were taken out of context. “I have been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time,” he added.
The replies were about as warm as you’d expect. The top one under that post calls it damage control and tells him not to gaslight everyone.
Partly, but not in the way he’d like. To be fair to him, in the same podcast he did say memory makers have been too slow to build new factories, and that supply needs to go way up for prices to come down. He never called for limits on the RAM you can buy, either. So nobody’s coming for the sticks in your PC.
But read his new posts closely. As IGN pointed out, he isn’t saying memory works just as well in your PC as in a data centre. He’s saying there should be enough of it to go around. The original point still stands: when supply is tight, he reckons it’s better off in the cloud. That’s the context. It’s just not a context anyone who has bought RAM this year is going to like.
And it matters who’s saying it. OpenAI’s Stargate deals with Samsung and SK Hynix reportedly target up to 900,000 DRAM wafers a month, which some estimates put at up to 40 per cent of global supply. When the guy buying a huge chunk of the world’s memory says memory is being wasted in home PCs, “let’s build more” doesn’t exactly fix the vibe.
The RAM crunch isn’t a meme for gamers. IGN notes that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have all raised console prices because of what’s been nicknamed the “RAMpocalypse”, and that the RTX 5080 has disappeared from Nvidia’s own store weeks after the RTX 5090 was all but discontinued. Here in NZ and Australia, where we already pay more for parts, it stings even harder.
Altman also posted a separate statement on Tuesday saying people should always be in control of the future and shouldn’t “cede control of the future to superintelligence”. IGN noted some took that as a response to the US midterm results. Either way, it came on the same day he was trying to win back PC gamers, which tells you he knows the public mood on AI is turning.
Fair play for the “Ram Altman” rename. That’s a decent self-own, and it’s more of a sense of humour than most tech CEOs manage. But “I was taken out of context” is the oldest move in the playbook, and it doesn’t hold up here. The full quote is out there. He said what he said, on a podcast about AI’s memory crunch, as the boss of the company eating that memory.
If he really wants us to have so much RAM, there’s an easy way to prove it: stop buying so much of it. Until RAM prices come back down, gamers are going to keep roasting him every time this comes up, and fair enough.
Buying it, or is this just damage control? Have your say in the GetRekt Discord.
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