On November 4, 2026, Sam Altman briefly changed his name on X to “Ram Altman.” The head of OpenAI wanted to defuse the controversy sparked by his remarks about the memory in our PCs, which he considers out of context: he assures us that he wants everyone to have tons of RAM. A developer clearly took him at his word. His script, Ram-Altman, writes an email every day reporting to the head of OpenAI the memory sitting idle in your computer.

A joke coming at a time when the price of RAM has soared—because it is being siphoned off by AI data centers, including OpenAI’s.

“Pretty awful,” then “out of context”

It all started with an episode of Cheeky Pint, the podcast of John Collison, co-founder of Stripe, published on October 29, 2026. Asked about AI running locally, Sam Altman explained that, from the perspective of global allocation, it is “pretty awful ” for everyone to keep a share of the available DRAM in their own computer, which, in his view, is used 5% of the time. According to him, it should be run at full capacity in the cloud, as Yahoo Finance reported on October 31, 2026.

It did not take much more to set social media ablaze.Netizens are renaming OpenAI’s boss “RAM Altman,” and Elon Musk piled on on November 1 with an Inglourious Basterds spoof. On November 4, Sam Altman finally joined in on the joke at an internet user’s request, while bristling at the idea that his words had been twisted. He says he has long advocated for the industry to produce more memory.

To be fair, he was mainly responding to those who think that open-source AI models, run locally, will make giant data centers less necessary. His reasoning still leads to the same conclusion: scarce memory would be better used in the cloud than at home.

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One email a day to flag the RAM that’s sleeping

It was this one-day nickname that inspired Ram-Altman, a small script on GitHub by Iain Kay, a developer based in Edinburgh who describes himself as being in charge of DevOps and network operations (without specifying which company). The concept is frighteningly simple: if more than 10% of your Linux machine’s memory is free, the script sends at most one email a day to report where the RAM is hiding. Why 10%? Because below that threshold, according to its creator, the machine “has suffered enough.” The threshold is adjustable.

In the example provided by the project, the email warns Sam Altman that a little more than 9 GB of RAM, or more than half of the computer’s memory, is of no use today. The whole thing is signed by a concerned RAM owner.

Rest assured, however, the tool does not flood Sam Altman’s inbox: the project provides nobody’s address, and it is up to the user to choose the recipient. Iain Kay also recommends test mode, which sends nothing, and points out that one email a day is still a joke. As of November 10, 2026, the repository nevertheless exceeds 1,600 stars.

RAM siphoned by AI

If the joke hits home, it is because it strikes a nerve. In one year, the contract price of a DDR5 memory chip has more than quintupled, according to figures reported by Notebookcheck on November 4, 2026. And manufacturer TeamGroup sees no easing before the second half of 2028.

The culprits are manufacturers who are now reserving their production lines for AI servers. And OpenAI is not the last to take advantage: in early October 2025, Samsung and SK Hynix signed letters of intent for Stargate, its data center project, whose needs could account for up to 40% of global DRAM production, according to a TechInsights estimate cited by Tom’s Hardware on October 1, 2025.

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