OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that it is ‘quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer’. Speaking on Cheeky Pint, Altman stated that the memory in personal devices ends up “being used 5% of the time. ” Now, Elon Musk has replied to Sam Altma. “The people deserve to have their RAM too!,” Musk wrote without naming the OpenAI CEO. But when a X user Retard Finder @IfindRetards called Sam Altman a “retard” for his recent comments, the Tesla CEO replied “Seriously” to the post.
What Sam Altman said about DRAM
Speaking on the podcast, Altman said that keeping DRAM in personal devices is a poor use of a scarce resource. He pushed back on the idea that running open-source AI models on personal computers would take the load off data centres.“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,” he said, adding that the memory ends up “being used 5% of the time.”Sam Altman’s point is about utilisation. Memory in a data centre serves many users through the day, while the RAM in a laptop or phone sits idle for long stretches. “You want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment,” he said. “Somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”He also said he wants a lot more supply in the market. Sam Altman said OpenAI has built its own chip, is learning to build data centres, and plans to point its robotics programme at making more of them. On memory prices, he admitted the market has not corrected itself, saying “the invisible hand is failing right now.”
Memory chip shortage pushes up prices of phones, laptops and consoles
The squeeze is visible in the smartphone market. OnePlus, Samsung, Oppo and others have revised prices more than once because of rising memory costs, and industry watchers say mobile-grade memory now costs several times what it did a year ago.PCs are taking a bigger hit. On October 29, the same day the podcast went live, Intel forecast fourth-quarter revenue of $15 billion to $16 billion, short of the roughly $17 billion analysts expected, and its shares fell over 20% in extended trading. The company expects the PC market to shrink 12% this year and another 10% in 2027, and does not see memory supply or pricing easing next year. HP has said memory made up about 35% of a laptop’s production cost in July, up from 15-18% a quarter earlier.Consoles have no exception either. Sony has raised PS5 prices twice this year, the Xbox Series X now costs 60% more in the US than it did at its 2020 debut, and Nintendo raised the Switch 2’s price in September.
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