One of the consequences of a hierarchy is that it becomes a vital survival skill for the people below to be able to read the moods of the people above them. Graeber talks about "anthropologies of Whiteness" developed by PoC, and it's true in other hierarchies too.
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Because of these two things, information is asymmetric. The higher you are, the less you know about the people below you, and the larger a proportion of the total population that is. Likewise, the lower you are, the more you know about the people above you.
The king has the privilege of knowing nothing at all, especially about the peasants, and the peasants know a lot about the king.
Sam Altman is high up the hierarchy: he's White, cis, male, able-bodied, university educated, documented. He's a rich man and he has the ear of other rich and powerful people.
This gives him the privilege of knowing fuck-all about everyone else, which is a privilege that he's a pretty enthusiastic user of. This means he probably does not understand that when he comes up with an ignorant-ass idea, he's showing that idea to the entire world and we can judge him for it.
The emperor is always naked.
Sam Altman thinks other people shouldn't have RAM in their own computers. This is a terrible idea that would fall apart instantly if he knew anything about other people's lives, but as mentioned he's too high up the hierarchy for that.
He does, however, have the ear of people who have the power to enforce his ideas whether they're workable or not. They're not going to send thugs around to your house to take the RAM out of your laptop, when they can just make shortages and high prices, and then wait for your RAM to burn out and need replacing.
Most of us are really aware of his ideas being terrible but we often miss the part about the power.
Another consequence of a hierarchy is that the people above can, if they want, ignore information from below.
They usually do want to ignore it, too, because listening to the people you're exploiting makes it difficult to exploit them. This void of information is often filled with crude stereotypes created to justify that exploitation.
Men sort women into madonnas and whores, White people see Asians as inscrutable and Arabs as berserk murderers, het people regard gay people as promiscuous dandies, et cetera.