OpenAI chief Sam Altman says it is "quite terrible" for the world's scarce computer memory to sit in home PCs. He spoke on the Cheeky Pint podcast, with host John Collison. Tom's Hardware and Polygon wrote about his remarks.

Altman was talking about local inference, which means running AI models on your own machine. Many people assume open-source models will let them skip the data center, he said. "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," he said. He added that the memory is used about "5% of the time."

"You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment," Altman said, according to the show's transcript. He said many people's intuition is the opposite. DRAM is the main working memory in phones, game consoles and computers.

Tom's Hardware said Altman is really defending OpenAI's business model. The company's main products are closed models that run in data centers. It said his view assumes that the data center boom won't slow. It also assumes that memory used for AI all day is worth more than memory used for games or spreadsheets. Some PC fans fear a future where they rent computers in the cloud instead of owning them, it added.

Polygon was harsher. It said OpenAI owns 40% of the world's DRAM supply until 2029. It blamed the company in part for the $650 price of a PS5 and for costly gaming PCs. Those figures are Polygon's claims, not Altman's.

Altman also talked about memory makers. For years, making DRAM was a boom-and-bust business, he said. Now, "these guys are each going to make like $100 billion of free cash flow in a year," he said.

What we know: Altman said memory sitting idle in home PCs is a poor use of a scarce supply.
What we don't: Whether OpenAI will change how it buys memory, or whether prices will ease.