almost feel like OpenAI's recent "fall" is a decoy setup by them intentionally.. something's cooking.. maybe they wanted to buy back their own shares at a lower price?
Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
41–50 of 255 posts
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#42Moves 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" ...
Seems like it is, but the question is whether the current Justice Department will do anything about it.
The current Justice Department? You're kidding, right?
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#43> 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.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seems like it is Do you have a citation for what law is being violated? Or just vibes?
Market manipulation is a crime under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. You can't buy things to influence the price or the market, only to use or resell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation
The law you refer to applies only to markets for securities. RAM is very clearly not a security, it fails the Howey test.
There are similar laws prohibiting the manipulation of commodity markets but I do not believe a US court would find RAM to be a commodity.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#45[dead]
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#46There's nothing dirty about this deal. When making a large deal with one vendor he didn't disclose to them that he was making a deal with another vendor. That's pretty normal when you're trying to buy a lot of stuff. Otherwise, they can collude to shake you down. I'm not thrilled about this genre of "guy I don't like does totally normal thing so it's bad". It's too engagement baity. EDIT: Though even that may be wron…
> 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…
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#47> 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…
What free market?
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#48There's nothing dirty about this deal. When making a large deal with one vendor he didn't disclose to them that he was making a deal with another vendor. That's pretty normal when you're trying to buy a lot of stuff. Otherwise, they can collude to shake you down. I'm not thrilled about this genre of "guy I don't like does totally normal thing so it's bad". It's too engagement baity. EDIT: Though even that may be wron…
> 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's not really that different from Apple reserving wafer starts on TSMC's next node and so on. It's just that this kind of capacity requirement has rarely shown up in DRAM before. Vendors prefer this kind of capacity reservation over a more variable finished product requirement. It allows them to know that they can build at the bottleneck rather than having to start up more capacity and then having that lie idle while everything downstream in DRAM packaging and DIMM production can't actually consume anything.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#49Moves 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?
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#50Force a divestiture of Microsoft.