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Sam Altman Thinks Your PC Is Wasting Precious RAM (tomshardware.com) 175

Posted by BeauHD from the we-see-what-you're-doing dept.
"Looks like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to own all the computing resources and rent out terminals to the world as a way of propping up his business plan, now that debt-ridden AI companies are teetering on the edge," writes ancient Slashdot reader Gilmoure. Tom's Hardware reports: In an interview over beers with the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, Altman said that local inference, and, by extension, people having DRAM in computers at home, is "quite terrible." When discussing local inference on home computers with open-source models, Altman discussed the assumption that people will be able to run local AI on their own computers, the ones they may already own or want to build.

Then he explained why that's a bad idea (at the 29-minute mark): "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," Altman said. "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."

While OpenAI does have some open-source models, its primary business is in closed-source models that run in data centers, so he's really defending the company's business model. OpenAI isn't exactly threatened by some laptops and gaming rigs just yet, but local AI could mean people one day paying less for subscriptions to models like GPT-6 Luna if they have the power to run them at home. Altman's talk suggests that the company would prefer that more RAM go to OpenAI's data centers rather than home computers, which also sparks enthusiast fears of not being able to own your own hardware or software, but rather rent an agent and a computer in the cloud.

Sam Altman Thinks Your PC Is Wasting Precious RAM More | Reply

Sam Altman Thinks Your PC Is Wasting Precious RAM

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  • I don't care (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Valgrus Thunderaxe ( 8769977 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:03PM (#66402032)
    What Sam Altman thinks of my PC.

    • You don't have a choice (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:15PM (#66402050)
      He has billions of dollars and nearly limitless power. Whether you care what he thinks about your PC or not he gets to decide whether you get to have a PC or not.

      You can't keep letting people have limitless power and then just throw up your hands and say I don't care. You can't live in an alternate universe where they don't exist and where they don't have power over you. And you can't just go somewhere they aren't because virtually all the land capable of sustaining human civilization is full of people already and those people have to listen to Sam Altman and guys like him who have the billions and billions of dollars and limitless power people refuse to take away from them.

      Politics affects your hobbies and your life whether you like it or not. I don't care doesn't make that go away. It's just cope.
      • This is why C can be a blessing when the rich and powerful get it ... cue Steve Jobs. Especially when they have the hubris to ignore sane medial advice as well.

      • Re:You don't have a choice (Score:5, Insightful)

        by wickerprints ( 1094741 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:29PM (#66402088)

        When someone says "I don't care" in this context, it isn't an expression of indifference, as if the issue doesn't have any material impact on them. It's an expression of DISDAIN. For example, when someone says "I don't care what Trump thinks," it is reasonable to infer that they mean that his thinking is fundamentally wrong and unworthy of discourse. That he is not someone whose thoughts are to be respected or regarded with any value.

        We DO need to stop these arrogant sociopaths. And we do that by refusing to buy into the explotative ecosystems and false narratives they push on us. But let's not read too literally into what is a common expression of frustration and twist its intended meaning.

        • Particularly a situation that you have given up on having any control over.

          And left wing spaces we call this complying in advance.

          The implication isn't just that you're looking down on the person making the comments, the implication is that you don't have to care about the comments they are making. That you're above all that.

          It's painfully obvious that we are not above the decisions Sam Altman makes. He gets to decide how our lives go. He's making serious decisions about the future of society, a

      • he gets to decide whether you get to have a PC or not.

        Horse. Shit.
        None of the companies that make the parts in my PC are going to ask for his permission to sell them to me.
        He's got a lot of spreadsheet wealth, it doesn't mean he can buy AMD and Micron tomorrow.
        When the bubble pops he'll still be a rich jerk, but there's a lot of rich jerks out there, and I don't need permission from any of them to buy computer parts.

      • What upsets Altman is he doesn't get to decide who has a PC.

    • Re:I don't care (Score:5, Insightful)

      by leonbev ( 111395 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:43PM (#66402112) Journal

      I don't care what he thinks either, but him and his AI buddies are making RAM and storage so expensive that many people can't afford to build or buy themselves a high end workstation anymore.

      By jacking up the prices for hardware, the AI cabal is forcing people to rent their compute from the cloud instead.

      • Re:I don't care (Score:4, Interesting)

        by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:48PM (#66402126)
        This is why minus 750 (as last check) points on the NASDAQ today is a good start ... if the elections flip Congress to candidates who are willing to tighten the regulatory noose around tech companies' balls, hope it will crash 2000-2001 style. The sooner the "AI bubble" pops and the US "you're the product" tech industry gets razed to the ground for a decade or two, the better it will be for society worldwide.

        • Wow, good thing you aren't a major campaign manager with the DNC. They'd be screwed with you spouting that rhetoric.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DarkOx ( 621550 )

          LOL it was the last crash that created the "you're the product" tech industry. Everyone woke in 2000 and realized nobody had a real business plan, and started sell; tech's answer was monitize the users.

