Sunday Reboot: Sam Altman needs to read the RAM room

In this week's Sunday Reboot, Sam Altman thinks it's wasteful for you to have more memory in your Mac. It's bad enough that you have any RAM that he can't access at all.

Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get next week underway with a good first step.

Blissful unawareness

When it comes to CEO pronouncements, they can be a mixed bag. Comments like Nvidia's Jensen Huang being fine with paying a billionaire tax are good ones, giving brief moments of hope that the 1% isn't entirely full of out-of-touch rich people.

For the moment at least, John Ternus hasn't fallen into the trap of uttering something damaging to the heavily managed Apple CEO persona. It's early days in his tenure, so there's still plenty of time for that to happen.

That said, there are plenty of company leaders who are outspoken and provide a controversial point of view. Lots of lessons on how not to conduct yourself as a figurehead for Ternus to absorb.

The latest one is from Sam Altman, the guy in charge over at OpenAI, which operates the current AI heavyweight ChatGPT.

I'm not talking about anything to do with the whole Jony Ive hardware thing nor the related lawsuit. Nor the tone-deaf response to AI hacking that OpenAI's tools are being used to both facilitate and protect against.

This time, it's memory. The computing component that has skyrocketed in price to be more precious than printer ink, thanks to AI's Borg-like need to consume it all.

Sam Altman in a pub. Or more likely, a pub set. - Image Credit: Cheeky Pint/YouTube

In the latest tone-deaf pronouncement, speaking to YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, Altman lamented that there's not enough memory for AI. Apparently, end users are the problem.

"From a global allocation perspective, it's quite terrible to have, like, everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer," Altman declared. In his estimation, it's only being used about "5% of the time."

He says that there should be "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."

Translated, he's saying that the memory used in your Mac would be better used as part of the almighty AI machine to serve you indirectly.

He almost has a point

The immediate knee-jerk reaction is that he's wrong, with the emotional side of all of us silently screaming horrible things at him.

Maybe paraphrasing Braveheart by declaring, "You may take our money, but you'll never take our memory." Maybe he's somehow affected by being in a set that is made to look like a sociable environment and not the robot side of The Matrix.

Before we get to that, as distasteful as it is, let's play devil's advocate for a moment and see his side.

Altman [right] and Jony Ive [left] at a different bar. - Image Credit: OpenAI

To him, the memory market is tough, with many people wanting flash chips and willing to pay for them. If we plebeian users just didn't buy any more memory, there would be more available for OpenAI and every other AI company to suck up and spit out into their infrastructure projects.

This is a logic that almost makes sense, but only if you take his point of view. You're invested and infatuated with the progress forward of AI, and that's your single-minded goal in life.

Of course you're not going to care about someone being able to afford the more expensive PlayStation 5 to play Grand Theft Auto 6. That's a waste of resources, when the memory in that game console could be used to further humanity by letting a computer think on its behalf.

This is, to me, the Star Trek fantasy. War between countries has become a "solved problem," and everyone is now working together in harmony for the greater good, often against their best interests.

Almost

Stepping out of the role of Lucifer's care worker, the argument falls flat in many different ways.

For a start, the memory industry is already leaning heavily in favor of the Great AI Industrial Machine. The major memory producers have already shifted production capacity towards data center-grade High Bandwidth Memory, cutting the amount of DRAM to go around.

Data centers are already taking a massive cut of DRAM sales, along with device producers, with direct-to-consumer and business memory sales being an afterthought. Indeed, competition is so high that, even with stratospheric memory pricing, the 2027 supply pipeline is already booked solid.

Since it's so expensive that consumers have to seriously consider how much memory their new purchases contain, Altman already has his wish. AI's buying most of the new memory anyway, and will for some time.

Anyone wanting to buy a new Mac from Apple is having the same thoughts about whether they can live without more RAM or if it's viable going into the second-hand organ sales trade.

Sam Altman. Presumably, the bar has been swallowed by a void, leaving Altman alone with his thoughts about wearing brown shirts all the time. - Image credit: Emerson Collective

In my particular case, I did upgrade my gaming PC earlier in the year. However, because RAM pricing was so goddamned high, the new build was centered around my existing DDR4 memory instead of buying new DDR5, or even increasing the amount of memory in use.

Even with investments by memory companies into new infrastructure, that's going to make only a small dent in the issue, and it will take too long. AI will also consume that, too.

To consumers, it's clear that AI infrastructure buildouts are the reason why there's so much memory demand in the first place. It's a problem that OpenAI and others have no real right to complain about, because their actions caused this situation in the first place.

We can't even propose that OpenAI starts its own memory manufacturing effort so it can secure a private supply of chips to its particular specifications. The problem is, if you're spending extremely high amounts of cash to do that, the easier option would be to buy out an existing memory producer altogether.

Thankfully, that's not a possibility for the moment, since the big three memory makers have extremely high values, thanks to this very problem of supply and demand. Namely they're benefiting from the rest of the tech manufacturing industry's misery.

At this point, Altman's comments are annoying, effectively taunting an angry tech industry and budget-conscious users because AI is consuming almost everything, and it's not satisfied.

It may be an altruistic proposal for the good of humankind's future to Altman. To everyone else, it's a misguided statement that ignores everyone else's deep unhappiness due to all electronics increasing in price as a result.

Maybe Sam truly doesn't see how his comment plays to observers because he's so invested in his own AI bubble. To me, I can't decide between imagining him as the Grinch or Blofeld.

Last week's Sunday Reboot discussed the Apple Music rebrand's physical coolness, as well as stupidity in security.

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