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AH Anthony Ha Anthony Ha Weekend editor at TechCrunch, writing about technology, startups and AI policy.

“If you are an AI true believer, or at least a Sam Altman true believer, you don't think it's a good idea to have a lot of RAM on your laptop, because then you are hoarding it. You are depriving the machine God of the memory he or she needs to grow and thrive.”

This Week in Tech · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“If you are an AI true believer, or at least a Sam Altman true believer, you don't think it's a good idea to have a lot of RAM on your laptop, because then you are hoarding it. You are depriving the machine God of the memory he or she needs to grow and thrive.” — Anthony Ha, This Week in Tech

Context

The panel was discussing a pricey high-RAM laptop and a comment Sam Altman made that week about RAM in personal computers. Anthony jokes about the logic, against a backdrop of memory shortages pushing up PC prices.

Transcript

This Week in Tech Around 29:18 into the episode
Speaker 4

…going to update that one. If you want all the newest stuff, you need to buy the more expensive iPhones, the Pros and the Duo, because they're not even going to give you the option to get the kind of regular models until the new year. And before it was just cheaper. Exactly. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar

…want to hit the cloud anymore and you're going to spend the money to do that. There's a bit of a, I guess, hell yeah about, let's bring our computer computing back to computers. And we can jump to a Sam Altman like story, something he mentioned recently this week. But Anthony, go ahead. That was

Anthony Ha

exactly what I was going to say. Is that actually if you are an AI true believer, maybe, or at least a Sam Altman true believer, you don't think it's a good idea to have a lot of RAM on your laptop because then you are hoarding it. You are depriving the machine God of the memory he or she needs to grow and thrive, which is essentially what Sam Altman said on this podcast, that like he thinks, I forget the exact wording, but he definitely thinks it's bad that there's all this RAM on our personal computers.

Devindra Hardawar

And specifically RAM for running local models, right? It's not just like RAM for gaming. It is, he does not want you running models, AI models on your computers because if you were doing that, you were not paying OpenAI and other AI companies' subscription fee, right? So there's something to be…

Speaker 4

like he's like so oblivious that he just doesn't realize that, you know, this is going to cause people to hate him. You know, like he's so disconnected from regular people. I remember, I remember like, this is like two or three years ago now. I was talking to Julia Black, who's now a reporter at…

Devindra Hardawar

Oh, man. Speaking of part of the AI. Go ahead, Anthony.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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