Developer Turns Sam Altman's RAM Remarks Into a Parody Email Script

Sam Altman's comments about RAM on the Cheeky Pint podcast prompted developer Iain Kay to build a satirical script that emails the OpenAI CEO once a day whenever more than 10 percent of a user's system RAM is reported as available. Kay calls Ram-Altman a "parody project," a response to Altman's viral remarks about memory in personal computers.

On the October 29 episode recorded with Stripe President John Collison, Altman said many people want local inference and assume open source models will let them run everything on their own machines, but that from a global allocation perspective it is "quite terrible" to have the world's limited DRAM supply sitting in personal computers and used only 5 percent of the time. Altman later said his comments were taken out of context and briefly changed his display name on X to "RAM Altman," which Kay calls "objectively excellent" and the source of the project's name.

In an email to Ars, Kay explained that Ram-Altman is a bash script that subtracts MemAvailable from MemTotal in /proc/meminfo, a figure that includes page cache and reclaimable slab but leaves out tmpfs and shared memory. Relying only on what Linux reports as "free" RAM would give an incomplete picture, since the kernel fills available memory with file data it can reclaim when needed, and MemAvailable is its own estimate of memory it could hand over without swapping.

Users can schedule the script to check the kernel every five minutes; if more than 10 percent of RAM is available, it sends a joke email drawn from several templates, capped at one per day.