This is silly, and I know Sam Altman said that consumers having RAM is not an efficient usage, but the real villains here are the memory manufacturers that have time and again have been proven to collude on price fixing and whatnot, and are now not scaling up production according to demand.
I don’t think it’s very productive to go on a witch hunt on someone who said something stupid and is being taken out of context (albeit he should have known not to say that).
> are now not scaling up production according to demand.
Would you though? If/when the AI bubble pops and the buildout of data centres either stops or plateaus then they'd suddenly be sitting in a vastly oversaturated market and struggle to make it to the end of the year.
Considering the profits they've made this year, on average they still wouldn't do too bad. SK Hynix employees got almost $500k for example, I can live on that for a few years. Companies are often also legally required to compete with each other.
But they are scaling up the production, they just conveniently did it a bit late. I also fear if/when the bubble pops, they'll quickly reduce the production to ensure prices stay high. I fear Nvidia could do the same. I think it'll be hard for all of them to go back to a world where they're paid way less per component, so instead of accepting that, they can reduce the supply and keep the prices high. Only antitrust regulators could intervene to stop that.
Many people expect prices to go down after the bubble pops, but it may not happen as much as we would want to.
Remember when the dot com bubble burst and after that the Internet became a billion times more important than before? Wikipedia didn't even exist when the dot com bubble collapsed!
All that bubble popping will do is wipe out some investor's money. Everything else will stay and become more and more important.
But of course, it is more profitable to sell one item for $1000 than it is to sell ten items for $100 each. And even if a competitor shows up, you can just price dump with all the extra money you already made until that competitor goes away.
Nothing silly was said really. The remark was specifically about local inference and RAM supply issues and it’s entirely true - if all current AI users tried to switch to local models, it would make the RAM availability situation much worse. I userstand that regular Twitter folk doesn’t grasp that, but this isn’t Twitter.
Would it? First of all, all current AI users still need memory in their devices. You can't use ChatGPT with pen and paper. There would always be a consumer demand for memory, even without local inference. Secondly, it'd drastically decrease the demand for HBM, which has shit yields when compared to conventional memory. It's also questionable as to how much of the produced HBM is actually in use and not sitting in a warehouse.
It was taken out of context for sure but still find this site amusing. Perhaps even prophetic, can we build enough ram and vram for future requirements when theres only a few holding the keys.
Obligatory: "we're curing cancer r-right?" No Nat we're making slop videos with it.
If a customer ask me to get all my butchery stock for a year, it will make thousands of client unhappy and will make one client happy, so I'll simply refuse.
This is not how business is supposed to be, the world is not supposed to be a B2B chaos.
I know how the business is done "supply demand" bla bla. That does not make it ethical one bit.
It really seems like the majority audience of this site (lukewarm left wing nerds, let's be honest) is trying to square a circle with the unwavering AI support (I mean the ecosystem and the people, not the technology, which is indeed great).
If you look outside the tech bro / stock bro / tech worker circles and into the mass left wing populace everyone HATES ai and ai data centers... the Altmans, the Amodeis, the Huangs, they are not the devil himself levels just yet (cough, Musk, cough), but they are climbing up there.
People's jobs being taken (and especially entry/junior jobs, you know, the ones young people, who voted massively blue, need to get started in life), data centers increasing their electric bills or polluting the air with gigawatt level gas turbines (or both), consumer electronics prices rocketing up (~400% increases YoY in RAM and SSD prices) just so the corporate capitalist class can hoard millions of gpus in warehouses.
I mean, if the democrat politicians getting into power keep their promises and step on AI buildout's neck, it could be lights out for the AI bros.
American exceptionalism again. If American politicians ban data centre builds in the US, that won't stop 'AI bros'. It will just run elsewhere, and at best Americans will just have a bit more latency on their AI services.
Except that's nonsense, any company that could make more ram absolutely would because the damand is insane. There is no universe or economy where it would be profitable to artificially lower your production to keep prices high when you can just make more ram.
It depends on how much inelastic demand there is. For example:
Let's say there are 10 companies that need 1 GB of RAM each in a life-or-death scenario. They would be willing to pay $100,000,000 per GB to get 1 GB of RAM.
At the same time, there are 90 more companies that need 1 GB of RAM each to make certain quarterly targets. They are willing to pay $10,000 per GB to get 1 GB of RAM.
If you make 9 GB of RAM, you can sell it for $900,000,000. If you make 99 GB of RAM, you can only sell it for $990,000, because the 10 life-or-death companies only need to bid high enough to push out a quarterly-target company.
