7 ms·

It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value

by torginus 10mo ago

It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate), can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.

palmotea 10mo ago
> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) ... can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods. If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. Not only will unemployment be a problem, but prices of any resources desired by the AI companies or their founders will rise to unaffordability.
- BoredPositron 10mo ago
  AI probably will end up living up to the hype. It won't be on the generation of hardware they are now mass deploying. We need another tock before we can even start to talk about AGI.
- walterbell 10mo ago
  > rise to unaffordability Or require non-price mechanisms of payment and social contract.
  - hackable_sand 10mo ago
    Yes. Like theft.
- torginus 10mo ago
  I think living up to the hype needs to be defined. A lot of AI 'influencers' love wild speculation, but lets ignore the most fantastical claims of techno-singularity, and let's focus on what I would consider a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two. Even in this scenario, the capital gains on the lump sump invested in AI far outpaces the money that would be spent on the salaries of these workers, and if we look at the scenario with investor goggles, due to the exponential nature of investment gains, the gap will only grow wider. Additionally, AI does not seem to be a monopoly, either wrt companies, or geopolitics, so monopoly logic does not apply.
  - dartharva 10mo ago
    > Even in this scenario, the capital gains on the lump sump invested in AI far outpaces the money that would be spent on the salaries of these workers, and if we look at the scenario with investor goggles, due to the exponential nature of investment gains, the gap will only grow wider. Interesting hypothesis, do you have the math to back it up?
  - wickedsight 10mo ago
    > a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two. I'm really interested in what will happen to the economy/society in this case. Knowledge workers are the market for much that money is being made on. Facebook and Google make most of their money from ads. Those ads are shown to billions of people who have money to spend on things the advertisers sell. Massive unemployment would mean these companies lose their main revenue stream. Apple and Amazon make most of their money from selling stuff to millions of consumers and are this big because so many people now have a ton of disposable income. Teslas entire market cap is dependent on there being a huge market for robo taxis to drive people to work. Microsoft exists because they sell an OS that knowledge workers use to work on and tools they use within that OS to do the majority of their work with. If the future of knowledge work is just AI running on Linux communicating through API calls, that means MS is gone. All these companies that currently drive stock markets and are a huge part of the value of the SP500 seem to be actively working against their own interests for some reason. Maybe they're all banking on being the sole supplier of the tech that will then run the world, but the moat doesn't seem to exist, so that feels like a bad bet. But maybe I'm just too dumb to understand the world that these big players exist in and am missing some big detail.
    - andy99 10mo ago
      AI won’t replace knowledge workers, it will just give them different jobs. Pre AI, huge swaths of knowledge workers could just be replaced with nothing, they are a byproduct of bureaucratic bloat. But these jobs continue to exist. Most white collar work is just a kind of game people play, it’s in to way needed, but people still enjoy playing it. Having AI writing reports nobody reads instead of people doing it isn’t going to change anything.
- m_mueller 10mo ago
  and if you're unlucky to live close to a datacenter, this could include energy and water? I sure hope regulators are waking up as free markets don't really seem equipped to deal with this kind of concentration of power.
  - robotnikman 10mo ago
    We are certainly seeing citizens wake up to it. There was a proposal for a new datacenter to be built near where I live which was to be voted on, and a large majority of the people voted against it. No one wants higher power and water bills.
- elorant 10mo ago
  Affordable computing is what created the economy. If you take that away people in poorer countries can no longer afford a phone. Without a phone a lot things that we consider a given will not be functional anymore. The gaming industry alone including phones is a whooping $300bn. This will take a significant hit if people have to pay a fortune to build a rig, or if their phones are so under-powered that they can't even play a decent arcade game. Fiber is not universal so that all of this to be transferred to the cloud. We tend to forget that computing is universal and it's not just PCs.
  - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    I really agree with your statement and people forget, but the reason third world countries are able to buy devices is because they are cheap, increase the ram price and thus every computing device and I think it will impact everyone of us but disproportionately due to power purchasing capacity and other constraints in an economy I genuinely hope that this ram/chips crisis gets solved ASAP by any party. The implications of this might have a lot of impact too and I feel is already a big enough financial crisis itself if we think about it coupled with all the other major glaring issues.
    - torginus 10mo ago
      Old devices work just fine. I've upgraded my old iPhone XS last year to the latest and greatest 16 to see what changed (not much), the old one was still fast (in fact faster than a most upper-midrange Androids, its insane how much of a lead Apple has) and the battery was good. I considered selling it, but quickly had to realize it was worth almost nothing. Also, when treated right, computers almost never break. There's so much hand-me-down stuff, that are not much worse than the current stuff, that I think people even in the poorest countries can get an okay computer or smartphone (and most of them do).
      - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
        Well the industries the most impacted by it are homelabbing/datacenters imo. Like in current circumstances, its hard to get a homelab/datacenter so its better to postpone these plans for sometime I agree with your statement overall but I feel like till the years that these ram shortages occur, there is a freeze of all companies providing vps's etc. ie. no new player can enter so I am a bit worried about those raising their prices as well honestly which will impact everyone of us as well for these few years in another form of AI tax
- nyc_data_geek1 10mo ago
  Nothing ever lives up to the hype, that's why it's called hype.
- blitzar 10mo ago
  > If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. This hype scenario would be the biggest bust of all for Ai. Without jobs or money then there is nobody to pay Ai to do all the things that it can do, it the power and compute it needs to function will be worth $0.
  - bratbag 10mo ago
    Or the value of everything non ai drops to zero, which makes the value of ai infinite by comparison.
    - numpad0 10mo ago
      Either ways it'll be the end of the USD as we know it. But then again such fantasy situations had been "predicted" numerous times and never once came to be a reality.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo ago
Without regulation, money begets money and monopolies will form. If the American voter base doesn't pull its shit together and revive democracy, we're going to have a bad century. Yesterday I met a man who doesn't vote and I wanted to go ape-shit on him. "My vote doesn't matter". Vote for mayor. Vote for city council. Vote for our House members. Vote for State Senate. Vote for our two Senators. "Voting doesn't matter, capitalism is doomed anyway" is a self-fulling prophecy and a fed psy-op from the right. I'm so fucking sick of that attitude from my allies.
- irjustin 10mo ago
  Just so we're clear the current voter base says this is exactly how it should be.
  - i80and 10mo ago
    Just so we're clear, the voter base of over a year ago asked for this because they were actively lied to, and were foolish enough to believe said lies. Current polling however says the current voter base is quite unhappy with how this is
    - nemomarx 10mo ago
      People spend a lot more effort and money lying to the voter base during election years than during the rest of the time.
      - kubb 10mo ago
        And the money required to change the voter’s minds is peanuts. You don’t need to make them happy, just scared of the opposition.
  - sph 10mo ago
    Just so we're double clear, the other voter base says this is exactly how it should be, using with different words. All the ills of modern (American) politics stem by the blaming one side for the problems caused by both.
jstanley 10mo ago
You don't think that as prices go up, the supply might also go up, and the equilibrium price will be maintained? And possibly even a lower equilibrium will be reached due to greater economies of scale.
- gehatare 10mo ago
  Is there any reason to believe that this will happen? Prices of graphic cards only went down after the crypto boom went down again.
  - InsideOutSanta 10mo ago
    And they never went down to pre-crypto pricing. For quite a while, Intel was the only company producing reasonably specced GPUs at somewhat reasonable prices.
