ASI Alliance CEO Ben Goertzel Counters Sam Altman on Idle RAM With Decentralized Compute Plan

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OpenAI CEO @sama has argued that memory chips sitting in home computers are a poor use of a scarce resource. ASI Alliance ($FET) CEO @bengoertzel agrees the memory is going to waste, but says the answer is not necessarily to move it into big data centers.

What Altman Said About Home PC Memory

In an interview with the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, Altman said that local inference, and by extension people having DRAM in computers at home, is “quite terrible.”

The podcast is hosted by Stripe co-founder John Collison, and the remark came during a conversation about why global chip and memory supply has not kept up with AI demand.

The episode aired on Oct. 29.

Altman said that from a global allocation perspective, it is quite terrible for everybody to have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time.

He cited no data to support the 5% figure, according to BigGo Finance.

He also said that “you want maximum utilization in the cloud.”

The comments drew wide pushback online.

Elon Musk (@elonmusk) rebutted the argument, posting on X that “the people deserve to have their RAM too.”

Some commentators noted that Altman’s own company runs data centers full of memory.

No outlet has reported that Altman wants PCs to have no RAM, and that claim remains unconfirmed.

Goertzel Points to Decentralized Networks

Goertzel agreed that idle memory is a waste but argued it does not all have to go to large server farms. He said people should be able to rent out spare memory and processing power from their laptops through decentralized networks and earn tokens in return.

He pointed to NuNet, a compute network that grew out of @SingularityNET, and to ASI:Chain, the alliance’s blockchain, which has yet to reach mainnet.

NuNet’s website says it was incubated in 2018 inside SingularityNET by Goertzel.

It describes itself as a peer-to-peer protocol that discovers, orchestrates and settles compute across distributed infrastructure.

Goertzel said NuNet went live in March.

The idea is not new for the alliance.

Cointelegraph previously reported that NuNet uses idle CPU and GPU power from connected computers.

The same report noted a core limitation of the approach:

it is much easier and cheaper to run large models using centralized equipment.

Goertzel has also acknowledged the alliance is “quite far from having as much hardware as OpenAI or Google.”

The exchange highlights a broader debate over whether AI-era hardware shortages should be solved by concentrating resources in hyperscale facilities or by pooling consumer devices through token-incentivized networks. For now, ASI:Chain has not launched on mainnet, so the alliance’s own blockchain layer for such a system remains unfinished.

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