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> RAM prices are crashing because new models won’t need as much Reality begs to differ [0] and following the link for that text goes to an article [1] where t

• faangguyindia 7mo ago
  If the gains are real why the limits are so bad? Google can barely serve Anti-gravity.
  • owlmirror 7mo ago
    Isn't that at the moment still a free product? Of course they will not prioritize serving those requests. That tells you nothing.
    • butlike 7mo ago
      It tells you there's no clear path to monetization.
      • adventured 7mo ago
        They've all avoided loading up their LLMs with ads to this point. That is going to change dramatically over the next 2-3 years. All of them will be loaded with ads, and Google will partake as expected given their ad network & capabilities in that realm. They'll match GPT's ad roll-out.
    • notatoad 7mo ago
      it has a paid option. and the antigravity subreddit is full of people who claim to be paid users, complaining about constantly hitting limits.
      • owlmirror 7mo ago
        where do I find the paid option? I can not find that on their product page. There are only two options I can see; one "Available at no charge" and another one "Coming soon - For organizations" Can you upgrade in the IDE? It would be strange that Google has a performance problem for paid users while I do not experience any such issues at all with Claude and Codex.
        • ajam1507 7mo ago
          Maybe it's unavailable in your region. Four options on this page for me. https://antigravity.google/pricing https://antigravity.google/pricing
    • gck1 7mo ago
      Oh no. I pay for it, not antigravity, but gemini-cli. The limits and response times are laughable. Remove branding and you'd think it's served by some hobbyist on a homelab server, not Google
  • BoredPositron 7mo ago
    You get more Claude tokens from a Google subscriptions via antigravity than from anthropic. Especially if you use the 5 other "family" accounts you can share the subscription with...
• sigmoid10 7mo ago
  Yeah, I also stopped reading at that point. If I want a bunch of random, made up facts to sell lukewarm opinions or steer the uneducated masses, I'll tune in on a Trump press conference. Why does this feel like someone is desperately trying to make reality mirror his flailing market bets?
  • Forgeties79 7mo ago
    Sometimes it's real easy to see who has risky short positions right?
• sandworm101 7mo ago
  There is also demand for ram in others areas of data centers. As we are all pushed deeper into clouds, i can see the rise of ram for data storage (ram drives) continue to eat into the supply. A module of ddr5 will be more useful in a netflix rack streaming movies 24/7 than in a gaming PC where it may only be used an hour or two every day.
• fotcorn 7mo ago
  Also, there is zero reason to think that the big labs did not have anything similar to TurboQuant for a long time already. The recent blog post from Google announcing TurboQuant does not change anything regarding RAM planning for the big labs. TurboQuant itself is already a year old! So even smaller labs have probably seen and implemented it.
  • schmidtleonard 7mo ago
    The open source tooling got quantization support 3 years ago! It was a lesser type of quantization, but more than enough to prove that the savings just go to bigger models.
  • scw 7mo ago
    TurboQuant has a specific benefit by compressing the KV cache at a negligible cost to quality. That mainly means that the context lengths can go up in models for the same amount of memory, however the KV cache only accounts for something like 20% of the overall model size, and this will not dramatically decrease memory demands in the way that some of the more sensationalist reporting has stated.
    • lostmsu 7mo ago
      In large providers KV caches are the main bottleneck, no?
• ajross 7mo ago
  > Reality begs to differ Honestly you're both wrong. RAM prices spiked speculatively, and they're going down for the same reason. Market people always want to argue in fundamentals, when in practice *ALL* the high frequency components of the signal are down to a bunch of traders trying to guess where it's going in the short term. At best those guesses are informed by ground truth ("AI needs a lot of RAM!" "Sam cornered the marked!" "TurboQuant needs less RAM!"), but they remain guesses, and even then you can't tell the difference between that and random motion.
  • cma 7mo ago
    > RAM prices spiked speculatively Didn't OpenAI buy up 40% of the capacity all at once?
    • ajross 7mo ago
      No, they signed a bunch of contracts for future deliveries. That's not a supply constraint. The factories making RAM continued operating and serving their existing deliveries, and in fact they still are. Freshman economics would say that supply is fine and that prices shouldn't move. But they did anyway. And the reason is speculation.
