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AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

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Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#181

Is there a reliable service that plots hourly price per GPU per cloud through time?

I’ve been working on computeprices.com as a side project for the last year to do just that.

I was not expecting that the prices are going down. Makes sense as the hardware gets older but I always assumed the prices must be inflated given how much competition there is to make new datacenters

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#182
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I've seen described by some is that the industry is resistant to expand capacity right now, because a partial pop of the AI bubble is expected aaany time now for months, but it keeps not happening. But if it does happen and they have too much capacity, the whole GPU and RAM industry would not be able to recoup that investment and would collapse.

People confuse themselves with the bubble-metaphor. If an AI bubble exists and pops (we need not discuss either) the already existing and on-the-way-demand will not just disappear. Millions of todays users will not just decide that they don't want to use claude code or chatgpt anymore. Instead, an increasing number of people are going to want AI stuff from here on out, forever, because it's proven to be good enough i…

> Millions of todays users will not just decide that they don't want to use claude code or chatgpt anymore

Won’t they? For a great number of people, LLM’s are in the “nice to have” basket. Execs and hucksters foam at the mouth over them, other people find utility but the vast majority are not upending their life in service of them.

I suspect if ChatGPT evaporated tomorrow, the chronically dependent would struggle, most people would shrug and go on with their lives, and any actual use cases would probably spin up a local model and go back to whatever they’re doing.

I’m not denying hardware demand will evaporate, it definitely won’t, but interrupt the cycle and “ehh, good enough” will probably go a very long way for a very large percentage of the userbase.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#183
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>home computers are replaced by thin clients Ah, but that's the genius of this circuit around the tech cycle. You need a "thick client" to access those subscription services, as running the (web) interface requires shameful amounts of RAM and CPU resources.

Not if the browser rendering is done in the cloud. All you're looking at is a screen on a server somewhere, not actually the one on your phone.

Nobody wants to run browsers in the cloud. Too expensive. We really are getting the worst of all worlds with this, where we have to do all the expensive computations and all our subscriptions do is flip a flag in some database somewhere so that we're allowed to run a few milliseconds/month of computation on their servers while we're providing vast CPU resources to the rendering, and if the company is even half clever, WASM execution that actually costs money.

Exceptions for services that actually cost some non-trivial money per consumer, but there's a lot of crap like an alarm clock or your smart watch's subscription for fitness tracking or other completely trivial bullshit charging $10/month out there.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#184
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely people will retain their current devices for longer and wait this whole thing out - there's less reason to upgrade than there was a decade ago. Processing power increases have noticeably plateaued, with e.g. Nvidia GPUs steadily increasing in TDP to make up for there not being enough gains from updated process nodes. The RTX 5080 is rated at 67% higher TDP than the RTX 2080, but you don't see such an incr…

> More likely people will retain their current devices for longer and wait this whole thing out Wait it out? The rich have realised that they can buy the entire stock of computing power and deprive the common folk of it, renting it to them instead. In practical terms, they have infinite resources. Definitely enough to long outlast our lifetimes and the next generation and the next. We can’t “wait out” until they run…

They never run out of "their" money either. Can keep borrowing until eye-watering values are breached, making out like bandits and then run to the govt for a bailout when the bubble bursts.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#185
post #145
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust me, losing freedom you most probably consider as basic as air we breathe since your birth will stop such petty worries. And no system would give you property just because it would be nice, neither did communism (I know since I grew up in it and saw its destruction of everything good first hand - it had to be bought for non-trivial money with good old mortgages, and only regime-aligned people could).

The spectrum of possible civic organization is not binary, and is not capitalism and communism in opposition. Though the insinuation of such is routinely used to justify the ongoing stratification of wealth, and corruption of government.

Well maybe but what examples out of real world do you mean?

Nobody is justifying anything here btw, I don't get why people hyperfocus on imperfections and claim whole thing is useless without understanding underlying reasons and thus options for fixes. Or providing long term working & proven alternatives.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#186
post #88
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You tell me how to automatically sync photos across iOS+mac devices using non-Apple services. I'll wait. (hint: it's a monopoly, you can't use other services). Yeah, I know you can do a manual backup to e.g. Google Photos. It's not the same as seamless bidirectional sync.

OneDrive supports automatic syncing of photos from iOS to the Mac.

Provided it…actually works, which shouldn’t be a high bar, but it’s one drive we’re talking about here.

And provided it doesn’t lose your stuff. Again, should be a core competency, but it has a track record of messing that up.

And arguably here, you’re trading one giant for a net-worse one?

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#187
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible. Either way, many people literally sleep in a monthly subscription model — rent.

[flagged]

What does this say about tenants though? You expect someone to buy a home that you can’t afford, rent it to you until you can. Meanwhile, maintain it while you rent it, pay the property taxes and insurance as well, basically have a tiny cash flow off my investment-all to just be forced to sell it to you in the end when my only hope of getting ahead on this was some long term appreciation or the build up of equity. Spoiler, equity doesn’t usually build up very fast. Better chance of appreciation building up, but even that is a pretty big risk because you’re trying to time the market.

I was a landlord for a bit and what I’ve found is that tenants that have probably never actually owned a property have no ideas about what it cost to own a property and what the landlord is actually making off your rent. Sure even if you pay a few thousand in rent, it may be the landlord only has a couple hundred of cash flow. Then, one repair on the home can easily wipe out a year or more of that. One bad tenants can wipe out a decade of it.

I recall my worst tenants ever. Weren’t even that bad all things considered but the were dirty people. The house was filthy when they moved out. The walls and floors were coated in a grease like film. I had a no smoking policy in the lease but it was obvious they smoked and used the floor as an ashtray. There was a handful of other things that were just broken. Anyways it was a 4 bedroom house that was 2500 sf. I got a few quotes to paint and fix the list of little stuff. The cheapest quote I got was $15k but there was also a $20k and a $30k quote. I decided not to go after these people for the damages but I told them the long list of repairs and because of the condition and cost of repairing it all I would not return their deposit which was only about $2500. Anyway they completely lost it calling me a slumlord and how there’s no way they could have generated that much damage and reported me to the state and wanted to sue me but I don’t think they found a lawyer to take the case. They thought I was marking up all the repairs costs and scamming them. I just sent them all 3 quotes and told them I chose the lowest and wasn’t asking them to pay the excess (I knew it would just be a bad debt). But they went through every line item and said they knew what it cost to paint a house and it was overpriced. This is where the problem is. They’ve never owned a property, never hired a contractor or handyman so they actually have no idea what these things cost. And in my city, construction is booming and everything housing related does seem expensive but it is what it is. There’s no cheaper way to do it besides DIY. But my labor isn’t free either and I’d charge more for my time than the contractors do so that’s not really a solution either.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#188
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how everyone arrives at that conclusion when the cost of the subscription services is also going up (as evidenced by the very article we're talking about). People who are renting are feeling this immediately, whereas people who bought their computers can wait the price hikes out for a couple years before they really need an upgrade.

Subscriptions have a "boiling frog" phenomenon where a marginal price increase isn't noticable to most people. Our payment rails are so effective many people don't even read their credit card statements, they just have vampires draining their accounts monthly. Starting with a low subscription price also has the effect of atrophying people's ability to self-serve. The alternative to a subscription is usually capital-i…

My bank has an option to send me a notification every time I'm charged for something. I've noticed several bills that were higher than they should have been "due to a technical error". I'm certain some companies rely on people not checking and randomly add "errors".

Notably there's no way (known to me) that you can have direct debits sent as requests that aren't automatically paid. I think that would put consumers on an equal footing with businesses though, which is obviously bad for the economy.

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