- marcyb5st 10mo ago
  That assumes that supply production means can scale up instantly. Fabs for high end chips don't and usually take years from foundations being laid to First chip out of the production line. In the interim, yeah, they will force prices up. Additionally those fabs cost billions. Given the lead time I mentioned a lot of companies won't start building them right away since the risk of demand going away is high and the ROI in those cases might become unreachable
  - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    I think one of these fab compaies have already invested/talked about investing 700 BILLION dollars (I think it was micron? but I am not sure) I have heard that in the fab making industry, things moves in cycles and this cycle has been repeated so many times and the reason that ram is so expensive was that at one time during covid there was shortage so they built more factories and they built so so many that these companies took a hit in stocks so they then went and closed and at just the bottom of their factory production levels, the AI bubble started to pop in and need their ram's and now they are once again increasing factory levels And after the supply due to AI gets closed with the additional compute etc., I doubt it I think that within 2-3 or maybe 4 years of timeframe ram will get cheaper imo. The problem is, if someone can fill the market till that time.
UltraSane 10mo ago
Supply should increase as a response to higher prices, this bringing prices down.
- dandanua 10mo ago
  in a fairy world
  - YetAnotherNick 10mo ago
    No just stop being cynical. The reason almost every electronic item is cheaper now than 2 decades back is just becuase the demand(and thus supply) is higher.
    - coderenegade 10mo ago
      I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. I'd argue it's more the result of the CCP bankrolling the Chinese electronics industry to the point where roughly 70% of all electronics goods are produced in China. The concentration of expertise and supply chains is staggering, and, imo, was really born out of geopolitical strategy.
      - YetAnotherNick 10mo ago
        No, its not. Transistors used to cost $1. Now they cost $1/billion or something. It's all because the 10s of billions of fixed cost incurred by fab is shared among customers. If we create less chips, the fixed cost wont reduce.
      - Ray20 10mo ago
        > of the CCP bankrolling the Chinese electronics industry to the point where roughly 70% of all electronics goods are produced in China. But we don't see this bankrolling in absolute values. Rather, it's due to regressive taxation, low (cheap) social security for workers, and very weak intellectual property protection.
- abenga 10mo ago
testbjjl 10mo ago
> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate) Some might conclude the same for funds (hedge funds/private equity) and housing.
- lpapez 10mo ago
  Stop right there you terrorist antifa leftie commie scum! You are being arrested for thought crime!
- baobabKoodaa 10mo ago
  I'm confused. When you say that hedge funds "price out" regular people, what do you mean? Price out of what?
  - kubb 10mo ago
    Of the housing market? That seems to be what GP said, doesn’t it?
  - gosub100 10mo ago
    They create demand which increases price. Plus they can afford to hold their asset longer, this reducing supply.
- xadhominemx 10mo ago
  AI consumes about 30% of DRAM wafers. PE owns about .5% of single family homes.
  - impossiblefork 10mo ago
    It going to be misleading to look at the fraction and I think it's misleading to only look at PE investors. It's more important to look at the fraction of demand for homes that are on the market. Investors bought 1/3 of the US homes sold in 2023. This is, I think, quite alarming, especially since a small amount of extra demand can have a large effect on prices.
newsclues 10mo ago
First crypto now AI. I just want to play video games so I don’t have to interact with people
- disqard 10mo ago
  Soon, you might have an AI partner, and never have to interact with people.
- rvnx 10mo ago
  This might be the case already. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory Even the multiplayer video games have bots... Some of the users here are not real at all. It's logical, if you want to push your product, be promoted on the first page of HN then you have to post fake comments using bots. -> You get credibility and karma/trust for future submissions, and that's pretty much all you have to do. Costs about 2 USD, can bring 2'000 USD in revenue, why wouldn't you want to "hustle" (like YC says) ? Bots are here to grow, it will take time as for now the issue is still small, but you may already have interacted with bots, so do I.
