- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman would rather have RAM put into data centers
- Altman says it’s ‘quite terrible’ that RAM is sitting in individual PCs
- The comments haven’t gone down well with consumers online
The increasing demands from data centers powering AI engines has plunged us into a global RAM shortage crisis, and the CEO of one of the companies responsible thinks the memory that is available should be in data centers rather than individual PCs.
Offering up an opinion that’s unlikely to add to his popularity among the general public, OpenAI boss Sam Altman told the Cheeky Pint podcast that “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.”
Individual PCs rarely make full use of their RAM, was Altman’s larger point, whereas data centers often do. “You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment,” the OpenAI CEO continued. “And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”
The PC owners Altman was referring to have had to deal with rising prices, job insecurity, and data center pollution thanks to the rise of AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, so the opinion he’s shared is unlikely to be supported by the masses.
Not a popular opinion
As you would expect, consumers aren’t particularly pleased with what Altman has had to say. A Reddit thread discussing the comments is packed with pushback against AI, data centers, and the RAM shortage.
“It’s only 64GB but he can pry it from my cold, dead hands,” writes one commenter in the thread, while another is of the opinion that “[tech company executives] will destroy the planet by continuing with this mentality and then they’ll promptly blame everyone else for the downfall”.
The out-of-touch mentality of AI company bosses gets several mentions — as do their ethics, with bots like ChatGPT having built up their training data on vast amounts of information, often copyrighted, without paying for it. It’s fair to say Altman’s comments haven’t gone down well.
Most analysts expect RAM to be in short supply for years to come, which is going to mean prices for consumer gadgetry continue to rise, and anyone thinking about building their own PC will have to pay top dollar for its components.