          Holly crap dude you think with regulating big tech is going to give you more freedom. I have 20% share in the Brooklyn Bride if you are interested, I am willing to sell for pennies on the dollar!

          Seriously all regulating AI will do is make it harder or impossible for open source and open models. Regulation is

    • how much is he gonna pay me? and how funny is going to be to inspect the ram they are using on my pc and find all the funny government secrets that are being transmitted to uncontrolled hardware, and then tweaked on the local machine before sent back.

    • I don't care what Sam Altman thinks of my PC.

      I find it reassuring he will not approve of the 64GB I put into my PC last year.

    • What Sam Altman thinks of my PC.

      You should, he's the reason you can't afford to replace it if it breaks.

  • I've said it before (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:05PM (#66402034)

    And I'll say it again. Altman is the ultimate douche-bag sociopath grifting asshole. This fucker needs to go now.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 )
      The son of a bitch asks for society's consent, just like he asked for his sister's consent. If you know the story, you know.
    • Honestly he's probably barely cracking the top 100. There's over 2,000 billionaires on this planet. Sure he's a sociopathic monster but I mean we've got over 2,000 to choose from. And for some reason we give them limitless power and then we pretend that they don't have the limitless power.

      • Interesting thought.

        So how much money are you allowed to make over a lifetime? I assume that once you reach the cap that you are forcibly retired.

        Are you allowed to keep stock in the company that made you rich or do you have to divest and keep it all in government bonds? I assume any bonds still outstanding at your death would simply be cancelled and would not be passed on to your heirs.

        I can think of some other problems with a lifetime income limit but it's an interesting notion.

        • IMHO: It's the hoarding that's the problem, not how much they "make" over their lifetime.

          • Just so! The wealthy hoarding money prevents it from employing people as they claim. When we have the money we spend it and it can do work.

            • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

              by sfcat ( 872532 )
              You seem to think that the rich have giant piles of cash somewhere. Generally this isn't true, instead it is stored in large quantities of stock or other assets. Also, regular people save money too in much the same way. So your idea about consumption being the only way money can "do work" just isn't true. Also, if the rich spent their money like you seem to want, all it would do is drive up prices of luxury assets which creates yet another bubble. Basically, your entire idea just isn't how the world ac

              • Generally this isn't true, instead it is stored in large quantities of stock or other assets

                And why is that? Because it's a tax dodge. If taking loans collateralized against that paper wealth wasn't possible, they would have to liquidate that paper wealth to afford their rich asshole lifestyle, and it would be taxed. Keeping it paper means paying fuck-all to government while consuming the same or more amount of government services than people that pay far more taxes.

                I give no fucks if they keep their wealth in stocks or whatever. There's a completely different set of rules for them, and for us

            • When we have the money we spend it and it can do work.

              Giving people money to spend is a Demand Side Stimulus [wikipedia.org].

              A demand-side stimulus makes sense when:
              1. Unemployment is high
              2. Inflation is low
              3. The trade balance is in surplus

              None of these conditions are currently true.

              A demand-side stimulus in today's economy would fuel inflation and would mostly be spent on imports.

          • IMHO: It's the hoarding that's the problem

            Can you define what you mean by "hoarding"?

            Rich people have most of their money in equity. That's investing, not "hoarding".

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            Very, very few of the rich hoard money. That's not how you get rich, and it's also not what the ones who inherit tend to do.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          The way it was done back in the 50's and 60's was by tax. The more you made, the more taxes you paid. People still got rich, just as not as rich as today. And they often chose to do things with their money like give it to their employees rather then the taxman.

        • I don't care if they keep amassing wealth. I care if they aren't taxed accordingly.

          I should not be paying a higher effective tax rate than someone who has 100x my income, be it on paper or liquid. And yet.

          Stupid bullshit schemes were they take out loans against that paper wealth in order to still fly around on private jets and own multiple mansions without paying taxes is absolute insanity. If they want to be rich, then fucking be rich and liquidate a small percentage of that paper wealth, and PAY YOUR F

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Jeremi ( 14640 )

          So how much money are you allowed to make over a lifetime? I assume that once you reach the cap that you are forcibly retired.

          Nah, that would be gauche. Instead, we implement the cap relativity-style, where your tax rate increases proportional to the amount of money you've made already. As you keep making money, you asymptotically approach the financial "speed of light" but can never quite get there because in order to actually reach it you'd need to earn an infinite amount of money.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        I'd put him as one of the top 3 or 4, or at least one of the top 10, because of the power of his position, not because he's intrinsically the worst.

      • Altman also has no clue how to maximize his personal power. He's doing better than John McAfee, but he's barely holding things together. No time/ability for dominating things, he can barely even hold on to his power at OpenAI.

