Hacker News Reader

Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

100%. We're probably on the cusp of over-capacity, a glut, cheap RAM, bankruptcies, and shortages.

The memory companies report that they're sold out through 2027... so it might be a while

That's only if the AI companies continue their build outs.

How many people actually use fable over opus? How far are we up the diminishing returns curve, and will their customers even care?

I don’t think the effects on the hardware market of open weight models triumphing has been reflected upon enough. It’s not clear that it will be less impactful if every enterprise decides to build for predominantly on-premise inference. In fact, before the question is ultimately decided, we’re probably heading towards a few years where hobbyists, enterprises and ‘hyper scalers’ are all competing for certain parts in common. Ram booked through 2027 sounds about right.

Companies are avoid risks, and at this stage, sometimes, I feel that all cloud providers are just buying RAM that they would have bought anyway. Now it's ensure that no company will be willing to pay x digits just for cards. One of my clients is stuck in "we are doing things on premise but we are too cheap to spend a few 100k in cards but we don't want to go on clouds.

Fable would have a much bigger userbase if Anthropic didn’t remove a zero data retention option because muh safeguards

Or if it didn’t constantly kick people off fable. It won’t talk to me about gardening or computing.

It will happily walk me through all the legal and illegal ways to systematically kill rodents.

At least it is on-brand for something used by militaries that want to target civilians, I guess.

The stock market crash caused by AI companies halting their planned build outs may in practice cause RAM to remain unaffordable.

How does a stock market crash increase RAM prices (when RAM demand goes down)?

Or would it affect people's purchasing power. I guess to some extent it does for people with significant investments in the stock market, but that's not a huge percentage of the people wanting to buy RAM or devices with RAM

The second and third and fourth-order exposure to AI spending is maybe bigger than you think. The blast radius if it pops could be quite large. Patrick Boyle had an interesting video discussing this recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTiYaWFP59Q

Sure, but how does it _increase_ RAM prices. It should decrease them because companies have less capital to buy RAM so demand decreases.

I have no opinion on what will happen, and know close to nothing about the memory industry but just to think out loud about how market turbulence could cause memory prices to increase:

- Suppliers that memory companies depend on JIT are entangled and go under, halting production or stalling capacity increases

- Downstream suppliers / distributors for not vertically integrated memory companies go under, and there is a shortage of finished product ready for consumer use even though there is an excess of memory chips

- Memory producers / fabs can’t handle the depressed demand and go under / have to halt production, alleviating the demand glut for the surviving suppliers, who have less competition. Coordinating a cartel becomes easier when there are fewer suppliers and becomes more desirable now that everyone realizes it’s a matter of survival.

There are also plenty of good reasons to think prices will go down if demand is depressed, but it does seem possible for prices to go up

I didn't say that it would increase RAM prices. I said "may in practice cause RAM to remain unaffordable."

Last thing i heard was that large companies are starting to seriously spend on ai infrastructure (think nvidia clusters rather than tokens from openai or anthropic) to fine-tune and run custom models.

This might become the driver for memory and chips demand in the near future.

But i don’t know, of course, we’ll i guess.

Or, they're price fixing, as they have many times before, and are currently being sued for [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

[2] https://moginlawllp.com/dram-antitrust-suit-ai-memory-supply...

Lol, you think they're price fixing today? When demand exceeds supply? How would that even work?

I for one can't wait. Current prices are absolutely insane.

However a problem exists with scalper bots. They're going to fight tooth and nail to keep prices artificially high even when supply increases. Same with the hyperscalers blowing "free money" at eating supply as a strategic position against smaller competitors.

Scalper bots need customers to sell to; their business model falls apart in the face of sufficient supply.

That sufficient supply is maybe on the distant horizon. In the meantime everyone is being fleeced because the scalpers have the only supply available. Even if there's a supply glut tomorrow the scalpers have the infrastructure in place to buy out retail channels keeping prices high.

That's an extreme risk to them buying at inflated retail prices when supply is improving and prices are about to come down. Scalpers arent a large enough group to act as a cartel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com