A web developer has created a script that automatically emails OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to tell him how much RAM is sitting unused in their computer.
The project, appropriately named Ram-Altman, was published on GitHub by developer IainKay in response to Altman’s previous comments about the world’s limited supply of computer memory being wasted in personal PCs.
Script tells Sam Altman how much RAM he’s missing
According to its GitHub page, Ram-Altman is a Bash script that monitors a Linux computer’s memory usage every five minutes.
If more than 10% of the machine’s RAM is available, the script can automatically send Altman an email detailing exactly how much memory isn’t being used, limited to one message per day.
The emails come with eight rotating subject lines, ten different messages, and six sign-offs to keep the correspondence varied.
One example, titled “You missed a spot,” reads: “Please don’t be alarmed, but there is 8.6 GiB of RAM on my desk that isn’t in a data centre. That’s 56.2% of what’s installed here, and as far as I can tell it has no plans today.”
The script’s feature list provided on GitHub.
The developer explains that the project was inspired by Altman’s appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast, where he discussed the limited global supply of DRAM and the efficiency of running AI models in data centers.
“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,” Altman said, adding that it was being used “maybe 5% of the time.”
The remarks attracted criticism, prompting Altman to clarify that he supports people having as much RAM as they want.
“I actually do want the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers,” he wrote on X.
but only because…i actually do want the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers, and it is fucking annoying that this was taken out of context.
i have been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time.
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 4, 2026
Altman also briefly changed his display name to “Ram Altman,” which inspired the project’s name.
Despite the joke, the developer has discouraged people from bombarding Altman’s inbox with messages.
“One email a day from one person is a joke. Ten thousand of them is a denial-of-service attack with better material,” the repository explains.
The script includes a dry-run option that lets users preview its emails without sending anything, and it doesn’t include Altman’s email address by default.