{"id":820534,"date":"2026-11-01T07:28:22","date_gmt":"2026-11-01T07:28:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/820534\/"},"modified":"2026-11-01T07:28:22","modified_gmt":"2026-11-01T07:28:22","slug":"openais-sam-altman-thinks-its-great-if-you-can-afford-ram","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/820534\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI’s Sam Altman Thinks It’s Great If You Can Afford RAM"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve tried to buy new electronics recently, from gaming consoles to iPhones, you\u2019ll have dealt with prices that are hundreds higher than they were even a year ago. That\u2019s because the price of RAM keeps going up<\/a> as AI companies race to build out datacenters to feed the insatiable compute demands of frontier LLM models. Lots of people think being unable to buy RAM for consumer products at a reasonable price is a bad thing. OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman disagrees<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people want local inference,\u201d the executive whose company is expected to go public sometime next year recently told the Cheeky Pint<\/a> podcast. \u201cAnd somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now because we are going to have open-source models, we\u2019re going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we\u2019re not going to need all the stuff in the data center.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a debate in the AI world right now about whether the future will be people running \u201clight weight\u201d open-source models on local devices, like phones and laptops, or whether all meaningful AI models will be run out of the cloud, i.e. massive data centers controlled exclusively by tech giants. Altman is coming down firmly on the side of the datacenters, and thus the companies currently buying up all available memory and sending prices skyrocketing for years to come in the process.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut from a global allocation perspective, actually, it\u2019s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world\u2019s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time,\u201d Altman continued. \u201cYou want maximum utilization in the cloud if you\u2019re trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow everyone\u2019s\u2014many people\u2019s intuition is the opposite of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

These \u201call your RAM are belong to us\u201d proclamations were delivered in-between sips of a slowly warming IPA (all the tech CEOs are now forced to discuss world historical moments while awkwardly smashing beers on podcasts<\/a>), but will have far-reaching consequences if they actually come to pass. It\u2019s not hard to imagine a future where everything is rented, not just movies and Google spreadsheets but also the AI models these companies hope will micromanage and ultimately monetize every spare moment of your life.<\/p>\n

Being able to play Grand Theft Auto 6 locally once it gets ported to PC<\/a> is a waste in the mind of Altman. Stream it from the cloud in-between datacenters burning tokens to scrape the web and replace it with AI-generated overviews instead. Better yet, have ChatGPT agents bid on your behalf against other agents for how much the spare compute is worth it to you to take a nightly drive around Vice City. Please clap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019ve tried to buy new electronics recently, from gaming consoles to iPhones, you\u2019ll have dealt with prices…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":820535,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,874,96078,10108,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-820534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-openai","tag-ram","tag-sam-altman","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=820534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/820535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}