Elon Musk Mocks Sam Altman Over Claim Home PCs Are Wasting RAM

In brief

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said it is "quite terrible" for the world's limited supply of DRAM to sit in home computers that are used 5% of the time.
• Elon Musk mocked the comments on X with a meme of the Nazi officer Hans Landa from Inglourious Basterds accusing people of "withholding DRAM from the cloud."
• The exchange is the latest clash between the two OpenAI co-founders, after a jury rejected Musk's $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI in May.

Elon Musk has mocked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for arguing that the world's limited supply of computer memory would be better used in AI data centers than in people's home computers.

Altman made the comments in an interview with the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, while discussing the shortages of memory and other components caused by the AI boom.

"A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we're going to have open-source models," Altman said, referring to running AI models on a user's own hardware. "But from like 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 and being used 5% of the time."