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Comment by metalliqaz | Hacker News Reader

are you saying that previous technologies had effectively infinite supply?

It's not that supply was actually infinite, but you didn't realistically have situations where you said "I want to buy GPUs for a data center" only to be told "there's a 3 year waiting list."

You might have two months after NVidia 3090s came out where they were short, but it is nothing like today.

Citation needed. Industries that faced multi year supply constraints in recent memory include: nuclear power, battery manufacturing, flagship commercial aircraft models, late-stage pharmaceutical safety certification, certain luxury cars, and more.

Fair!

At the same time, a lot of interest in this paper is specific to the AI industry (even if it's not only about that), and outside of high-end labor, the other constraints are new there.

No. I'm stating where the paper's assumptions are clearly violated.

AI companies are intentionally trying to monopolize the supply of inputs needed for R&D. This violates homogeneity of degree 1.

Isn't this true in a lot of situations? Basically anytime maximum production capacity of an input is limited, or scale-up time is very long, firms are large relative to the supply so they are not price takers.

PP's point has (mostly?) been addressed in

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20180386

Inputs that can be monopolized are manifestly _not_ the intangibles; price-taking is independent of their effect

I don't think they implied that those inputs are the intangibles, only that the functional form assumption in the 2018 paper is unrealistic.

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