Key facts
- Altman said DRAM sitting in home computers used 5% of the time is a poor use of a limited global supply.
- Altman said a DRAM producer would invest $20 billion of CapEx to make $19 billion in past cycles.
- Altman said he wants energy and chip prices to fall and would be very sad if they do not.
- Musk posted a meme of the Inglourious Basterds character Hans Landa captioned about withholding DRAM from the cloud.
- A federal jury in California rejected Musk's $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI in May.
Elon Musk mocked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Sunday over Altman's argument 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 shortages of memory and other components caused by the AI boom. He said that while many people want to run AI models on their own hardware, from a global allocation perspective it is quite terrible to have a large share of the world's limited DRAM supply sitting in home computers used 5% of the time. He added that maximum utilization in a cloud is preferable in a supply-constrained environment.
Musk responded on X 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?" Musk wrote alongside the image: "The people deserve to have their RAM too!"
In the interview, Altman partly blamed the shortage on memory makers' caution. He said a DRAM producer would invest $20 billion of CapEx to make $19 billion, and that companies that nearly went bankrupt building too many factories in past cycles have been slow to expand even as they stand to generate large profits. Altman said he would like to see prices for energy, chips and the rest of the supply chain fall, adding that supply needs to grow for prices to fall.
The exchange is the latest clash between the two OpenAI co-founders. Musk co-founded OpenAI with others in 2015 and left in 2018. He 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 the suit was motivated in part by competition after Musk launched rival AI company xAI in 2023.