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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

#401

Post by lopis »

jstummbillig wrote: post #310
lopis wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of companies right now have slapped AI features on their products without extra cost. Some are offering it for free (e.g. search engines). If LLM costs significantly increase, I would expect free AI features to disappear or become extra paid features (already started to happen in some SASS), while any free LLMs become simpler and cheaper.

This is making the scenario more complicated, because now we also have to consider products without product market fit, which is an entirely different issue. I don't know how to think about that.

But that's exactly why this "bubble" is so hard to predict, isn't it? The dot com bubble was simple. All companies were jumping the gun to make websites. Most were not useful, but the Internet was useful so it survived. LLMs are useful, but how much of its current use is actually valuable? If 95% is useful while 5% is memes, we're fine. But if 95% is useless, the industry will collapse hard. Who can tell what is useful when LLM companies sell the service to everyone?

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

#402

Post by platevoltage »

9rx wrote: post #227
kakacik wrote: 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).

> neither did communism (I know since I grew up in it Impossible. Communism is a work of science fiction, much like Star Trek which is a more modern adaptation of the same idea. Like Star Trek, the concept is dependent on post-scarcity, which we've never seen, and isn't likely to ever happen. Perhaps you mean you grew up under rule of the Communist Party? > it had to be bought for non-trivial money with good old mort…

I don't know why the this being downvoted. This is literally what Communism is.

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

#403

Post by Twirrim »

xvxvx wrote: post #12

- GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising - hard drive prices rising Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? ‘You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription’ ‘You don’t need processing power, stream your games through our subscription service.’ Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games…

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients

FWIW these kinds of claims have been a cyclical thing constantly throughout my nearly 3 decades long career. We're always on the verge of thin clients replacing desktops, and then we're suddenly not and things calm down for a couple of years before, oops back again!

Every time there's arguments about saving on cost of hardware, etc. but the reality never seems to line up with the dream.

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

#404

Post by peab »

xvxvx wrote: post #12

- GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising - hard drive prices rising Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? ‘You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription’ ‘You don’t need processing power, stream your games through our subscription service.’ Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games…

| Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and | all the power lies in subscription services?

arguably, we are already there. The majority of people don't use a computer anymore, they use their phone. The phone itself is just an interface to the cloud. If I lost my phone today, and got a new one, the only inconvenience would be the time it takes me to set up the new phone, and the cost of the new phone. I wouldn't lose anything because everything is on the cloud

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

#405

Post by Lammy »

xvxvx wrote: post #12

- GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising - hard drive prices rising Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? ‘You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription’ ‘You don’t need processing power, stream your games through our subscription service.’ Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games…

They've been planning this outcome for a long time. Here's Larry Ellison in 1997: https://youtu.be/Bk1_btV3oIk?t=402

“The personal computer was designed as a standalone device. There was no Internet around 1981 when the PC was invented. There weren't a lot of local area networks and corporations and schools and government agencies [online] back in 1981. The world has changed — there are networks everywhere; around the world and offices and schools and major governments and institutions. So why not have computer networks that are similar to television networks or telephone networks?

A television network is enormously complicated; it's got satellites and microwave relay stations and cable headends and recording studios, and you have this huge professionally-managed network accessed by a very low cost and simple appliance: the television.

Anyone can learn to use a television. 97% percent of American households have televisions. 94% of American households have telephones. They can have very simple appliance attached to enormously complex professionally-managed network. Why shouldn't the computer network be just the same?”

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

#406

Post by vee-kay »

xvxvx wrote: post #12

- GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising - hard drive prices rising Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? ‘You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription’ ‘You don’t need processing power, stream your games through our subscription service.’ Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games…

Valve changed its Steam Store's ToS, so officially it means Steam users no longer own the content they purchased in it, they merely bought a subscription to rent it for a while, until the game publisher decides to revoke the online content at any time they choose.

TakeTwo Interactive (2K Games, the makers of popular games series Borderlands) changed its ToS to allow it to spy on and capture anything on the user's machine, including browser behaviors (websites visited, bookmarks saved, etc.), payment information (credit card details, etc.), programs installed & usage, etc.

Gaming industry has moved on to become evil, by default. Most AAA games these days cannot even be played without an internet connection. And most AAA games demand intrusive DRMs, and same games demand the dangerous kernel-level DRMs like Denuvo which cannot be monitored by major antimalware.

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

#407

Post by 9rx »

XorNot wrote: post #145
kakacik wrote: 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.

> and is not capitalism and communism in opposition.

Hard to say. The prevailing assumption, and basis for the Communist Party (on paper, at least), is that capitalists will try to block reaching a state of post-scarcity — the necessary precondition for communism. This is why they are sometimes considered to be at odds with each other.

They don't have to be. And thus far they don't seem to be. Capitalism, and especially American capitalism, has done far more to getting us closer to post-scarcity than anything else, with US-centric agriculture innovation being the shining example. We're almost there in that particular area.

But we're not there yet and things can quickly turn. It is apparent in that agriculture progress that the capitalists remain deathly afraid of losing control (see the tales of Monsanto, John Deere, etc.), which is exactly the foundation on which the assumption is built.

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

#408

Post by conductr »

testing22321 wrote: post #219
conductr wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people here are pro capitalism. It has flaws but you’re also being blind to its benefits. If 20 people need homes to live in and can’t afford to build them, suddenly landlords/investors have a place because they built housing inventory where others couldn’t. They won’t do that for free though and why should they. I remember your username from prior threads, you’re a troll man. Take this crap to Reddit.

Let them profit off commercial real estate, or a million other things that capitalism provides. The nestle statements about profiting off people’s need for drinking water were universally viewed as disgusting. We shouldn’t always profit off the basic needs of other humans.

This list gets long pretty quick once you start it though. I'm sure you could say the same for healthcare & education. In doing so, according to a cursory google search, you just removed profit from ~40% of GDP. That's going to be felt.

Propose pivoting our entire economy all you want, but do it in a way that doesn't cripple it and provides more than a one sided benefit masquerading as having no downside implications.

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

#409

Post by lossolo »

y0ssar1an wrote: post #293
pphysch wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Taiwan destroying its own assets disincentivize annexation goals that have existed long before computer chips were produced there?

If Taiwan is being invaded, the annexation is happening. There's no longer any reason to disincentivize annexation. Destroying the fabs is about denying China a major prize.

Did Hong Kong destroy its financial sector to deny China a "major prize"? If someone were going to invade and occupy your country, would you destroy your huge source of revenue so they couldn't claim it as a "major prize"? And then what? Stay poor? I feel like people who repeat this view (something they read somewhere) haven't really analyzed it in a social, economic, historical, and geopolitical context. Because if you do, there's zero logic to it, given the consequences for the 23 million people who would still be living on the island afterward.

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

#410

Post by lucketone »

Aachen wrote: post #360
noname120 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you need to scale up and down dynamically.

Then the claim above can never be falsified because there will always be a value you can plug into the equation at which it's cheaper to rent (like at 50% occupancy, at 5%, at 0.5%... so long as you're not the only person in the world who wants to use the device being offered for loan). I would assume we're talking about a common workload where one actually needs the device that one considers purchasing for some reas…

So in summary:

- own the hardware, if you have constant load and have enough expertise (personally or a team) to use/maintain it at your required reliability level

- rent the cloud, if your usage is opportunistic/ spike’y/rapidly changing

- also rent the cloud, if required expertise/maintenance would cost you more than the hardware (if you want to have gazillion of nines, you need somebody who’s there to deal with smoking stuff, in several locations)

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