71–80 of 107 posts
I welcome this. Anything that makes consumer electronics more expensive acts counter to the Baumol Effect. How scarce does memory have to get before it makes health care half as expensive?
It makes all electronics more expensive. This makes every service more expensive as well.
One of the things I’ve been hoping for every time a new EC2 instance comes out is for them to unpin the memory:core ratio a bit. I don’t expect they have enough r# and c# users to completely balance things out so what they’re really doing is selling people more CPUs to get the memory they need. It would be nice if it were creeping up generation to generation. But if this keeps up I fear the opposite.
Article completely misses the true cause of the price increase - Sam Altman/OAI made a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix get 40% of their RAM wafer production for the 2026 period. This was economic warfare against OpenAI's competitors, and the competitors along with the data centers responded by buying up every bit of DDR5 in sight. This price increase was engineered. The deal was inked on October 1, 2025, and rumors of…
https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
I don't really get the panic. This is the same as the pandemic, just for different reasons. A change in demand is causing supply shortages and price hikes. But the demand will eventually swing back as the current demand is completely unsustainable. AI demand will crumble, prices will bottom out, and companies who bet big on AI & RAM will end up going into big layoffs triggering another recession and a huge market cra…
Article completely misses the true cause of the price increase - Sam Altman/OAI made a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix get 40% of their RAM wafer production for the 2026 period. This was economic warfare against OpenAI's competitors, and the competitors along with the data centers responded by buying up every bit of DDR5 in sight. This price increase was engineered. The deal was inked on October 1, 2025, and rumors of…
Not sure that OpenAI's move was a very good one, they've just created a lot of enemies for themselves. I see comments all over the internet about AI slop making RAM expensive. It's going to eat into the profits of a lot of companies. People will be willing for this insanity to end.
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It makes all electronics more expensive. This makes every service more expensive as well.
It sounds like effenciencies in manufacturing sectors lead to more costly medical services, and ineffencies in manufacturing sectors lead to costly medical services. Am I understanding correctly?
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That's correct and a good point I almost forgot about - they can't even utilize what they bought!
It feels like abuse. They shouldn't be able to get away with such trickery.
"However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. [...] This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop." I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-…
Code the AI will produce will solve the memory usage problems which is itself a result of lazy or poor human coders.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like effenciencies in manufacturing sectors lead to more costly medical services, and ineffencies in manufacturing sectors lead to costly medical services. Am I understanding correctly?
Who said efficiencies in manufacturing sectors lead to more costly medical services?
> the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth
Specifically, manufacturing sectors have increased productivity and service sectors haven't.
"However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. [...] This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop." I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-…
> I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-efficient software? If the consumer market can't get cheap RAM anymore, the natural result is a pivot back to server-heavy technology (where all the RAM is anyway) with things like server-side rendering and thin clients. Developers are far too lazy to suddenly become efficient programmers and there's plenty of network bandwidth.