Sam Altman renames himself ‘Ram Altman’ on X after facing backlash over RAM remarks

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman changed his display name on X to “Ram Altman” after facing online backlash over his recent remarks about the allocation of computer memory, or RAM, in personal computers.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman changed his name to Ram Altman on X. (Bloomberg)Altman made the change after a user suggested the new name in response to one of his posts on X. The suggestion came amid criticism of his comments that having dedicated Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) in personal computers was a “quite terrible” allocation of the world’s limited memory supply.Amid the backlash, Altman argued that people should not surrender control of the future to superintelligence, adding that doing so would ultimately constrain the progress of artificial intelligence. “People should always be in control of the future. OpenAI is against the notion that it would be acceptable for people to be relegated to a role of doing things that ‘AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans,'” Altman wrote in a post on X.Under his post, a user asked Altman: “Can you rename your X to Ram Altman?” The OpenAI CEO replied, “Ok yeah,” and subsequently changed his display name.Explaining the name change in a follow-up comment, Altman said his earlier remarks had been taken out of context. He added that he wanted the world to have more memory and that people should be able to install as much RAM in their computers as they wanted.“But only because, 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***ing annoying that this was taken out of context. I have been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time,” he wrote.(Also Read: Sam Altman tells Raj Shamani he misses anonymous coffee shop visits: ‘Now there are 2 security guards next to me’)Sam Altman on RAMThe controversy began after Altman appeared on the Cheeky Pint podcast, where he discussed the global shortage of computing resources facing the artificial intelligence industry. During the conversation, he questioned the efficiency of people keeping large amounts of DRAM in their personal computers when much of it remains unused.“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.”You want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow everyone’s, many people’s, intuition is the opposite of that,” he added.His remarks drew attention because OpenAI primarily develops closed-source AI models that run on data centre infrastructure. Altman and other tech leaders fear that local AI could mean people one day paying less for subscriptions to models like GPT-6 Luna if they have the power to run them at home. His remarks indicated that the company would prefer that more RAM go to OpenAI’s data centers rather than home computers.