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As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

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Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#151

Post by walterbell »

l9o wrote: post #135

It feels like a weird tension: we worry about AI alignment but also want everyone to have unrestricted local AI hardware. Local compute means no guardrails, fine-tune for whatever you want. Maybe the market pricing people out is accidentally doing what regulation couldn't? Concentrating AI where there's at least some oversight and accountability. Not sure if that's good or bad to be honest.

> market pricing people out

For now. Chinese supply chains include DRAM from CXMT (sanctioned) and NAND from YMTC (not sanctioned, holds patents on 3D stacking that have been licensed by Korean memory manufacturers).

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#152

Post by torginus »

palmotea wrote: post #139
torginus wrote: post #133

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.

> 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.

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.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#153

Post by walterbell »

terribleperson wrote: post #27
shmerl wrote: post #26

> She said the next new factory expected to come online is being built by Micron in Idaho. The company says it will be operational in 2027 Isn't Micron stopping all consumer RAM production? So their factories won't help anyway.

Micron is exiting direct to consumer sales. That doesn't mean their chips couldn't end up in sticks or devices sold to consumers, just that the no-middleman Crucial brand is dead. Also, even if no Micron RAM ever ended up in consumer hands, it would still reduce prices for consumers by increasing the supply to other segments of the market.

> no-middleman Crucial brand is dead

It could be restarted in the future by Micron.

Crucial SSDs offer good firmware (e.g. nvme sanitize for secure erase) and hardware (e.g. power loss capacitors).

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#154

Post by llmslave2 »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #143
torginus wrote: post #133

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.

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…

This is a common sentiment but it doesn't make any sense. Voting for the wrong politician is worse than not voting at all, so why is it seen as some moral necessity for everyone to vote? If someone doesn't have enough political knowledge to vote correctly, perhaps they shouldn't vote.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#155

Post by jstanley »

torginus wrote: post #133

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.

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.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#156

Post by magicalhippo »

greesil wrote: post #94
piskov wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple secured at least a year-worth supply of memory (not in actual chips but in prices). The bigger the company = longer the contract. However it will eventually catch up even to Apple. It is not prices alone due to demand but the manufacturing redirection from something like lpddr in iphones to hbm and what have you for servers and gpu

Apparently Google fucked up https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiatoday.in/amp/technolog...

Non-AMP link:

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/ram-shortage...

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#157

Post by rhdunn »

incompatible wrote: post #83
rurp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that higher performing devices will still exist. Those engineers will probably keep using performant devices and their managers will certainly keep buying them. We'll probably end up in an even more bifurcated world where the well off have access to lot of great products and services that most of humanity is increasingly unable to access.

How many "great products and services" even need a lot of RAM, assuming that we can live without graphics-intensive games?

Image, video, and music editing. Developing, running, and debugging large applications.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#158

Post by UltraSane »

torginus wrote: post #133

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.

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

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#159

Post by gehatare »

jstanley wrote: post #155
torginus wrote: post #133

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.

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.

Is there any reason to believe that this will happen? Prices of graphic cards only went down after the crypto boom went down again.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#160

Post by nemomarx »

i80and wrote: post #150
irjustin wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so we're clear the current voter base says this is exactly how it should be.

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

People spend a lot more effort and money lying to the voter base during election years than during the rest of the time.
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