In brief
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said it is "quite terrible" for the world's limited supply of DRAM to sit in home computers that are used 5% of the time.
- Elon Musk mocked the comments on X with a meme of the Nazi officer Hans Landa from Inglourious Basterds accusing people of "withholding DRAM from the cloud."
- The exchange is the latest clash between the two OpenAI co-founders, after a jury rejected Musk's $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI in May.
Elon Musk has mocked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for arguing that the world's limited supply of computer memory would be better used in AI data centers than in people's home computers.
Altman made the comments in an interview with the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, while discussing the shortages of memory and other components caused by the AI boom.
"A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we're going to have open-source models," Altman said, referring to running AI models on a user's own hardware. "But from like 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."
"You want maximum utilization in a cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment," he added. "And somehow, many people's intuition is the opposite of that."
Musk responded on X on Sunday with a meme showing Hans Landa, the Nazi officer played by Christoph Waltz in the film Inglourious Basterds, captioned: "You are withholding DRAM from the cloud, are you not?" "The people deserve to have their RAM too!" Musk wrote alongside the image.
The people deserve to have their RAM too! pic.twitter.com/q6dwauALw4
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2026
In the interview, Altman blamed the shortage partly on memory makers' caution. For years, a DRAM producer "would invest $20 billion of CapEx to make $19 billion," he said, and companies that nearly went bankrupt building too many factories in past cycles have been slow to expand, even as they now stand to generate huge profits.
Altman said he would like to see prices for energy, chips and the rest of the supply chain fall. "If it doesn't go down, I'll be very sad," he said, adding that for prices to fall, supply needs to grow.
Musk versus Altman
The jab is the latest in a long-running feud between the two men, who co-founded OpenAI with others in 2015 before Musk left in 2018.
Musk sued OpenAI and Altman in 2024, accusing them of abandoning the organization's founding nonprofit mission. In May, a federal jury in California rejected the $150 billion lawsuit, finding OpenAI, Altman and president Greg Brockman not liable on all claims. OpenAI's lawyers had argued that the suit was motivated in part by competition, after Musk launched rival AI company xAI in 2023.