Comrade Altman has a plan for that RAM

Sam Altman has identified another obstacle to the glorious AI future: people buying RAM and then failing to keep it busy. On the October 29 episode of Cheeky Pint, the OpenAI CEO said: “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.” Quite terrible. Buy two sticks of memory, and suddenly you’re holding back civilization.

He was discussing running AI models locally, arguing that scarce memory should be kept as busy as possible in the cloud. An attractive proposition for someone selling cloud AI. People buy their own hardware to use on their own terms; now someone wants a productivity report. Sleeping? Taking a walk? Reading a paper book? The world’s precious DRAM is sitting idle. Comrade, who authorized this break in production?

The lecture comes from the head of a company competing for that same scarce memory to fill its data centers. Apparently, a resource is being squandered when a private individual owns it, but efficiently allocated when a private corporation accumulates it. Humanity’s interests turn out to align perfectly with OpenAI’s shopping list. What luck.

Twitter spent the weekend appreciating this discovery. Forbes writer Paul Tassi offered a concise assessment: “You know what I don't think I like this guy very much.” Elon Musk rallied to the defense of household RAM: “The people deserve to have their RAM too!” Personal computing now needs a billionaire champion. Quite a milestone.

Musk has his own cloud operation and his own appetite for compute. We recently covered his warning of an AI-cloud crisis, issued after he’d already borrowed $40 billion. So one AI infrastructure baron explains where memory would be most useful, while another argues that ordinary people should be allowed to keep a little. Apparently, the fate of a desktop upgrade must now be settled between computing empires.

The people deserve to have their RAM too!

Judging personal possessions by utilization could be a wonderfully productive exercise. The household drill becomes an economic offense. Empty disk space requires a written explanation. People buy things so they’re available when needed, including for purposes that don’t suit the vendor. A personal computer can run a model locally, without someone else’s server or a billing department’s permission. That freedom doesn’t register on a utilization chart.

“All RAM belongs to the people.” The cloud collective farm has its slogan ready. There’s still the business of deciding who speaks for the people, owns the servers and sets the rates, but Altman happens to know a company that could take care of that. The people get a login.