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On the Cheeky Pint podcast, Sam Altman said it is "quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply" of sitting in personal computers, arguing that "you want maximum utilization in the cloud" while chips are scarce.
He acknowledged that "a lot of people want ."
The remarks spread on Friday, the week Intel fell almost 30% on a weak PC outlook driven by memory prices, and Bloomberg reported that Altman had met Samsung executives as the shortage deepens.
OpenAI is one of the largest memory buyers in the world, and its chief is now arguing in public that consumers should have less of it. That puts the cloud labs against local models, whose whole case rests on cheap consumer memory.
Altman calls it "quite terrible" that PCs hold memory the cloud could use
On the Cheeky Pint podcast, Sam Altman said it is "quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply" of DRAM sitting in personal computers, arguing that "you want maximum utilization in the cloud" while chips are scarce. He acknowledged that "a lot of people want local inference." The remarks spread on Friday, the week Intel fell almost 30% on a weak PC outlook driven by memory prices, and Bloomberg reported that Altman had met Samsung executives as the shortage deepens.
OpenAI is one of the largest memory buyers in the world, and its chief is now arguing in public that consumers should have less of it. That puts the cloud labs against local open-weight models, whose whole case rests on cheap consumer memory. SourcesBC
Sources
- BSam Altman says it's quite terrible for your PC to have RAM (Tom's Hardware)tomshardware.com
- CSam Altman hates local AI models (Futurism)futurism.com
This story ran in the Morning Brief of October 31st 2026.