      • drakythe 7mo ago
        The economy is vibe coded at this point. Have we gotten anymore word on the potential Helium constraints that SK Hynix was making noise about after the strike on the helium plant in the Middle East that suppplied 60% of S. Korea's Helium? Because that could definitely put a kink in things, since SKH is one of the 3 remaining big DRAM producers.
      • leoc 7mo ago
        I don't get it tbh. What market participants were speculating here? There aren't futures markets in RAM as far I know, though I certainly don't know much. And the supply constraints appear to have been pretty real (though maybe not immediate) if eg. Valve was begging publicly for RAM consignments. Were there pure-play speculators filling warehouses with DDR5?
• albinn 7mo ago
  I would think that we are going to see RAM prices increase even more, given, among other things, pure helium disruptions and increased electricity prices. I haven't looked closely into TurboQuant, but perhaps it will revolutionize just as much as the 1-bit llm did...
• hirako2000 7mo ago
  Not crashing yet. The article is looking 1 to 5 years to come. Given Nvidia's CEO's agitation I would give credit to the prediction, and if it's correct the price will go back to what it was, or even lower of investment in capacity are made today.
  • michaelcampbell 7mo ago
    My take is new capabilities will consume any price reductions, making them moot. At least in the medium term. A RAM price drop due to some magic efficiencies assumes everything else doesn't change, which I doubt anyone honestly thinks will be the case.
• amelius 7mo ago
  > Now if that means RAM prices come down (as speculated, not reported on, in the link) or the AI companies just do more things with their extra ram is yet to be determined. I think it is determined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  • woadwarrior01 7mo ago
    Yeah, even if one efficiency trick lands, people will end up spending the saved budget right back on bigger models, and/or more "thinking" tokens.
    • EthanHeilman 7mo ago
      Not if the bigger models have diminishing returns. Lets say you figure out a way to reduce RAM requirements 100X, but 2x increasing RAM usage by 2x only gets you a 1% increase in effectiveness and 3x does not get you any noticeable increase over 2x at all. Sure you can reduce the price per token, but you might have already saturated the market. Even if you haven't saturated the market, your hardware based moat just got smaller and this is going to reduce your margins even more. Just noticed that pydry made a similar point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47574216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47574216
  • pydry 7mo ago
    Jevons paradox only applies if demand hasnt already been saturated. The fact that public LLM usage is leveling off at a price of $0 and Jensen "we make the shovels in this gold rush" Huang is rather desperately claiming that you need to spend $250k/year in tokens to be taken seriously suggests that demand saturation may not be that far off. Whether Jevons' Paradox applies to software engineers I think is another open question. Im constantly being told that it doesnt and that LLMs make half of us redundant now, but Im skeptical - so much automation I see is broken or badly done.
    • adventured 7mo ago
      LLMs haven't remotely begun to be integrated into the lives of the typical person. Not even close. The typical person is using LLMs not at all as it pertains to their daily life tasks. They're using them almost entirely for limited discussion matters (eg having a discussion with GPT about a medical issue, or a work related matter). This is the first or second inning in the LLM rollout. It'll take 15-20 more years for full integration of AI agents into the life of the typical person. The claw experiments for example can just barely be considered alpha stage. They're early AI garbage unfit for the average person to utilize safely. That new world hasn't gotten near the typical person yet. The compute requirements to get to full integration of AI agents into the life of the average person - billions of them - is far beyond 10x where we're at now.
• adjejmxbdjdn 7mo ago
  I’m not disagreeing with you, but consumer RAM prices are lagging indicators. If commercial RAM prices are dropping then consumers will see those price drops last, especially given the fact that several consumer manufacturers turned to commercial only.
  • drakythe 7mo ago
    Is there a source that says commercial RAM prices are dropping? I was recently told (without a source, so I am not sure if it is true or not) that OpenAI never even bought any of the RAM they signed deals on last year, and that those deals were just letters of intent. So if prices are coming down I wouldn't be shocked but the economy is pretty well vibe coded these days so who even knows.
