Sam Altman joked about AI's thirst for memory with a new social media nickname - Business Insider
By Google News AI ·
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman briefly gave himself a new name on X: "Ram Altman." The change followed a joke about his appetite for computer memory after recent controversial comments on how the much-desired memory is allocated. Responding to an Altman post about people retaining control over AI’s future, an X user wrote "sam come here come here" alongside an image of several memory chips leading toward a cardboard box propped up like a trap. sam come here come here pic.twitter.com/xj6AO6tSXR Altman replied, "i lol’d." When another user asked whether he could rename his account "Ram Altman,” he answered, "OK yeah" — and did. ok yeah The change was short-lived. By 11 a.m. ET on Wednesday, the CEO's name had reverted to "Sam Altman" on his X profile. It was unclear why he changed it back and OpenAI declined to comment when contacted by Business Insider. Altman's joke landed after recent remarks about the world’s limited supply of DRAM, a type of memory that is key to both personal computing and the GPUs that power AI data centers. On an October 29 episode of the "Cheeky Pint" podcast, he argued that running AI models on personal computers could leave scarce memory underused. In a market where supply is tight, he said, cloud data centers can use it more intensively. Sam Altman joined John Collison for a pint to discuss the scaling laws of agent teams, proving Navier-Stokes, why hand-written software will soon look quaint, the optics of token pricing, and what computing looks like beyond the keyboard and screen.00:00:00 Introduction… pic.twitter.com/q7jsLCszLW The comments drew criticism from some people who took them to mean consumers should have less access to memory so data centers could have more. Elon Musk, who has feuded with Altman for years, weighed in on Sunday, posting a…
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