‘F***ing annoying’: Sam Altman claims comments about PC gamers buying RAM ‘taken out of context’

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed that his controversial remarks on PC users buying RAM were “taken out of context”.

This comes after the exec made an appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast and touched on the topic of the worldwide RAM shortage.

“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. “You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment.”

His comments were soon met with criticism online, particularly in the gaming community. This is perhaps unsurprising, as many are struggling to upgrade their PCs thanks to the RAM shortage, partially created by Altman’s OpenAI.

Now, Altman has addressed the critics on his X account. “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 fucking annoying that this was taken out of context,” he said. “I have been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time.”

Within the context of the clip, Altman is discussing the rise in open-source AI models, and responds to critics who argue that large, memory-hungry data centers are no longer necessary.

He argues that data centers supplying demand would be more effective, but as per his own argument, this would still come at the cost of consumers struggling to secure memory for their own setups.

The RAM crisis has had a disastrous impact on the gaming industry, with hardware price increases across the board. This is due to the demand created by AI companies and data centers, making figures like Altman contentious in the gaming community. The memory crisis is expected to continue until at least 2028, and worsen in 2027.