3 ms·
Right now, every company that can is ramping up their RAM production as much as humanly possible. There is such outrageous and growing demand, that it's like pr
by redsymbol 12d ago
Right now, every company that can is ramping up their RAM production as much as humanly possible. There is such outrageous and growing demand, that it's like printing money if you can manufacture more RAM chips. And that massive financial incentive is driving huge investment in manufacturing capacity.
But someday, that demand will stop rising.
At some point, most people will have enough RAM. And they just won't need to buy more.
The inventories of RAM will become overfull, in warehouses and stores. And suddenly the manufacturers, middlemen, and even retailers will all find the price they can sell at keeps dropping.
But you can't shut down a huge manufacturing facility overnight. You can't shut down a years-in-the-making retail distribution system overnight, either. You can't even shut down a facility that is halfway finished with construction. They'll keep producing and selling RAM at lower and lower profit margins, until the day comes they finally accept they're losing money with each sale.
And when that happens, we'll all have more RAM than we know what to do with. It'll be cheaper than we have all ever experienced in our lifetimes.
I don't expect this to happen soon. But demand cannot keep exponentially rising forever. There will come a point, probably in the next 5 years, when demand at least levels off, even as production capacity is still rising.
And it will be interesting to see what's possible at that point. We'll be able to create software that is not doable right now, because it will no longer be constrained by memory. And even cheap laptops will massive amounts.
- ricardobayes 12d agoYeah, that's kind of the beauty of capitalism. It can lead to short-term shortages but never structural ones. Any demand gets immediately fulfilled. I grew up in a country where there was a structural shortage of say, shoes and cars. You didn't really even get to choose which shoe you wanted to get, when there was a new shipment, folks went to the "department store" and got whatever size they could get their hands on and later trading it for the right one. To get any car, you would submit an application and 5-8 years down the line you would get a letter that your car would now be ready to be picked up, in a random color.
- redsymbol 12d agoThanks for sharing that. I am grateful every day that I was born in such an abundant environment. I have a few friends who did not, like you, and it always reminds me of how lucky I have been.
- burnerRhodov3 12d agoWhen you commoditize intelligence, you dramatically lower the cost to create. The amount of electronics being created is... incredible. We've really seem to have hit the asymtote part of the growth and i don't really see it coming back. Everything is moving to edge compute. From smart rings and watches, to robotics and drones, iphones and humanoids, and no end in sight to the scaling improvements in AI... It does seem that you can continue to get more emergent behavior the more compute you expend in pre/ post training. There's no reason we can't scale up to a million data centers in space, as long as you get dramatically improved intellegence.