Over the past year, the prices of RAM and SSDs have surged, leading many to abandon plans to upgrade their PCs until costs come down. However, this wait may be a long one; according to SK Hynix, prices might not drop until 2030. In the *Cheeky Pint* podcast released yesterday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman remarked that using RAM in personal computers (PCs) for this purpose is a "bad idea."
Altman argues that, given the current tight supply of RAM, it would be better to allocate the memory found in PCs—which might otherwise be used to run artificial intelligence (AI) models locally—to data centers instead. His reasoning is that RAM in a typical PC is only utilized at about 5% capacity, whereas memory in data centers is used far more efficiently for cloud-based AI processing.
This statement has drawn negative reactions, as OpenAI is considered one of the factors driving the exorbitant cost of RAM and memory. Since OpenAI offers a subscription-based cloud AI service, there is a clear conflict of interest: Altman would naturally prefer that people not run AI models locally on their own PCs using open-source alternatives.
