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.
Altman made the change after a user suggested the new name in response to one of his posts on X. 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? 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. I have been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time,” he wrote. His remarks indicated that the company would prefer that more RAM go to OpenAI’s data centers rather than home computers.
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. “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. Because openAI primarily develops closed-source AI models that run on data centre infrastructure, his remarks drew attention.
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. 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.
