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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

How much are we going to pay for "AI kits" once the DRAM shortage is over? Will we be able to run a local model equivalent to the current AI frontier in sub $1000 hardware, even if dedicated, in 5 years?

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Yeeeeep. There is no moat at the moment. AI companies are trying to dig one as fast as they possibly can. Either through passing laws to prevent local inference ("It's too dangerous! We need to control it") or by creating/limiting possible integrations (locking down OS/hardware, APIs/MCPs that only work with Claude/ChatGPT, etc).

Good luck trying to enforce those laws outside of the USA. And in the future China will be happy to sell local inference hardware at competitive prices.

Open, cheap & good enough will win the race.

frontier to laptop runnable open weight so far seems to be ~2 years latency, so maybe there's some hope

For that matter, just getting Chinese DRAM into the market could cool pricing down a lot to oppose the cartel.

No it won't because Chinese DRAM manufacturers have relatively low capacity and it's already being used. And in an auction, prices from different suppliers converge.

Because China can't ramp up production at all... no means to do so... they aren't even working on it at all.

Not really. I imagine demand for AI just from China would eat up their entire production let alone demand from the west.

And after all, that demand from consumers.

When this hardware was announced, it was expected to be in the $1200-1400 range new... so, maybe. The real question is will the powers that be let this bubble burst, and how painful will the fallout be... I have a feeling it will be worse than 2001-2002.

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