HexPhantom 10mo ago
I think the uncomfortable part is that it's not really about "AI hype" at this point, it's about who gets priority access to scarce inputs.
EZ-E 10mo ago
In the end, with the current market prices, chips factories and data centers are being built all over with the assumption of exponential demand growth. When the excitement and demand for AI cools, we will enjoy the additional capacity and better prices. Also see: fiber bandwidth post 2000. Capital poured in, overbuilding happened, prices collapsed after the crash.
- doom2 10mo ago
  Has work begun on increasing RAM production capacity? My understanding is that these companies are specifically _not_ increasing capacity yet while they wait to see if the bubble bursts or not.
  - walterbell 10mo ago
    They decreased 2025 production, to increase memory prices, profits and their stock prices,https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419776
    - Numerlor 10mo ago
      Afaik production of nand was reduced as some of the lines can be repurposed for dram that's more in demand. Significantly increasing supply is also a huge multi year investment into a new fab that'd likely not pay out when the artificial demand breaks down.
      - riku_iki 10mo ago
        > Significantly increasing supply is also a huge multi year investment into a new fab so, are there huge multi-year investments?
        Numerlor 10mo ago
        There aren't because nobody is betting on ai demand to last. Then they'd have a couple billion dollar fab sitting around doing nothing and employees that'd have to be fired. There already was scaling back for dram and and production post COVID, where I believe nand was being sold close to cost because of oversupply
arisAlexis 10mo ago
Calling the greatest and last invention of man "AI thingies" is telling of why our society will split into tech and non tech communities in the future like all the science fiction authors have predicted.
- latexr 10mo ago
  > Calling the greatest and last invention of man There are several inventions which are far greater than LLMs. To name two: computers and methods to generate electricity, things without which LLMs wouldn’t have been possible. But also harnessing fire, the wheel, agriculture, vaccines… The list goes on and on. Calling LLMs “AI thingies” seems much more in tune with reality than calling them “the greatest invention of man” (and I’m steel manning and assuming you meant “latest”, not “last”). You can’t eat LLMs or live in them and they are extremely dependent on other inventions to barely function. They do not, in any way, deserve the title of “greatest invention”, and it’s worrying that we’re at that level of hyperbole. Though you’re certainly not the first one to make that claim. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alphabet-ceo-sundar-pichai-says-175046683.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alphabet-ceo-sundar-pichai-sa...
  - arisAlexis 10mo ago
    Am not talking about LLMs this is like making an argument about DC power. I am talking about inventing intelligence which is greater even than fire.
    - Applejinx 10mo ago
      He did mean 'last', maybe don't steelman these arguments so dutifully? Speak for yourself, friend. I don't believe you and think you're making a tragic mistake, but you're also my competition in a sense, so… you have fun with that.
  - arisAlexis 10mo ago
    I meant last. The concept of calling it that way is historical and it shows you have never really deep dived into the concept of AI at all if you don't know who used it and why.
tliltocatl 10mo ago
DUV processes are still a things and perfectly usable for general compute - but not for AI. Rising prices will make them competitive again. And it will require us to ditch Electron (which is a good thing). If anything, we might see a compute renaissance.
liveoneggs 10mo ago
They are willing to sacrifice everything in the short term to depress tech salaries long term. The purpose of this exercise is to make you poor.
bloppe 10mo ago
It's called a shortage. Chips are highly cyclical. Right now demand is surging and prices and investment are booming. Give it 5 years and I'd bet many in the chips industry will be bemoaning a massive glut and oversupply that sends prices plummeting.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
marcosdumay 10mo ago
Yes. To put it in slightly different terms, it's alarming that a handful of companies can price all of humanity out of computing goods. And it's even more alarming that those companies don't even need to be profitable.
xnx 10mo ago
The cure for high prices is high prices. Datacenter RAM is heavily utilized. RAM in personal devices is sitting idle 99% of the time. Think of all the ram sitting in work laptops on nights and weekends sitting unused. Big waste of resources.

