The general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes". That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary computing device that they don't even have full control over now (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many people (myself included). Now many people primarily consume content on a device controlled almost entirely by the company they bought it from. If the economics lead to a situation where its more profitable to sell you compute time than sell you computers then businesses will chose to not sell you computers. I have no idea if that is what ends up happening.
Hold on to Your Hardware
61–70 of 559 posts
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#62I feel like this is just the bubble talking. I'm pretty naive here, but at some point suppliers will adjust so they can take money from data center builders and consumers, just like pre-bubble.
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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#63Just to mention one thing, helium -which is a necessity for chip production- is a byproduct of LNG production. And 20% of that is just gone (Qatar) and the question is how long it will take to get that back. So not only a chip shortage because of AI buying chips in huge volumes but also because production will be hampered. Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.
Fusion fuel is so energy dense that fusion plants will never produce industrially meaningful amounts of helium.
I think this is why he labelled the comment 'Tongue in cheek'. Thanks for pointing it out explicitly tho, was not aware of this.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#64Just to mention one thing, helium -which is a necessity for chip production- is a byproduct of LNG production. And 20% of that is just gone (Qatar) and the question is how long it will take to get that back. So not only a chip shortage because of AI buying chips in huge volumes but also because production will be hampered. Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.
Fusion fuel is so energy dense that fusion plants will never produce industrially meaningful amounts of helium.
Well, as long as they can make electricity too cheap to meter, we can get helium from somewhere. Mine it from LNG sources currently untapped due to EROI < 1, or ship it from the goddamn Moon - ultimately, every problem in life (except that of human heart) can be solved with cheap energy.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#65I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…
We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games.
People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked […] 768GB of RAM is insane… Meanwhile, I’ve been going back and forth for over a year about spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. I can’t shake the feeling I’d never actually use that much, and that, long term, cloud compute is going to matter more than sinking money into a sing…
My home server has 512GB RAM, 48 cores, my 4 desktops are 16 cores 128GB, 4060GPU each. Server is second hand and I paid around $2500 for it. Just below $3000 price for desktops when I built them. All prices are in Canadian Pesos
Canadian Pesos?
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#67In such a future the iPhone and android ecosystem is dead? Because a single $1k phone is a hell of a computer. So if you can still buy a phone you can still get a computer. Local AI aside these are very capable.
iOS is apparently going to have mandatory age gating, so likely that will come to Android as well.
I was trying to avoid the software side of this argument as it is a worm cannister. I was just musing from a hardware availability point of view.
That said.... hopefully at least on Android side you can get a free (as in unchastified) OS to run on it.
Until they come for the HW.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#68I'm not sure why people are upset. This is how Capitalism is supposed to work - resource allocation towards the most productive (in terms of Capital) usage.
Those who are best able to use a resource are willing to pay the most for it thus pricing out unproductive usages of it.
This is pure Capitalism.
If one is in general against Capitalism, yes, one can complain.
But saying "I want free markets" and "I want capitalism", but then complaining when the free markets increase the price of your RAM is utterly deranged.
Some will say "but Altman is hoarding the RAM, he's not using it productively". It's irrelevant, he is willing to pay more than you to hoard that RAM. In his view he's extracting more value from that than you do, so he's willing to pay more. The markets will work. If this is unproductive use of Capital, OpenAI will go bankrupt.
And the RAM sellers make more money, which is good in Capitalism. It would be irresponsible for them to sell to price sensitive customers (retail), when they have buyers (AI companies) willing to pay much more. And if this is a bad decision, because that AI market will vanish and they will have burned the retail market, Capitalism and Free Markets will work again and bankrupt them.
Survival of the fittest. That is Capitalism. And right now AI companies are the fittest by a large margin.
AI and Capitalism are the exact same thing, as famously put. We are in the first stages of turning Earth into Computronium, you either become Compute or you will fade away.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
My home server has 512GB RAM, 48 cores, my 4 desktops are 16 cores 128GB, 4060GPU each. Server is second hand and I paid around $2500 for it. Just below $3000 price for desktops when I built them. All prices are in Canadian Pesos
Canadian Pesos?
It is sarcasm. Our dollar which used to be on par with US is no more.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#70[flagged]