Sam Altman Changed His Name to “Ram Altman.” Here’s Why

Sam Altman briefly renamed himself “Ram Altman” on X. The OpenAI CEO made the change after a week of backlash over comments he made about computer memory. He then posted a thread clarifying his position, saying the original remark had been taken out of context. By 11 AM ET on November 6, his name was back to normal. The whole thing started on the Cheeky Pint podcast with Stripe co-founder John Collison. Altman discussed people who want to run AI models locally on their own machines. Then he turned to DRAM, which is the working memory inside every computer and server. He called it “quite terrible” from a global allocation perspective for everyone to have DRAM sitting in personal computers and only using it 5% of the time.