    • Re:I've said it before (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @11:09PM (#66402526) Journal

      Also, he's the same shit stain that not long ago thinks it would be a good idea to have an "intelligence meter" on the side of your house like other utility meters. That's his rent-seeking dream, and if you can buy enough RAM to run useful models at home, that directly interferes with his rent-seeking.

      Fuck him. I couldn't give a solitary shit if he approves of me owning my own compute or not.

  • Sam Altman is wasting precious oxygen (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wickerprints ( 1094741 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:09PM (#66402038)

    Why should I care what this dumb asshole thinks? If he takes up entire world's supply of RAM, then with what devices will we be able to presumably pay for the privilege to access his AI models? Is he really suggesting that we all go back to the days of running dumb terminals?

    What is this CEO disease, where they all think that just because they run a company, that they are suddenly subject matter experts for every domain of knowledge that built said company? Like, somehow just by being in a leadership position, they suddenly have the knowledge of all the engineers, developers, and technicians who built the product, as if they built everything with their bare hands? And what is with this mass delusion that so many people--shareholders included--buy this absurd narrative?

    Fuck this guy and fuck his arrogant "I'm the leader so I'm a visionary who can say and do no wrong" attitude. Put them all on a spaceship and blast them out of the solar system.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 )
      It's the recrudescence of the old 1960s time-share (client/server aka terminal) computing model. Me server. You client. You pay me, and pay some more. My pockets get bigger. Except that they make the "service" free now, and the real clients are the advertising companies, surveillance capitalists, and TLA thugs. In short, you're the product.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Is he really suggesting that we all go back to the days of running dumb terminals?

      Yes, The whole AI industry is suggesting it as part of the whole "you don't own anything anymore".

      Nvidia because they don't want you to own GPUs - they've been restricting how many 5000 series gaming GPUs they make so they can make more of their AI processors. In the meantime, why not subscribe to GeForce Now and their gaming subscription services. And with RAM prices causing everything to jump up in price, streaming gaming s

    • "Is he really suggesting that we all go back to the days of running dumb terminals?"

      That's how I read it.

    • If he takes up entire world's supply of RAM, then with what devices will we be able to presumably pay for the privilege to access his AI models? Is he really suggesting that we all go back to the days of running dumb terminals?

      In principle, what he wants you/us to do is to get some lightweight graphical terminals (machines with slow processors, basic memory and GPU) and use them to do VDI in the cloud. According to his/their vision, our memory is DDR3, maybe DDR4 (only if the DDR$ production lines can not be converted to DDR5 or 6), our processors are not made in a cutting edge litho, we have barely enough RAM for the light terminal to function. Something akin to a low end Chromebook.

      In a separate but related and Interesting note

    • > Put them all on a spaceship and blast them out of the solar system.

      That's too expensive. Aim for the Sun.

  • Local data is a threat (Score:5, Informative)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:11PM (#66402042)
    Anything written that's stored on someone's own computer, or (worse!) on paper, is a threat to the business model of parasites like Altman. They want everything that people write, message, even think about. They want to be able to sell "inferences" on every single person to Fascist governments as well as to surveillance/advertising capitalists. Does society consent to this? I doubt it. But his sister didn't consent either when he tried to crawl into bed with her.

  • of precious bodily fluids, iykyk.

  • false premise (Score:4, Insightful)

    by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:13PM (#66402048) Homepage Journal

    "the world's limited supply of DRAM"

    The world's constrained supply of DRAM should ease in 2-5 years, at which point his argument, such as it is, will be much weaker.

    That said, from an economy-of-scale and efficient-use-of-resources perspective, centralization makes sense. But form a privacy, autonomy, actual-ownership, and personal freedom perspective, it's a disaster waiting to happen.

    • from an economy-of-scale and efficient-use-of-resources perspective, centralization makes sense.

      This assumes that my interests are perfectly aligned with Sammyboy's.

      But they aren't, and his proposal is no different than that any other greedbag who wants to own your future.

      Allow me to counteroffer: Sam, fuck off to an island somewhere and scan crab eyeballs or something. We'll give LLMs their due attention, pat yourself on the head. Somewhere far away from humanity.

  • Sounds perfectly reasonable (Score:3)

    by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:15PM (#66402052) Journal
    Sure, no problem:
    • He can create a distributed client [berkeley.edu] and farm out AI queries to all these otherwise idle PCs. Maybe people would be willing to provide access to their computers for a small fee [bbc.co.uk].
    • Or he can grow the AI company side-by-side with power generation and RAM fabrication.

    Both reasonable suggestions, and I bet there are more out there.

  • Sounds like Nestlé (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tomahawk ( 1343 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:16PM (#66402056) Homepage
    who want to own all of the water.

