OpenAI boss Sam Altman has addressed the backlash over comments he made in a recent interview, where he said he thought it was “terrible” for people to have RAM in their PCs rather than a data center.

Speaking to YouTuber Cheeky Pint, Altman 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. Like, you want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that."

The comments were widely ridiculed, with many suggesting that, whether he intended it or not, Altman sounded like he wanted to take away personal ownership of memory and force society to use resources for the benefit of AI companies such as his. Social media was flooded with posts, images, and videos of people slamming Altman for the suggestion, promising to protect their memory from any who might try to claim it. Even tech rival Elon Musk joined the backlash with a meme of his own.

Now, in a series of posts on social media, Altman expressed frustration at the online response, insisted his comments had been taken out of context, and even joked about the situation, renaming his X / Twitter name to 'Ram Altman' at the suggestion of a follower.

Altman said he actually wants the world to have “tons of memory,” and for people “to put as much as they want in their computers.” He added that it was “f***ing annoying” that this was “taken out of context.”

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