211–220 of 255 posts
With the amount of hatred for anything OpenAI it’s not surprising the author chose a clickbaity title. HNs quality of posts are going down and instead of objective analysis I often see very polarized and flamy articles, titles etc.
Moves like this should be illegal. It's becoming increasingly clear that OpenAI is going to get lapped by Google on technical merits. So this is the "code red" solution? Supply shenanigans? They are getting beat in the developer market by Anthropic. And getting beat on fundamental tech by Google. This is a company whose ostensible mission is to "benefit all of humanity" ...
> Moves like this should be illegal. Should be, as in, new legislation should criminalize it? What's the generalized principle? Or should be, as in existing law should cover it? And if so, what law / how?
RAM manufacturers are a de facto duopoly manipulating the market to gouge prices. It's not that difficult to see.
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Is it? I'm fairly certain many countries have had a very strong showing from nationalist parties in recent years, or am I way off base?
You're not wrong, globalism and nationalism go hand in hand. All those Twitter bluechecks glazing Trump and trying to drum up the right-wing controversy of the day were exposed as people from third-world countries shitting up the American infosphere for cash. When British far-right nutters say "We can't import the third world", keep in mind that third-world dictators are saying the exact same shit about other parts o…
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As in producers not over-producing RAM should be illegal? A presumably short-term price spike in RAM of all things is a non-issue. It is a luxury good that only a very small number of people care about and there is no reason to think this blip is going to last. Apple did stuff like this all the time at their high point in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and it would happen often in other markets. The world is not sta…
> Apple did stuff like this all the time at their high point in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and it would happen often in other markets. Interesting in that I thought about their purchase of $1B of solid state memory at the height of their iPod run. The difference is that Apple had a hit product that was selling as quickly as they could be produced and there was a legitimate need if they wanted to meet the demand.…
What if OpenAI expects to be in the same boat? Their "hit product" is just R&D and training for new very large models. Of course if they're wrong, they've just set a huge pile of their own cash on fire.
> Budget brands normally buy older DRAM fabrication equipment from mega-producers like Samsung when Samsung upgrades their DRAM lines to the latest and greatest equipment. This allows the DRAM market to expand more than it would otherwise because it makes any upgrading of the fanciest production lines to still be additive change to the market. However, Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipm…
> This was not the "free and global market" I thought we were supposed to have at this point. Perhaps you haven't noticed but the pendulum has been swinging the other way for a while already and has a lot of momentum behind it. It's mentioned off-hand because the ongoing return to a multi-polar global order is covered elsewhere already, across dozens of articles every day.
We have been slowly moving towards centralized computing again since 2010s
With governments backing this trend of AI with military funds it is only natural for the others to follow and making computing even more centralized.
By 2020s, Nvidia announce the plan to become more b2b only and then at some point a cloud only company, not even selling the assets.
I don't mean you won't have your smartphone, but it is a dumb terminal compared to the capacities you'll have and maybe need daily.
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Who in developed countries doesn't buy computers and by extension ram
Who in the developed world doesn't have a few luxuries? Pretty much all of history people have had to make do with RAM being a lot less accessible than it is now. It isn't essential and people can still buy RAM in the rare situations where they actually need it. There is nothing here worth invoking the legal system over. OpenAI can buy huge amounts of RAM if they want. Good luck to them, hope it works out, looks like…
There are about five billion smartphone users worldwide. An increase in the price of RAM will, for a start, increase costs for those 5 billion, as smartphones do not last forever.
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Do you think OpenAI plans to trade the semiconductor market? This would only apply in that scenario.
It's interesting that this isn't actually illegal to do except in the specific context of an exchange market. I did a very cursory search of the US Code and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and yeah, unless there's some additional legal precedent or other applicable law I didn't find, then this might just be a gap in the law. It even seems to skirt around notions of illegal vertical integration. For example in thi…
They tried it and lost their shirts. When you hoard a critical input, that input doesn't just disappear. You spend huge amounts of money pushing the price up, and then the market price turns against you as people finally figure out that the hoarding was just a stunt, that you don't really have a higher-valued use for the stuff you hoarded, and all of it is going to be right back on the market sooner or later.
Moves like this should be illegal. It's becoming increasingly clear that OpenAI is going to get lapped by Google on technical merits. So this is the "code red" solution? Supply shenanigans? They are getting beat in the developer market by Anthropic. And getting beat on fundamental tech by Google. This is a company whose ostensible mission is to "benefit all of humanity" ...
As in producers not over-producing RAM should be illegal? A presumably short-term price spike in RAM of all things is a non-issue. It is a luxury good that only a very small number of people care about and there is no reason to think this blip is going to last. Apple did stuff like this all the time at their high point in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and it would happen often in other markets. The world is not sta…
It's raised the price of my in-progress workstation build by several thousand $, and now I'll likely not be able to build it. :(
I _really_ hope it's a "short term" price spike, but I kinda doubt it. :( :( :(
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I don't buy it. It's easier to make this argument for companies that are building their own hardware, since they know it can be immediately used. OpenAI's move is tantamount to hoarding for the sake of strangling competition. There was plenty of supply to allow for their plans without this move (especially since they will probably go bankrupt at this rate).
How exactly could they 'hoard' this? There's no place in the world to store that much undiced wafer. It will all go bad.
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> OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses That is not "totally normal".
It seems not normal (in the sense that it is obviously quite weird to but like half of the world’s RAM supply). But I wonder if they are also just not ready to announce what they are doing with it? I mean with that many wafers, I guess it is possible that they’d be doing something pretty custom with the things…
Didn't they announce some kind of AI-silicon recently? Wouldn't it be for that?