A developer has turned OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's remark about memory in home PCs into a Linux script that emails a report of your idle RAM once a day.
The script is called Ram Altman. Iain Kay wrote it in bash, a common Linux scripting language, and published it as open source on GitHub. It tracks total, used and available RAM and sends at most one email per day. The text rotates through 10 messages, eight subject lines and six sign-offs, so the joke "gets old at a carefully managed pace", in Kay's words. If less than 10% of your RAM is free, it stays quiet because the machine has "suffered enough". One sample email reports 8.6 GiB idle, or 56.2% of installed memory, and signs off as "A concerned RAM owner".
Despite the name, it does not email Altman by default. You pick the recipient, and Kay says it is not meant for spamming anyone. He suggests a willing friend, such as one waiting for DDR5 prices to fall.
The target is a podcast comment in which Altman called it "quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer." DRAM is the main memory in a PC. Altman has since said he was taken out of context, and that he was talking about people running AI models locally instead of using cloud services like ChatGPT.
That clarification may be accurate, but it does not fix the wording. "Everybody" is the word that stuck, and it landed while AI demand is being blamed for inflated PC component prices. Local-model users are also the closest thing to a rival for a cloud AI product, so the complaint sounded like a sales pitch whatever Altman intended. Kay's script works because it flips the argument and casts your spare gigabytes as hoarding.
One Redditor offered a sequel: a report on how much RAM OpenAI has stockpiled and cannot yet power.