palmotea 10mo ago

> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) ... can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods. If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. Not only will unemployment be a problem, but prices of any resources desired by the AI companies or their founders will rise to unaffordability.

BoredPositron 10mo ago
AI probably will end up living up to the hype. It won't be on the generation of hardware they are now mass deploying. We need another tock before we can even start to talk about AGI.
walterbell 10mo ago
> rise to unaffordability Or require non-price mechanisms of payment and social contract.
- hackable_sand 10mo ago
  Yes. Like theft.
torginus 10mo ago
I think living up to the hype needs to be defined. A lot of AI 'influencers' love wild speculation, but lets ignore the most fantastical claims of techno-singularity, and let's focus on what I would consider a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two. Even in this scenario, the capital gains on the lump sump invested in AI far outpaces the money that would be spent on the salaries of these workers, and if we look at the scenario with investor goggles, due to the exponential nature of investment gains, the gap will only grow wider. Additionally, AI does not seem to be a monopoly, either wrt companies, or geopolitics, so monopoly logic does not apply.
- dartharva 10mo ago
  > Even in this scenario, the capital gains on the lump sump invested in AI far outpaces the money that would be spent on the salaries of these workers, and if we look at the scenario with investor goggles, due to the exponential nature of investment gains, the gap will only grow wider. Interesting hypothesis, do you have the math to back it up?
- wickedsight 10mo ago
  > a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two. I'm really interested in what will happen to the economy/society in this case. Knowledge workers are the market for much that money is being made on. Facebook and Google make most of their money from ads. Those ads are shown to billions of people who have money to spend on things the advertisers sell. Massive unemployment would mean these companies lose their main revenue stream. Apple and Amazon make most of their money from selling stuff to millions of consumers and are this big because so many people now have a ton of disposable income. Teslas entire market cap is dependent on there being a huge market for robo taxis to drive people to work. Microsoft exists because they sell an OS that knowledge workers use to work on and tools they use within that OS to do the majority of their work with. If the future of knowledge work is just AI running on Linux communicating through API calls, that means MS is gone. All these companies that currently drive stock markets and are a huge part of the value of the SP500 seem to be actively working against their own interests for some reason. Maybe they're all banking on being the sole supplier of the tech that will then run the world, but the moat doesn't seem to exist, so that feels like a bad bet. But maybe I'm just too dumb to understand the world that these big players exist in and am missing some big detail.
  - andy99 10mo ago
    AI won’t replace knowledge workers, it will just give them different jobs. Pre AI, huge swaths of knowledge workers could just be replaced with nothing, they are a byproduct of bureaucratic bloat. But these jobs continue to exist. Most white collar work is just a kind of game people play, it’s in to way needed, but people still enjoy playing it. Having AI writing reports nobody reads instead of people doing it isn’t going to change anything.
m_mueller 10mo ago
and if you're unlucky to live close to a datacenter, this could include energy and water? I sure hope regulators are waking up as free markets don't really seem equipped to deal with this kind of concentration of power.
- robotnikman 10mo ago
  We are certainly seeing citizens wake up to it. There was a proposal for a new datacenter to be built near where I live which was to be voted on, and a large majority of the people voted against it. No one wants higher power and water bills.
elorant 10mo ago
Affordable computing is what created the economy. If you take that away people in poorer countries can no longer afford a phone. Without a phone a lot things that we consider a given will not be functional anymore. The gaming industry alone including phones is a whooping $300bn. This will take a significant hit if people have to pay a fortune to build a rig, or if their phones are so under-powered that they can't even play a decent arcade game. Fiber is not universal so that all of this to be transferred to the cloud. We tend to forget that computing is universal and it's not just PCs.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  I really agree with your statement and people forget, but the reason third world countries are able to buy devices is because they are cheap, increase the ram price and thus every computing device and I think it will impact everyone of us but disproportionately due to power purchasing capacity and other constraints in an economy I genuinely hope that this ram/chips crisis gets solved ASAP by any party. The implications of this might have a lot of impact too and I feel is already a big enough financial crisis itself if we think about it coupled with all the other major glaring issues.
  - torginus 10mo ago
    Old devices work just fine. I've upgraded my old iPhone XS last year to the latest and greatest 16 to see what changed (not much), the old one was still fast (in fact faster than a most upper-midrange Androids, its insane how much of a lead Apple has) and the battery was good. I considered selling it, but quickly had to realize it was worth almost nothing. Also, when treated right, computers almost never break. There's so much hand-me-down stuff, that are not much worse than the current stuff, that I think people even in the poorest countries can get an okay computer or smartphone (and most of them do).
    - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
      Well the industries the most impacted by it are homelabbing/datacenters imo. Like in current circumstances, its hard to get a homelab/datacenter so its better to postpone these plans for sometime I agree with your statement overall but I feel like till the years that these ram shortages occur, there is a freeze of all companies providing vps's etc. ie. no new player can enter so I am a bit worried about those raising their prices as well honestly which will impact everyone of us as well for these few years in another form of AI tax
nyc_data_geek1 10mo ago
Nothing ever lives up to the hype, that's why it's called hype.
blitzar 10mo ago
> If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. This hype scenario would be the biggest bust of all for Ai. Without jobs or money then there is nobody to pay Ai to do all the things that it can do, it the power and compute it needs to function will be worth $0.
- bratbag 10mo ago
  Or the value of everything non ai drops to zero, which makes the value of ai infinite by comparison.
  - numpad0 10mo ago
    Either ways it'll be the end of the USD as we know it. But then again such fantasy situations had been "predicted" numerous times and never once came to be a reality.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo ago

Without regulation, money begets money and monopolies will form. If the American voter base doesn't pull its shit together and revive democracy, we're going to have a bad century. Yesterday I met a man who doesn't vote and I wanted to go ape-shit on him. "My vote doesn't matter". Vote for mayor. Vote for city council. Vote for our House members. Vote for State Senate. Vote for our two Senators. "Voting doesn't matter, capitalism is doomed anyway" is a self-fulling prophecy and a fed psy-op from the right. I'm so fucking sick of that attitude from my allies.