It's a bit of a contrived example, but it shows you how restricting supply can boost total revenue if there is a segment of the market that has inelastic demand. (this is why medicine pricing has to be regulated - in the medical industry, there are lots of inelastic demand scenarios that can lead to predatory pricing)
So… the major manufacturers, which operate across different continents with notoriously uneasy geopolitical tensions, are secretly operating a silicon cartel?
If you want the personal thanks from Altman without having to actually give up your RAM, you can download some here first https://downloadmoreram.com and then upload that to Altman.
Will we go back to PCs? As in: are we going to get cheap local hackable frontier AIs at some point? I hope so.
:insert Will Smith presenting meme:
The Cloud
I don’t think it’s very productive to go on a witch hunt on someone who said something stupid and is being taken out of context (albeit he should have known not to say that).
where is the proof?
>and are now not scaling up production according to demand.
fabs are being built by maaany companies, but it takes years
hopefully china does it and hynix burns in hell
Would you though? If/when the AI bubble pops and the buildout of data centres either stops or plateaus then they'd suddenly be sitting in a vastly oversaturated market and struggle to make it to the end of the year.
Considering the profits they've made this year, on average they still wouldn't do too bad. SK Hynix employees got almost $500k for example, I can live on that for a few years. Companies are often also legally required to compete with each other.
But they are scaling up the production, they just conveniently did it a bit late. I also fear if/when the bubble pops, they'll quickly reduce the production to ensure prices stay high. I fear Nvidia could do the same. I think it'll be hard for all of them to go back to a world where they're paid way less per component, so instead of accepting that, they can reduce the supply and keep the prices high. Only antitrust regulators could intervene to stop that.
Many people expect prices to go down after the bubble pops, but it may not happen as much as we would want to.
New fabs will be operational in a while, which is too big of a risk to take in these times.
All that bubble popping will do is wipe out some investor's money. Everything else will stay and become more and more important.
But of course, it is more profitable to sell one item for $1000 than it is to sell ten items for $100 each. And even if a competitor shows up, you can just price dump with all the extra money you already made until that competitor goes away.
Good god the internet is so sensitive nowadays
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50400515 for longer comment on that
And "if all current AI users" is a strawman, people using free chatgpt once or twice a day are not going to buy RAM to run own LLMs.
Obligatory: "we're curing cancer r-right?" No Nat we're making slop videos with it.
Ah yes Sam Altman is not a real villain despite OpenAI locking up 40% of global DRAM supply.
If a customer ask me to get all my butchery stock for a year, it will make thousands of client unhappy and will make one client happy, so I'll simply refuse.
This is not how business is supposed to be, the world is not supposed to be a B2B chaos.
I know how the business is done "supply demand" bla bla. That does not make it ethical one bit.
If you look outside the tech bro / stock bro / tech worker circles and into the mass left wing populace everyone HATES ai and ai data centers... the Altmans, the Amodeis, the Huangs, they are not the devil himself levels just yet (cough, Musk, cough), but they are climbing up there.
People's jobs being taken (and especially entry/junior jobs, you know, the ones young people, who voted massively blue, need to get started in life), data centers increasing their electric bills or polluting the air with gigawatt level gas turbines (or both), consumer electronics prices rocketing up (~400% increases YoY in RAM and SSD prices) just so the corporate capitalist class can hoard millions of gpus in warehouses.
I mean, if the democrat politicians getting into power keep their promises and step on AI buildout's neck, it could be lights out for the AI bros.
1) boom and bust cycle in memory industry is a repeated problem
2) companies are not obligated to scale up
> and is being taken out of context
no it is not - Altman is lying by omission[0] by implicating that various important costs are not real
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50400515 for longer comment on that
Let's say there are 10 companies that need 1 GB of RAM each in a life-or-death scenario. They would be willing to pay $100,000,000 per GB to get 1 GB of RAM.
At the same time, there are 90 more companies that need 1 GB of RAM each to make certain quarterly targets. They are willing to pay $10,000 per GB to get 1 GB of RAM.
If you make 9 GB of RAM, you can sell it for $900,000,000. If you make 99 GB of RAM, you can only sell it for $990,000, because the 10 life-or-death companies only need to bid high enough to push out a quarterly-target company.
It's a bit of a contrived example, but it shows you how restricting supply can boost total revenue if there is a segment of the market that has inelastic demand. (this is why medicine pricing has to be regulated - in the medical industry, there are lots of inelastic demand scenarios that can lead to predatory pricing)
Also, it is not likely to happen any time soon.
We have less rich gamers deciding to not upgrade their PCs at most.
Truly an unimaginable and ludicrous suggestion in a time where regulators are less likely than ever to pursue it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing#200...
that could've been crummy for someone; you should warn that your cute little complaint actually eats ram; half is clearly fiction but the OOM isn't.
Do you also click on the links of the Nigerian princes?