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Sam Altman, chief of OpenAI, believes that the memory in your computer is mostly wasted.

Altman discussed the RAM shortage on a recent episode of the Cheeky Pint podcast, saying that those who want to run AI locally have things “basically backwards,” according to a report by The Verge.

A lot of people want local inference, they assume that open-source models mean you can run open-source models on your own computer and not have to go to the data center.

Then he said the quiet part.

"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. You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment."

This is the ownership argument in a single sentence. Your personal computer is idle for most of the time. The memory that your personal computer has should be in a server and be used 100% of the time instead of in your personal computer and being used only 5%.

Altman made it clear that he isn’t blaming the current shortage on the companies trying to buy up all of the world’s supply of RAM, he just wants people to stop trying to put so much memory into their personal computers.

What Altman seems to think is wasting all of the world’s scarce memory are the types of computer users that he calls “intuitively backwards.” They want computers that will work for them without logins, subscriptions, or remote servers. They want to own computers. They want to be able to use the computers that they own when they want to use them.

This is how he frames the issue as one of efficiency. The result is that the memory that makes a computer a computer is stored in a building controlled by Altman and the suppliers of chips. You get to have a screen and keyboard, but they get to keep the chips.

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