Sam Altman becomes ‘Ram Altman’ and says his memory remark was misread

Sam Altman says people took his remark about memory in home computers out of context. The OpenAI chief executive made the point on X on Wednesday. Hours earlier, he had renamed himself “Ram Altman” on the platform.

“i actually do want the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers, and it is f*cking annoying that this was taken out of context,” Altman wrote on X.

He said he has long pushed for the world to make more memory. One user asked why he wanted their RAM. Altman gave a short answer.

“i want you to have so much ram lets build more,” he wrote.

A name change that didn’t last

The thread began under an Altman post saying people should stay in control of the future. A user replied with a meme of memory chips leading into a box trap, and Altman wrote “i lol’d”. Another user asked him to rename his account “Ram Altman”, and he answered “ok yeah”.

The new name did not last. By 11am ET on Wednesday his profile read “Sam Altman” again, Business Insider reported. OpenAI declined to comment to Business Insider.

The posts came a week after Altman spoke on Cheeky Pint, the podcast of Stripe co-founder John Collison. He was talking about people who want to run AI models on their own machines. Then he turned to DRAM, the working memory in computers and servers, as we reported then.

“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 and being used 5% of the time,” Altman said on the podcast.

Data centres, he said, could use that memory more fully while supply is tight.

Musk joined in

Elon Musk mocked the remark in an X post on Sunday. He shared a meme with a short caption.

“The people deserve to have their RAM too!” the meme read.

Several replies to Altman’s new post pushed back. They asked why OpenAI had secured so much memory for its own data centres if he wanted people to have more.

Memory prices have climbed as AI data centres buy up supply. SK Hynix said last month that the shortage will last to 2030. Micron expects it to tighten into 2028.