irjustin 10mo ago
Just so we're clear the current voter base says this is exactly how it should be.
- i80and 10mo ago
  Just so we're clear, the voter base of over a year ago asked for this because they were actively lied to, and were foolish enough to believe said lies. Current polling however says the current voter base is quite unhappy with how this is
  - nemomarx 10mo ago
    People spend a lot more effort and money lying to the voter base during election years than during the rest of the time.
    - kubb 10mo ago
      And the money required to change the voter’s minds is peanuts. You don’t need to make them happy, just scared of the opposition.
- sph 10mo ago
  Just so we're double clear, the other voter base says this is exactly how it should be, using with different words. All the ills of modern (American) politics stem by the blaming one side for the problems caused by both.

jstanley 10mo ago

You don't think that as prices go up, the supply might also go up, and the equilibrium price will be maintained? And possibly even a lower equilibrium will be reached due to greater economies of scale.

gehatare 10mo ago
Is there any reason to believe that this will happen? Prices of graphic cards only went down after the crypto boom went down again.
- InsideOutSanta 10mo ago
  And they never went down to pre-crypto pricing. For quite a while, Intel was the only company producing reasonably specced GPUs at somewhat reasonable prices.
marcyb5st 10mo ago
That assumes that supply production means can scale up instantly. Fabs for high end chips don't and usually take years from foundations being laid to First chip out of the production line. In the interim, yeah, they will force prices up. Additionally those fabs cost billions. Given the lead time I mentioned a lot of companies won't start building them right away since the risk of demand going away is high and the ROI in those cases might become unreachable
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  I think one of these fab compaies have already invested/talked about investing 700 BILLION dollars (I think it was micron? but I am not sure) I have heard that in the fab making industry, things moves in cycles and this cycle has been repeated so many times and the reason that ram is so expensive was that at one time during covid there was shortage so they built more factories and they built so so many that these companies took a hit in stocks so they then went and closed and at just the bottom of their factory production levels, the AI bubble started to pop in and need their ram's and now they are once again increasing factory levels And after the supply due to AI gets closed with the additional compute etc., I doubt it I think that within 2-3 or maybe 4 years of timeframe ram will get cheaper imo. The problem is, if someone can fill the market till that time.

UltraSane 10mo ago

Supply should increase as a response to higher prices, this bringing prices down.

dandanua 10mo ago
in a fairy world
- YetAnotherNick 10mo ago
  No just stop being cynical. The reason almost every electronic item is cheaper now than 2 decades back is just becuase the demand(and thus supply) is higher.
  - coderenegade 10mo ago
    I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. I'd argue it's more the result of the CCP bankrolling the Chinese electronics industry to the point where roughly 70% of all electronics goods are produced in China. The concentration of expertise and supply chains is staggering, and, imo, was really born out of geopolitical strategy.
    - YetAnotherNick 10mo ago
      No, its not. Transistors used to cost $1. Now they cost $1/billion or something. It's all because the 10s of billions of fixed cost incurred by fab is shared among customers. If we create less chips, the fixed cost wont reduce.
    - Ray20 10mo ago
      > of the CCP bankrolling the Chinese electronics industry to the point where roughly 70% of all electronics goods are produced in China. But we don't see this bankrolling in absolute values. Rather, it's due to regressive taxation, low (cheap) social security for workers, and very weak intellectual property protection.
abenga 10mo ago

testbjjl 10mo ago

> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate) Some might conclude the same for funds (hedge funds/private equity) and housing.

lpapez 10mo ago
Stop right there you terrorist antifa leftie commie scum! You are being arrested for thought crime!
baobabKoodaa 10mo ago
I'm confused. When you say that hedge funds "price out" regular people, what do you mean? Price out of what?
- kubb 10mo ago
  Of the housing market? That seems to be what GP said, doesn’t it?
- gosub100 10mo ago
  They create demand which increases price. Plus they can afford to hold their asset longer, this reducing supply.
xadhominemx 10mo ago
AI consumes about 30% of DRAM wafers. PE owns about .5% of single family homes.
- impossiblefork 10mo ago
  It going to be misleading to look at the fraction and I think it's misleading to only look at PE investors. It's more important to look at the fraction of demand for homes that are on the market. Investors bought 1/3 of the US homes sold in 2023. This is, I think, quite alarming, especially since a small amount of extra demand can have a large effect on prices.

newsclues 10mo ago

First crypto now AI. I just want to play video games so I don’t have to interact with people

disqard 10mo ago
Soon, you might have an AI partner, and never have to interact with people.
rvnx 10mo ago
This might be the case already. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory Even the multiplayer video games have bots... Some of the users here are not real at all. It's logical, if you want to push your product, be promoted on the first page of HN then you have to post fake comments using bots. -> You get credibility and karma/trust for future submissions, and that's pretty much all you have to do. Costs about 2 USD, can bring 2'000 USD in revenue, why wouldn't you want to "hustle" (like YC says) ? Bots are here to grow, it will take time as for now the issue is still small, but you may already have interacted with bots, so do I.

