Sam Altman: “It’s Quite Terrible” That People Have DRAM In Their Own Computers for Local Inference
November 2nd, 2026Eventually, Sam Altman schadenfreude will be the best schadenfreude.
Sam Altman says its bad that everyone’s personal computers are using the world’s limited supply of memory chips.
"It’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAMs sitting in their own computer, and being used 5% of the time. Like, you want maximum utilization."
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) October 30, 2026
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Via: PC Magazine:
It’s not exactly a surprise, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman isn’t a fan of people running AI models locally because it can pull precious memory supplies away from data centers.
“You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow, many people’s intuition is the opposite of that,” Altman said in a new interview on the Cheeky Pint podcast.
In contrast, OpenAI partners, including Nvidia and Microsoft, have been touting the benefits of running AI models on new PC hardware with high memory capacity. Local AI offers better privacy, but it also means consumers and enterprises can ditch cloud-based AI without paying, making the business model a direct threat to OpenAI and other top providers.
“A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now because we are going to have open-source models,” Altman said. “We’re going to be able to run them on our computers. And so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data center. But 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 be used 5% of the time.”
