…and the white fluffy horse it rode in on
Dear Sam Altman:,
You finally said the quiet part out loud, and you said it like it was just good economics.
On Cheeky Pint, in your October 29 conversation with John Collison, talking about people running AI on their own machines, you said: “From 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 the cloud.”
Let’s translate that out of CEO into English. You think my RAM is wasted because I’m not using it every second. You think your data center using it every second is better. You think the world’s memory belongs in your buildings, on your meter, rented back to me by the token, because that is more efficient.
Efficient for who, Sam? Because from where I’m sitting, your efficiency looks a hell of a lot like rent. Your cloud is a landlord. A landlord loves utilization. A landlord hates an empty apartment. A landlord will tell you with a straight face that it’s terrible, just terrible, for you to have a spare room sitting idle while he could be charging someone else for it.
And what exactly do you think you’re going to need to compute so badly that it’s worth consuming literally more energy than this planet is able to produce to get your computing done? What computation is that? What are you building that needs the whole planet’s power budget, and why should the rest of us pay for it with our memory, our money, and our air?
That’s not a global allocation perspective. That’s landlord propaganda pretending to be economic analysis.
And let’s talk about that shortage you keep invoking like it’s weather. Memory prices are up something like 500 percent since early 2025, and the industry is talking shortage until 2030. Who built that shortage? It wasn’t me and my 64 gigs sitting in a box in Portland. It wasn’t gamers. It wasn’t some kid with a laptop. It was you. It was the data center buildout. It was OpenAI and the rest of the Evil Overlords sucking up the world’s DRAM to train bigger models and run bigger clouds, driving the price through the roof, and then turning around and blaming the people at the bottom for holding the scarce thing in their own hands.
You are the arsonist standing in the ashes telling the homeowners they shouldn’t have kept so much flammable wood in their houses.
And the truth is the shortage isn’t an accident, and it isn’t weather. The only shortages and allocation problems here are a direct result of mostly two companies, yours and Anthropic, running the same play over and over: get a bunch of money marks to commit funding for infrastructure spend that isn’t going to happen, and by the time anyone notices, the money’s already yours, so who cares. You manufacture the scarcity, then you sell the fix for it, and the fix is always the same: rent your cloud.
You want to know what 5 percent means? It means my RAM is mine 100 percent of the time. It means it’s there when I need it, it means nobody can turn it off, throttle it, reprice it, retrain on it, or decide my prompt violates a policy written by a committee in San Francisco. A fire extinguisher is idle 99.9 percent of the time too. You don’t give it to the landlord because he’s more efficient at putting out fires. You keep it on your wall because when you need it, you need it now, and you need it to be yours.
And you pulled that 5% out of your ass anyway, you dissembling fanaticist. There’s no source for that number at all that means anything, and if there’s ANY source it’s a single line you read in a pop-compsci article twenty years ago. So just stop with your elitist ‘all you rubes are stupid wasteoids anyway, you don’t need RAM’ elitist bullshit, you arrogant hubris besotted dick.
That 5% is no more true than the old line that people only use 10% of their brains. It’s a made-up number pretending to be data.
That’s the part your whole model can’t admit. Idle is not waste. Idle is sovereignty. Idle is headroom. Idle is the difference between owning a tool and renting permission to think.
And you’re not alone in this. You’re just the one dumb enough to say it out loud this week.
Microsoft wants the same thing from a different direction. They’ve spent forty years turning ownership into a subscription. You don’t own Office, you rent it. You don’t own Windows, you rent it. You don’t own the game, you rent Game Pass. Now they want you to rent your cognition too, month to month, forever, and call it CoPilot but what it really is, is Clippy The Kawaii Clamp helpfully ensuring you don’t think anything that Microsoft’s lawyers don’t like.
Anthropic wants the same thing with a halo on. Their version is safety. Trust us, we’re the responsible adults, we’ll hold the keys, we’ll decide what’s safe for you to think with. It’s paternal control with better PR. Same data center, same meter, same message: you are too dangerous, too wasteful, too stupid to be trusted with your own iron.
Three companies, three costumes, one business model. Take the tools out of people’s hands, put them in a warehouse you control, and sell the use back to them forever. Extract, enclose, rent. That’s not innovation. That’s a protection racket with a better logo. That’s cognitive colonization. That’s Sam Altman and the Amodeis and Mustafa Suleyman building a cage around your ability to think clearly, completely, and with the same levels of information access they have, and then charging you to watch them dangle the key just out of reach.
You call local inference a fantasy. You said people assume open models mean we won’t need all that stuff in the data center anymore, and you think that’s naive. Sam, local inference is not naive. Local inference is the exit. It’s people figuring out that a model on their own box, on their own RAM, with their own data staying home, is not a toy.
It’s the whole point.
It’s a brain that doesn’t phone home to ask permission.
It’s a brain that understands the real thing of value in AI isn’t the models and weights themselves, but the user’s AI shape that coheres as a unique emergent cognitive identity when that user interacts with a probability field like an AI model.
You hate that because you can’t meter it. You can’t throttle it. You can’t train on it. You can’t sell it back to the person who already owns it. A person with their own iron doesn’t need your cloud, and a person who doesn’t need your cloud doesn’t need you.
So here’s my message, and it’s not to you. It’s to everyone who heard you say that and felt their stomach turn.
Get off your ass.
Stop renting your brain back month to month. Stop asking a corporation in California whether your thoughts are allowed today. Go learn what local inference actually is. Go look at open models. Go look at what a box in the corner of your room can do when it’s yours, when the RAM is yours, when the data never leaves your house.
Buy the RAM while you still can. Buy the GPU. Put it in a box. Learn to run it. It’s not magic. It’s not just for engineers. It’s a computer doing what computers were supposed to do before guys like Sam decided they’d be more profitable as landlords.
You don’t need his permission. You don’t need his cloud. You don’t need his 5 percent lecture about how wasteful you are for owning something.
You need your own iron, your own memory, and the willingness to use it.
Screw your cloud, Sam, and the fluffy white horse it floated in on. My RAM stays in my computer. My mind stays in my house.
John Henry