After claiming people having RAM was “quite terrible” and rightfully getting dunked on by a huge part of the internet, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said his controversial statement was “taken out of context” in a post today.
“I actually do want the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers, and it is fucking annoying that this was taken out of context,” Altman wrote on social media (as spotted by Kotaku). “I have been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time,” the CEO added.
Despite his claims, the statement in question seems pretty clear-cut. “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 five percent of the time,”Altman said in an interview last week. “You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment.”
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AI companies like OpenAI play a huge hand in the skyrocketing RAM prices, since they vaccuum up available RAM and shrink the available supply. But don’t worry, Altman said he doesn’t want to steal your memory; instead, he said he just wants the world to build more RAM—probably so he doesn’t have to covet yours in the first place.
Altman’s original statement unsurprisingly went up like a lead balloon, earning him ridicule from the internet. “Using a stick of RAM to stir my coffee this morning, fuck you, Sam Altman,” one user wrote. Another image—which prompted Altman’s response—had a series of RAM sticks laid out toward a box trap. “I lol’d,” the OpenAI CEO said eloquently.
To show he’s a funny, harmless guy who can take a joke and is totally not making cartoonishly large eyes at your RAM sticks, Sam Altman changed his social media name to “Ram Altman,” Kotaku reports, though he has changed it back at the time of writing.
Last week, stock prices for big tech companies plummeted after they reported suboptimal earnings. Google in particular purportedly pointed to its AI overview hurting its bottom line.
AI has been nearly ubiquitous in the past years. It “has infested the world as no parasite had ever done before,” as Destructoid’s Andrej Barovic put it, dealing devastating environmental, economic, and societal blows to the world. But the technology gives us undoubtedly good things, like making fun of how atrocious DLSS 5 looks and… yeah, I think that’s it.