    • ffsm8 7mo ago
      Well, all manufacturers of ram have publicly stated that they're sold out for 2026 RAM prices falling during 2026 is insanely unlikely unless AI crashes so hard it starts to actually kill companies. And not just any but big tech I'm not seeing that in 2026. Maybe 2027 (I'd sincerely doubt that too, honestly), but definitely not within the next 9 months. Their runway is _way_ too large for things to spiral out of control within such a short period of time
      • citrin_ru 7mo ago
        > unlikely unless AI crashes so hard it starts to actually kill companies. And not just any but big tech. I'm not seeing that in 2026 A month ago AI crash we looking unlikely but with the strait of Hormuz being de-facto blocked many predict a global stagflation which could affect AI too.
      • dylan604 7mo ago
        If the claims the GP made about letters of intent to buy vs actual purchases are true, that brings additional questions. Like, if you send a letter of intent but do not follow through, are there financial penalties? How hard is it for the chip maker to sell the chips allotted based on that letter of intent? Would someone like Apple buy up the extra, or would they not need it as they've already bought enough for the units they expect to sell? If someone like Apple suddenly had an influx of RAM, that does not mean they would have extra CPU capacity to match. If the supply chain is this closely apportioned, what is the most likely result of a sudden surplus?
• slfnflctd 7mo ago
  > almost as bad as when LLMs link things to prove their point, you visit the link, and find it says nothing of the sort or even the opposite To be fair, they got it from us. This happened to me plenty of times long before modern LLMs.
  • throwup238 7mo ago
    It learned by reading HackerNews, after all.
• h14h 7mo ago
  I do wonder how closely prices consumer RAM kits follow the wholesale prices for NAND chips manufacturers see internally. The pcpartpicker graphs you linked show consumer prices have leveled out and may even be starting to fall. Depending on how the economics shake out this could mean we've hit an inflection point. My personal prediction is that once the VC bill comes due and prices for frontier models starts to climb, competition for efficiency will heat up. The main AI use-cases seem to be falling into buckets, and I doubt serving gigantic, do-it-all general models for every use-case under the sun is remotely cost-effective. If common use-cases start to be more efficiently served by smaller, more efficient purpose-built models (or systems thereof), it'd make the big frontier models increasingly niche. Cursor's Composer 2 model is a great example of this. In any case, I think it's pretty fair to speculate we may be seeing RAM prices start falling sooner rather than later.
  • joshstrange 7mo ago
    Consumer vs NAND is an absolutely fair distinction to make, I'm not sure how to track those prices. My main issue the article saying "RAM prices are crashing" (which I can't find any evidence of) and linking to an article that doesn't even repeat that claim, it instead just speculates that maybe RAM will come down in price due to this new idea. > In any case, I think it's pretty fair to speculate we may be seeing RAM prices start falling sooner rather than later. I sure hope so. RAM, HDDs, and SSDs are all crazy-high right now and I was in the market for literally all 3 but have paused all my buying because I can't justify the costs as they stand today.
    • h14h 7mo ago
      > My main issue the article saying "RAM prices are crashing" (which I can't find any evidence of) and linking to an article that doesn't even repeat that claim That's totally fair. The article is written in a very odd way where it makes a bunch of authoritative, factual-sounding claims and then throws a "this is all very speculative" line right at the end. It's very interesting speculation, but can't really be considered anything more than that, despite the prose it chose.
• aurareturn 7mo ago
  Even if TurboQuant, which was released a year ago, drastically lower RAM requirements, AI labs will just release bigger models. Jevons Paradox. When are we going to learn that efficiency gains in AI does not decrease hardware usage?
  • functional_dev 7mo ago
    valid point, it reminds me of video games. GPUs got faster, devs pushed higher resolutions, more complex lighting instead of saving power :)
• layer8 7mo ago
  I agree. The article they link to talks about memory company stocks crashing, not RAM prices crashing. There is some truth to the former: https://www.ft.com/content/e4e15692-187e-4466-832e-ec267e792292?syn-25a6b1a6=1 https://www.ft.com/content/e4e15692-187e-4466-832e-ec267e792...
