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> Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here. Which governments, and what exactly would you want these governments to do
by digdigdag 12d ago
> Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.
Which governments, and what exactly would you want these governments to do? The demand is global. There are no levers a single government can pull to meaningfully influence the global demand without fully committing to an protectionist economic policy, in which case the U.S. doesn't have the facilities to magically pop up world class fabs overnight, and South Korea and Taiwan don't have the market demand that the U.S. generates to justify their investments in making these chips and China lacks the IP to be able to build anything comparable to Nvidia's silicon at the moment.
No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.
- carlm42 12d agoGovernments have sued DRAM companies for price fixing and forming cartels before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing. They can absolutely step in and if there are evidence of price fixing or anti-competitive behaviours, can impose fines. The choice of whether to do that though is political.
- daedrdev 12d agoSeveral of these companies almost went under before the AI boom. There isn’t a cartel.
- lovich 12d agoIs there any allegations of price fixing in this case? The demand just skyrocketed. Other than legislation like the defense act in the US I don’t know of any governments that have jurisdiction over these ram makers that mandate companies produce more of a product. Especially not for consumer goods.
- wmf 12d agoIf they're charging one customer $X and another customer $5X for the same chips... there's got to be some law about this.
- SideQuark 11d agoAnd on that page govts have tried and failed at it also. Thinking the current prices are the result of fixing and not insane demand is surely going to lose in court. It’s trivial to show massive demand, and thus production line changes, as the driving forces here. If you look over all such lawsuits, they extremely rarely succeed.
- CamperBob2 12d agoNo one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers. I'm as fanatical a free-market fundamentalist as you'll ever meet, but if someone were to argue that government has a role in preventing bullshit like OpenAI's unilateral 40% attack on the entire DRAM market, backed by nothing but funny money, I would have a hard time coming up with defensible counterarguments.
- bunderbunder 12d agoI don’t really know much about how this stuff works, but I have a feeling we wouldn’t even have to do anything punitive. We might just need to find and close whatever weird loophole allows the folks who are participating in this gold rush to feel confident enough that they’ve externalized their risks to be willing to engage in speculative data center buildout projects on such a grand scale in the first place.
- pfdietz 12d agoYour attempts to insult what they are doing doesn't show they did anything wrong, but it does impeach the validity of your own argument.
- CamperBob2 12d agoHit dog hollers, sounds like.
- pfdietz 12d agoThat's abuser logic.
- CamperBob2 12d agoThe funny thing is, we're mostly in violent agreement, going by your other comments. This is a weird point to disagree on... so weird, in fact, that it's easy to believe you are associated with OpenAI. Hence my follow-up comment. What Altman did, and the way he did it, was not OK. Unless you believe that humanity's adoption of AI-based intellectual work is best served by concentrating an enormous amount of power in one company at the expense of everyone else, turning the market into a literal zero-sum game. Do you?
- newsclues 12d agoHow much memory does it take for the consumer market not to be totally screwed? Can that share of production be allocated to consumers, and the AI fights over the rest?
- m4rtink 12d agoWell, thats kinda how strategic reserves work - so that say food manufacturers just don't dump all the cheap food to sell crack instead & everybody starves to death.
- m4rtink 12d agoThe same governments that dumped bilions into to these companies and gave them insane tax breaks.
- rtpg 12d agoThe same major memory makers got prosecuted for cartel behavior by the DoJ a little over 20 years ago[0]. One might say "well what specific law have they broken" and I don't know and I don't know if they have, but at the very least the power of the State _could_ be used to force behavioral changes in some ways or another. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
- ozgrakkurt 11d agoIt is funny how regular people are trapped into legalism while companies are seeing things as a two sided fight. You can’t demand anything with this mentality. “The current situation is messing up the economy for a very large portion of us” is universally a good enough reason