HexPhantom 10mo ago

I think the uncomfortable part is that it's not really about "AI hype" at this point, it's about who gets priority access to scarce inputs.

EZ-E 10mo ago

In the end, with the current market prices, chips factories and data centers are being built all over with the assumption of exponential demand growth. When the excitement and demand for AI cools, we will enjoy the additional capacity and better prices. Also see: fiber bandwidth post 2000. Capital poured in, overbuilding happened, prices collapsed after the crash.

doom2 10mo ago
Has work begun on increasing RAM production capacity? My understanding is that these companies are specifically _not_ increasing capacity yet while they wait to see if the bubble bursts or not.
- walterbell 10mo ago
  They decreased 2025 production, to increase memory prices, profits and their stock prices,https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419776
  - Numerlor 10mo ago
    Afaik production of nand was reduced as some of the lines can be repurposed for dram that's more in demand. Significantly increasing supply is also a huge multi year investment into a new fab that'd likely not pay out when the artificial demand breaks down.
    - riku_iki 10mo ago
      > Significantly increasing supply is also a huge multi year investment into a new fab so, are there huge multi-year investments?
      - Numerlor 10mo ago
        There aren't because nobody is betting on ai demand to last. Then they'd have a couple billion dollar fab sitting around doing nothing and employees that'd have to be fired. There already was scaling back for dram and and production post COVID, where I believe nand was being sold close to cost because of oversupply

arisAlexis 10mo ago

Calling the greatest and last invention of man "AI thingies" is telling of why our society will split into tech and non tech communities in the future like all the science fiction authors have predicted.

latexr 10mo ago
> Calling the greatest and last invention of man There are several inventions which are far greater than LLMs. To name two: computers and methods to generate electricity, things without which LLMs wouldn’t have been possible. But also harnessing fire, the wheel, agriculture, vaccines… The list goes on and on. Calling LLMs “AI thingies” seems much more in tune with reality than calling them “the greatest invention of man” (and I’m steel manning and assuming you meant “latest”, not “last”). You can’t eat LLMs or live in them and they are extremely dependent on other inventions to barely function. They do not, in any way, deserve the title of “greatest invention”, and it’s worrying that we’re at that level of hyperbole. Though you’re certainly not the first one to make that claim. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alphabet-ceo-sundar-pichai-says-175046683.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alphabet-ceo-sundar-pichai-sa...
- arisAlexis 10mo ago
  Am not talking about LLMs this is like making an argument about DC power. I am talking about inventing intelligence which is greater even than fire.
  - Applejinx 10mo ago
    He did mean 'last', maybe don't steelman these arguments so dutifully? Speak for yourself, friend. I don't believe you and think you're making a tragic mistake, but you're also my competition in a sense, so… you have fun with that.
- arisAlexis 10mo ago
  I meant last. The concept of calling it that way is historical and it shows you have never really deep dived into the concept of AI at all if you don't know who used it and why.

tliltocatl 10mo ago

DUV processes are still a things and perfectly usable for general compute - but not for AI. Rising prices will make them competitive again. And it will require us to ditch Electron (which is a good thing). If anything, we might see a compute renaissance.

liveoneggs 10mo ago

They are willing to sacrifice everything in the short term to depress tech salaries long term. The purpose of this exercise is to make you poor.

bloppe 10mo ago

It's called a shortage. Chips are highly cyclical. Right now demand is surging and prices and investment are booming. Give it 5 years and I'd bet many in the chips industry will be bemoaning a massive glut and oversupply that sends prices plummeting.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

marcosdumay 10mo ago

Yes. To put it in slightly different terms, it's alarming that a handful of companies can price all of humanity out of computing goods. And it's even more alarming that those companies don't even need to be profitable.

xnx 10mo ago

The cure for high prices is high prices. Datacenter RAM is heavily utilized. RAM in personal devices is sitting idle 99% of the time. Think of all the ram sitting in work laptops on nights and weekends sitting unused. Big waste of resources.