• martinvol 7mo ago
  RAM prices haven't crashed yet and it'll take time because it has to propagate within the supply chain. Micron is -20% from the top already https://www.investing.com/equities/micron-tech https://www.investing.com/equities/micron-tech Stock price is the best forward indicator I can think of
  • cwillu 7mo ago
    That might be true, but it's still straightforwardly wrong to say that RAM prices have crashed, and it calls into question everything else they write.
    • martinvol 7mo ago
      yeah good point, although it's just one of all the catalysers I mentioned. I fact I had written most of the post already before I saw the news about RAM.
• gmerc 7mo ago
  consumer ram is starved by production capacity shifting to HBMs. Hbms dropping in price would not affect consumer RAM on any immediate timeline. Also, as pointed out by many, Jevons Paradox
• maeln 7mo ago
  > > RAM prices are crashing because new models won’t need as much > Reality begs to differ [0] and following the link for that text goes to an article [1] where they talk about Google's TurboQuant which supposedly will lower the RAM requirements. Now if that means RAM prices come down (as speculated, not reported on, in the link) or the AI companies just do more things with their extra ram is yet to be determined. The fact this article links there with text "RAM prices are crashing" throws the entire rest of the article into doubt for me. I find it fascinating how extremely reactive things have become. One research paper which, to my knowledge, hasn't been externally replicated yet, nor implemented, generate tons of hyperbolic article, tweets and such, and do actually manage to move the market at least temporarily. Not just this, but a simple message in full caps lock by the president of the U.S who is in the habit of lying through is teeth constantly, and the same thing happens. It's like there is a big bubble that threw any form of critical thinking out of the window and is in a hurry to react to anything even if it is not even remotely believable. Now I understand why it happens, there is a lot of money that can be made by capitalizing on FOMO, either by driving traffic to their website, socials, etc, or by simply insider trading (which feels like it has been legalized these days). But I still find it incredible the proportion it started to take.
  • incognition 7mo ago
    You nailed it. It's algos and noise trading
  • JCTheDenthog 7mo ago
    My favorite was when Google revealed Project Genie a month ago (which lets you generate video game worlds with AI, basically) and stocks for game companies immediately dropped. Anyone familiar with games and gaming knows that what Project Genie offers (essentially empty worlds with minimal interactivity that you can just kind of wander around in, and they struggle with simple things like object permanence if you look away) knows that this isn't real competition for actual games, but the markets reacted anyways.
    • mcv 7mo ago
      I've always seen the stock market as a mix of mass hysteria and pyramid scheme. With actual value underlying it of course, but actual stock values are frequently irrational.
• am17an 7mo ago
  Thank you, there are two things I would like to point out: 1) Google releasing something probably means they don't see it as important. 4-bit KV-cache quantization has been known for a long time. The fact there is almost a mass hysteria about this paper makes me think there is a lack of skepticism in this AI mania, even in relatively tech-savvy crowd. 2) But prices for memory companies are crashing! look around, the whole market is crashing.
• mNovak 7mo ago
  This feels similar to when Deepseek first debuted with claims of ultra-low cost training, and all the pundits exclaimed that Nvidia was finished, the bubble had burst, etc.
• hintymad 7mo ago
  Some also argue that the RAM price keeps rising because of the bullwhip effect. I was wondering if there's anyway for us to differentiate a sustained demand from the bullwhip effect.
• tracker1 7mo ago
  Even worse, 3 memory companies control well over 90% of the international market, with a history of cartel collaboration that's going to be ever harder to prove with fewer companies.
• Valakas_ 7mo ago
  This article and the title are total clickbait filled with emotional hooks. And it worked. You totally debunked it but look how it still became so popular.
• veunes 7mo ago
  Bingo. Even if some magic drops tomorrow that compresses the KV cache down to literally zero bits, that saved VRAM will instantly get swallowed up by bumping the batch size or pushing the context window to 10 million tokens. There is no such thing as "excess memory" in ML, only under-trained models