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Comment by 34679 | Hacker News Reader

I can't shake the feeling that the RAM shortage was intentionally created to serve as a sort of artificial moat by slowing or outright preventing the adoption of open weight models. Altman is playing with hundreds of billions of other people's dollars, trying to protect (in his mind) a multi-trillion dollar company. If he could spend a few billion to shut down access to the hardware people need to run competitor's products, why wouldn't he?

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From what I understand the RAM producers see the writing on the wall. They’re not going to invest in massively more capacity only to have it sit completely idle in 10 years.

RAM shortage is probably a bubble indicator itself. That industry doesn’t believe enough in the long term demand to build out more capacity.

It's very difficult to "intentionally create" a real shortage. You can hoard as much as you want, but people will expect you to dump it all right back onto the market unless you really have a higher-value use for the stuff you hoarded (And then you didn't intentionally create anything, you just bought something you needed!).

Plus producers will now feel free to expand production and dump even more onto the market. This is great if you needed that amount of supply, but it's terrible if you were just trying to deprive others.

You sure about that?

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

Hard drives and GPUs seem to be facing the same fate.

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