Sam Altman says local AI inference wastes scarce memory

OpenAI's CEO argues that running AI on personal devices leaves DRAM sitting idle while data centers could put it to work Sam Altman has a problem with the AI model running on your laptop. It’s not that it doesn’t work. It’s that your computer barely uses the memory it’s hoarding. The OpenAI CEO argued that local inference, meaning AI that runs directly on consumer devices instead of in the cloud, leaves scarce DRAM sitting idle on individual machines. With memory chips in short supply, he framed that idle capacity as something the industry can’t afford. The case against your personal AI box Altman made the comments during a podcast appearance, with research tying the remarks to October 29, 2026. His core claim was about utilization. According to Altman, individual devices put only about 5% of their resources to work. Altman’s argument applies that logic to memory. DRAM is the short-term working memory computers use to run software, and AI models are famously hungry for it. When that memory lives inside a personal device, it sits unused whenever the owner isn’t actively prompting a chatbot. Cloud data centers, by contrast, are built to squeeze as much work as possible out of every c...