This is an experimental and opinionated piece that I hope triggers some interesting discussion about the current situation with memory makers getting sued and possibly/allegedly the prices being deliberately manipulated with.
If anyone actually manages to read this, feedback is welcome
Every large AI startup is racing to be the last one standing. They are all gobbling up compute resources to ensure that they have the best competitive advantage when others go broke. That includes soaking up all the future supply they can to restrict their competitors ability to do the same. In < 5 years time there is only going to be one commercial AI company left, and all the rest will just be skeletons picked clean of all their resources.
Be prepared to live with whatever hardware you have now for about 10 years. If you’re lucky things will be back on an even keel by then.
I do think the consumer market might still look depressing in upcoming years, but I don’t think there will be one AI company left. I mean, even if we don’t take it literally, like I also wanted to mention how OpenAI gets to build its fabulous data centers while Anthropic just signs partnerships, and both LLMs (ChatGPT and Claude) are good and competitive. And don’t forget about FOSS models like DeepSeek.
There is something those companies aren’t loud and clear about, like they don’t talk about architectural bottlenecks, that what they need is not scaling but an architectural shift. And once photonics enters the game, should we expect the prices[*] to drop or will they justify it by even more compute power.
[*] edit: I mean LLM pricing (tokens), not chips
prices are 10000% deliberately being manipulated, that is no doubt about it, and nobody is going to get sued as all of them are in cahoots with the governments.
Jansen himself said it recently that in 2018 they have talked about this with Oracle and others “what their plan for the future is”
nobody is going to get sued
I gotta agree with you, because the people who are currently suing memory makers seem to be names I’ve never heard of, maybe they are trying to cut some money for personal profit. But even Valve was frustrated with the way how they are unable to negotiate the prices, it’s like only a few companies can (like OAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, etc.), basically the ones who are currently “in control” of stock market prices.
It makes me think of when Epic Games sued Apple: at some point, there could be more “smaller” companies like Valve that would be frustrated with the situation enough to do something about it. Maybe we should boycott the use of AI (unlikely), maybe we should boycott buying next gen consoles (more likely), etc. We can do something about it if we, as a society, become more conscious about the situation, even though conscious consumerism sounds overly optimistic.
It makes me think of when Epic Games sued Apple: at some point, there could be more “smaller” companies like Valve that would be frustrated with the situation enough to do something about it. Maybe we should boycott the use of AI (unlikely), maybe we should boycott buying next gen consoles (more likely), etc. We can do something about it if we, as a society, become more conscious about the situation, even though conscious consumerism sounds overly optimistic.
Body
I have to be honest here … i highly doubt it. I think nothing is going to change, there is going to be a bubble burst, there are going to be bailouts, nothing is going to change, and the regular user is going to get poorer and poorer. To some degree its the user fault for using this crap, but from another perspective you cant do shit about it as they are pushing this down people throaths and regular users dont even see this until its too late. Water is going to get scares, there are going to be lots more diseases, its going to be a shit storm.
As a religions person i truly believe this is the end times. We are at the finish line. Richer are getting WAAAAY richer and powerful, they are laughing in our faces, making us dumber, poorer, and to fight each other so we dont have time to say something about anything that matters. How can it not be the end times, what is to come out of all this mess? Just look at the data centers, pollution (not only from them), poverty, climate … everything is literally doomed, regular people just dont want to see it, dont want to believe it so to speak.
Because of Stargate.
AI was definately hurting supply before that, but it wasn’t ‘unlimited money’ hurting supply, they could only buy up at a reasonable rate.
Trump’s Stargate project and China’s instant response has eaten all the ram.
AFAIK, before AI it was COVID coupled with cryptomining, yet the only thing it hurt was GPU prices going up, not DRAM. Now, we have both GPUs and RAM sticks costing as much as a decent PC that you could build at least two years ago… yeah, I am somewhat hurt over my dream of building a high-end battlestation, which might not come to reality anytime soon.
