- A new Linux script called ‘Ram Altman’ is a tongue-in-cheek creation
- It emails Sam Altman with a report of the unused RAM in your PC, also known as the RAM he missed out on
- The joke follows a controversial comment Altman made recently about how it’s ‘quite terrible’ that everyone has a load of RAM sitting in their own PC, rather than in data centers
Someone has planted their tongue firmly in cheek and knocked up a little script that reports the amount of RAM being used in your Linux PC
Okay, so this script on GitHub (spotted by Respawn First) doesn’t actually email Sam Altman – though it could be used to message someone (theoretically the OpenAI CEO if you had his private email somehow). However, the creator makes it clear that they don’t intend to have this tool used to spam people (as you’d hope).
It’s a joke, of course, and one made at the expense of Altman after he recently commented that it’s “quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer.”
That comment sparked developer Iain Kay to craft this openhat writes to Sam Altman once a day to report the RAM he missed.”
The Linux utility is designed to “track total, used and available RAM, plus your standing with the global allocation authorities,” with the developer noting that it sends at most one email per day.
As mentioned, you are not supposed to be setting this up to actually spam someone with emails about your RAM usage, not unless it’s a willing participant who will enjoy the (daily) joke, such as the “friend who has been waiting for DDR5 prices to come down” as the dev observes.
The email content around the RAM report is rotated with 10 messages, eight different subject lines, and six sign-offs, all to ensure that the “joke gets old at a carefully managed pace.”
No email is sent if you have less than 10% of your system RAM free, incidentally, as the creator judges that your machine has “suffered enough” and doesn’t need another task on its memory plate.
Should you not wish to bother with an installation, but want to see the joke messages anyway, they’re up on a website here. As ever, run any third-party software on your PC at your own risk.
There’s a sample email given on the GitHub page:
Please don’t be alarmed, but there is 8.6 GiB of RAM on my desk that isn’t in a data center. That’s 56.2% of what’s installed here, and as far as I can tell it has no plans today.
Analysis: large language misjudgement
This is a well-observed piece of humorous coding, so full credit to Iain Kay in that respect. Of course, as the developer acknowledges, Sam Altman very quickly walked back his “quite terrible” comment (which it was in a very literal sense, certainly for the OpenAI CEO who has faced monumental amounts of flak for the utterance).
If you recall, Altman was quoted from a podcast, and the CEO has since argued that he was taken out of context. Now, many folks aren’t having that and feel this is just his attempt to weasel out of the ensuing controversy, although I can see both sides of the coin here.
Altman’s comment was made in a discussion about people running local AI models and using lots of RAM for that, rather than using the likes of ChatGPT or other cloud-based LLMs. The problem is he doesn’t specifically say that, and instead uses the term “everybody” having a bunch of RAM sat in their PCs, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to see that he really meant those using local AIs (the direct competition for his product, as it were) as he later clarified.
Still, he didn’t say that, and the way he phrased this, and the lack of understanding of how much anger such a broad and sweeping comment would provoke, remains quite breathtaking. It’s the sort of classic and stereotyped blunder out-of-touch-with-reality tech CEOs can typically make, and in that way, the fiery feedback was inevitable in the current climate of ridiculous PC component inflation caused by AI demand.
As one Redditor says: “Can [this script] also report how much unused RAM is sitting in warehouses that OpenAI stockpiled to keep out of the market and can’t use yet because they don’t have a way to power any of it?” (There are similar rumors along these lines about GPUs, too, and graphics card price hikes).
I doubt that this ‘Ram Altman’ script is the last the CEO will be hearing of this affair.
