Sam Altman’s recent comments on the Cheeky Pint podcast inspired developer Iain Kay to create a satirical script that allows users to email the OpenAI CEO once per day if more than 10 percent of their system RAM is reported as available. Ram-Altman is described by its creator as a “parody project” launched in response to Sam Altman’s viral remarks about RAM in your personal PC.
As reported by The Verge, on the October 29 episode recorded with Stripe President John Collison, Altman said, “A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now because we are going to have open source models, we’re going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data center. But 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 percent of the time.”
Altman has since gone on to explain that his comments were taken out of context and briefly changed his display name to “RAM Altman” on X, which Kay calls on the project GitHub, “objectively excellent and where the project gets its name.”
In an email to Ars, Kay said, “Ram-Altman is a bash script that takes MemTotal minus MemAvailable from /proc/meminfo, so the figure includes page cache and reclaimable slab but leaves out tmpfs and shared memory.”
If the script only showed what Linux reports as “free” RAM, it would paint an incomplete picture. Linux often reports a surprisingly small amount of “free” RAM, as it doesn’t count memory that is currently claimable for use. Linux will fill available RAM caches with file data for quick access, but the kernel can reclaim that usage at a moment’s notice when needed. The MemAvailable figure is the kernel’s own estimate of how much memory it could hand over without swapping.
used = MemTotal - MemAvailable
Users can schedule the script to ask the kernel for a status update every five minutes, and if more than 10 percent of the RAM is available, it triggers a joke email to be sent from any one of a number of joke templates. The script limits outgoing emails to one per day.