  • Fuck You Sam (Score:4, Insightful)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:17PM (#66402060)

    I'll never rent your hardware or software. Die in a fire.

    You can pull the ram from the computers in my cold dead hands.

  • No "unused" memory in modern OSs (Score:5, Informative)

    by chipperdog ( 169552 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:21PM (#66402074) Homepage
    Most modern operating systems will use memory not allocated to an application for disk caching, so it's far from unused.
    • It's not being used IN THE WAY SCUM ALTMAN WANTS. That's the problem. He wants his AI models to have access to everyone's data to munch on ... their bank statements, their purchases, their budgets, their diaries, their conversations, almost their private thoughts. He wants to be able to sell "inferences" on literally everyone to surveillance ad-capitalists and malicious three-letter agencies worldwide. The fact that people want to have privacy, that there's human thought going on outside of the Internet

  • Low utilization (Score:5, Funny)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:26PM (#66402080)
    Sam is right about low utilization. I use my toilet only about 0.1% of the day, it has much higher throughput than I could ever realistically hope to utilize even after eating Taco Bell. I am very over-toileted.

  • I think Sam Altman is a waste of precious resources like O2 and H20.

    • I have it on good authority that he's only using 10% of his brain power at any time.

      He should probably hand it over to somebody else.

  • He's secretly been eating all the ram himself, it's the only logical conclusion. I mean otherwise he'd be a two bit con artists jumping from lie to lie in a desperate scramble, and that couldn't happen.

  • Altman said that local inference, and, by extension, people having DRAM in computers at home, is "quite terrible."

    He said it specifically about the local inference. Get your facts straight.

  • Look, I could spend hours arguing on why ownership of the means of production is important and how out of touch the AI CEOs are, but I won't, so I'll just leave this here: fuck you Altman.

  • The Capitalist wet dream is that you would own nothing and rent everything. Going back to the toothbrush-communism meme, I'm 100% someone is working on a toothbrush that requires a subscription to use.

  • Centralize everything! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by garompeta ( 1068578 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @06:14PM (#66402172)
    I think it is terrible to have food in your own refrigerator. Such a waste of space.
    You should come to my restaurant, and pay me for food, because our refrigerators are always efficiently at max capacity.

  • > somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that

    Billionaires owning and running every aspect of our lives, and then charging nickels and dimes for every move we want to make and every thought we want ot think, is somehow not a very popular idea.

    For some reason.

    It really is very difficult to figure out why . . .

  • You will own nothing, they don't care if you're happy. You're now their slave. Worship your masters.

  • with all the money thrown around... they could solve the shortage just fine by building out production capacity themselves... and feed into their own machine. A fab is the price of a rounding error on their data center buildout budgets.

    Yes, would take a minute to build, but then the "shortage" won't be a shortage and their biggest expense nose dives - the hardware. They could have built the production capacity several times over and used the savings towards their buildouts.

    I am guessing they don't have th

    • You are assuming an infinite supply of natural resources required to produce RAM. It isn't just production capacity in terms of labor, there is also not enough natural resources available to manufacture RAM in unlimited quantities.

  • Sammy boy will have to make sure that his pal Jensen builds a datacenter near me (say, Caracas or Maracay, Venezuela) so that I can game after work with no lag, AND Sammy boy will have to build an OpenAI DC near me in Venezuela as Well.

    Considering OpenAI does not even let you connect to their AI from Venezuela without a VPN (with all the friction that implies), I'd say:

    Go Fuck Yourself.

    I'd rather build a DDR3 rig with a 9th Gen Intel Processor with a Gigabyte H310M DS2V DDR3 (Rev. 1.0) mobo to weather the s

  • This guy will now say anything, regardless how stupid.

  • "The plebs shall not have computing power of his own!" is not just in the interest of Sam Altman, it is also quite compatible with the notion of many politicians that the underlings shall be obedient and not think for themselves, thus underlings having AI at their disposal, which is not censored and controlled centrally, is something they will want to avoid.

    So better prepare for the time when "personal compute and storage" will be strictly capped at low levels in order to make everyone depend on centraliz

  • Most people want to own at least SOMETHING, like their own home computer.

    P. S. Fuck off, Sam.

  • Than 64 Gigabytes.

  • A deal to be made? (Score:3)

    by liqu1d ( 4349325 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @08:48PM (#66402402)
    I've got 256gb over a couple pcs. I'll sell it to Altman for 500k. I await the email.
  • And the wailing ghosts (d. 1997) of X terminals have returned to haunt and seduce us into indecent communion with the Devil.
  • â¦When he pries it from my cold dead handsâ¦
  • Can lick my crusted asshole. Fuck that guy.

  • Look at me sitting here with 128GB of DDR5 that I bought for $550 on Black Friday two years ago. It's mine, I tell you! ...What? I could get how much for it? Hmmm...

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