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Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

mashable.com

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Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#61

Post by trueismywork »

smashface wrote: post #10
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #4

Are these the picks and shovels? Is the profitability of these electronics manufacturers more likely than the companies that are buying up all their future inventory?

If AI continues at this trajectory, sure, likely to the picks and shovels. If AI has a bubble burst, you could see a lot of used hardware flood the market and then companies like WD could have a hard time selling against their previous inventory.

Given how hard AI is on I/O, while restarting if hardware might go second hand. I dont see hard drives go second hand. Most hardware that we get might be used beyond redeeming even at free price.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#63

Post by aurareturn »

mrweasel wrote: post #25
glimshe wrote: post #8

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies. Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing t…

AI is going to be what fiber was to the dotcom bubble. Someone spend a lot of money on a lot of infrastructure, some of which is going to be incredibly useful, but sold for much less than it cost to build. Hardware just depreciates much much faster than fiber networks.

I'm not saying that data center buildouts can't overshoot demand but AI and compute is different than fiber buildout. The more compute you have, the smarter the AI. You can use the compute to let the AI think longer (maybe hours/days/weeks) on a solution. You can run multiple AI agents simultaneously and have them work together or check each other's work. You can train and inference better models with more compute.

So there is always use for more compute to solve problems.

Fiber installations can overshoot relatively easily. No matter how much fiber you have installed, that 4k movie isn't going to change. The 3 hours of watch time for consumers isn't going to change.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#64

Post by infecto »

glimshe wrote: post #8

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies. Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing t…

No it’s not an easy fix. Manufacturers don’t have a good pulse on long term demand. The he capex to spin up a new manufacturing plant is significant. Especially with the recency of Covid where some folks did get caught with their pants down and over invested during the huge demand boom.

I don’t quite follow the narrative like yours about nation states and investors. There is certainly an industrial bubble going on and lots of startups getting massive amounts of capital but I here is a strong signal that a good part of this demand is here to stay.

This will be one of those scenarios where some companies will look brilliant and others foolish.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#65

Post by jmclnx »

55555 wrote: post #49

What are companies needing all of these hard drives for? I understand their need for memory, and boot. But storing text training data and text conversations isn't that space intensive. There's a few companies doing video models, so I can see how that takes a tremendous amount of space. Is it just that?

I am surprised by that too. I thought everyone moved to SDDs or NVMe ?

I was toying with getting a 2T HDD for a BSD system I have, I guess not now :)

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#67

Post by voidUpdate »

GuB-42 wrote: post #52
voidUpdate wrote: post #3

This is the consequence of "I don't want to write this function myself, I'll get the plagiarism machine to do it for me"

And what's wrong with not wanting to write functions yourself? It is a perfectly reasonable thing, and in some cases (ex: crypto), rolling your own is strongly discouraged. That's the reason why libraries exist, you don't want to implement your own associative array every time your work needs it do you? As for plagiarism, it is not something to even consider when writing code, unless your code is an art project. If s…

If I use a package for crypto stuff, it will generally be listed as part of the project, in an include or similar, so you can see who actually wrote the code. If you get an LLM to create it, it will write some "new original code" for you, with no ability to tell you any of the names of people who's code went into that, and who did not give their consent for it to be mangled into the algorithm.

If I copy work from someone else, whether that be a paragraph of writing, a code block or art, and do not credit them, passing it off as my own creation, that's plagiarism. If the plagiarism machine can give proper attribution and context, it's not a plagiarism machine anymore, but given the incredibly lossy nature of LLMS, I don't foresee that happening. A search engine is different, as it provides attribution for the content it's giving you (ignoring the "ai summary" that is often included now). If you go to my website and copy code from me, you know where the code came from, because you got it from my website

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#68

Post by arbuge »

I console myself with knowledge of the economics maxim that every supply shortage is usually, eventually, followed by a supply glut.

One can only hope that that's the principle at work here, anyway. It could also be a critically damped system for all I know. Unfortunately I studied control systems too...

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#69

Post by markus_zhang »

Better stock up with used laptops. I'm going to buy another one this year. Those used ones usually don't last very long.

What if in the near future it is simply too expensive to own "personal" computers? What if you can no longer buy used computers from official channels but have to find local shops or sharpen up on soldering skills and find parts from dumps? The big techs will conveniently "rent out" cloud computer for us to use, in exchange of all of your data.

"Don't you all have cellphones?"

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#70

Post by pier25 »

glimshe wrote: post #8

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies. Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing t…

I think AI companies are involving these other industries so when the money runs out they will claim the whole thing is too big too fail.
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