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Will we go back to PCs? As in: are we going to get cheap local hackable frontier AIs at some point? I hope so.
:insert Will Smith presenting meme:
The Cloud
This is complete conjecture on my part, but I bet if you're late 20s - early 40s, you probably have some form of pc/laptop laying around. But people 50+ (gen x / gen boomer), a phone is likely all you use or own. My mother, aunt, et. al operate totally through their phones. The same is true for my pre-teen, teenage cousins or cousins children (ipad generation).
The AI boom first reversed the trend, to now try to get back to that cycle.
I am using AI now to make a game engine that will run and make 'nice enough' graphics on simpler machines. things like laptops with iGPU and 4gb of ram.
U can still get quite ok graphics, and make very complex and rich gameplay systems using such a machine. It just needs to be the target machine while developing so the right tradeoffs are made.
Which would not be all too bad. It would also mean the end of stupid SaaS subscription services, and mass surveillance, adtech. And shitty propaganda.
And your local AI could emulate the good parts of the internet.
Like talking to people?
In fact, it was closer to the opposite.
Forget about AI, the entire PC market is getting killed over this.
As an avid gamer I'm unsure if in 5 years I can even buy a gaming PC anymore. Not even because of cost, but it's unclear if anyone will still make the components anymore.
NVIDIA isn't interested, nor is AMD.
5 years ago it would have been science fiction
Also, this reminds me so much of the download more RAM ads back in the day.
Many games that come out still, and are quite successful, do not require such technologies.
gaming does not equate to only things like the last of us or cyberpunk which need extreme machines. a lot of visual fidelity can be reached still without having such a monster. Just need to not use certain features which are currently pretty much exclusive to Nvidia...
Have an agentic enough setup and they'll do anything that the biggest closed models can. They'll also do more, making them the true frontier.
A sensible point of entry is a 2899$ Mac mini.
If you're not partaking that's only on you.
> If you're not partaking that's only on you.
There's honestly nothing sensible about that for a lot of developer budgets across the globe. Don't assume most folks have $3k to burn.
Everybody will have a mini PC for the sole purpose of streaming content, with no storage to keep anything on it.
It's just unfortunate that producing a half decent computing platform is significantly more difficult than a rifle (and that in the case of said hardliners, the capital is backing them, here it's working against us).
You might say that this is impossible but look at current trends. A lot of information today is getting shared in the walled gardens of Internet. You have to login to social media to view posts. The Twitter, Reddit threads that were accessible freely now require you to log in. Similar thing is happening across other networks. People are no longer asking questions on Stackoverflow. All those queries are gonig to AI. If someone chooses to not use AI, their options will be limited in future.
The free sharing of information on Internet is I think coming to an end.
Not even talking dictatorship scenarios here. The USA might simply decide it doesn't like your country. Or maybe heavily cripple the models you can use, or censor them, for whatever reason.
I guess this is an argument for local AI. Probably not feasible for the less technically savvy.
So it’s plausible they’ll block me from accessing Mistral since they host DeepSeek models.
Not everyone subscribes to the "cloud compute is more important than everything else" outlook, but everyone is affected by it nonetheless.
I would be shocked if it did anything at all.
I don’t think it’s very productive to go on a witch hunt on someone who said something stupid and is being taken out of context (albeit he should have known not to say that).
Would you though? If/when the AI bubble pops and the buildout of data centres either stops or plateaus then they'd suddenly be sitting in a vastly oversaturated market and struggle to make it to the end of the year.
New fabs will be operational in a while, which is too big of a risk to take in these times.
All that bubble popping will do is wipe out some investor's money. Everything else will stay and become more and more important.
But of course, it is more profitable to sell one item for $1000 than it is to sell ten items for $100 each. And even if a competitor shows up, you can just price dump with all the extra money you already made until that competitor goes away.
Considering the profits they've made this year, on average they still wouldn't do too bad. SK Hynix employees got almost $500k for example, I can live on that for a few years. Companies are often also legally required to compete with each other.
But they are scaling up the production, they just conveniently did it a bit late. I also fear if/when the bubble pops, they'll quickly reduce the production to ensure prices stay high. I fear Nvidia could do the same. I think it'll be hard for all of them to go back to a world where they're paid way less per component, so instead of accepting that, they can reduce the supply and keep the prices high. Only antitrust regulators could intervene to stop that.
Many people expect prices to go down after the bubble pops, but it may not happen as much as we would want to.
Good god the internet is so sensitive nowadays
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50400515 for longer comment on that
And "if all current AI users" is a strawman, people using free chatgpt once or twice a day are not going to buy RAM to run own LLMs.
Ah yes Sam Altman is not a real villain despite OpenAI locking up 40% of global DRAM supply.
If a customer ask me to get all my butchery stock for a year, it will make thousands of client unhappy and will make one client happy, so I'll simply refuse.
This is not how business is supposed to be, the world is not supposed to be a B2B chaos.
I know how the business is done "supply demand" bla bla. That does not make it ethical one bit.
If you look outside the tech bro / stock bro / tech worker circles and into the mass left wing populace everyone HATES ai and ai data centers... the Altmans, the Amodeis, the Huangs, they are not the devil himself levels just yet (cough, Musk, cough), but they are climbing up there.
People's jobs being taken (and especially entry/junior jobs, you know, the ones young people, who voted massively blue, need to get started in life), data centers increasing their electric bills or polluting the air with gigawatt level gas turbines (or both), consumer electronics prices rocketing up (~400% increases YoY in RAM and SSD prices) just so the corporate capitalist class can hoard millions of gpus in warehouses.
I mean, if the democrat politicians getting into power keep their promises and step on AI buildout's neck, it could be lights out for the AI bros.
ChatGPT is one of the most used websites in the world. Compared to e.g. Facebook you are not "forced" to use it (because of friends or whatnot) so it's all voluntary usage. There is real demand for AI usage, that's why RAM and GPU prices are skyrocketing, not because of some evil conspiracy.
I don't see this, no. I think HN serves as a sort of Rorschach test for the reader. I get a center-libertarian vibe from HN, definitely not left wing. That's probably my own biased perception, of course.
I also think while there's a ton of AI articles, there are also very vocal people against it. The sentiment is not universally "AI booster" here, it's a mix.
1) boom and bust cycle in memory industry is a repeated problem
2) companies are not obligated to scale up
> and is being taken out of context
no it is not - Altman is lying by omission[0] by implicating that various important costs are not real
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50400515 for longer comment on that
hopefully china does it and hynix burns in hell
Obligatory: "we're curing cancer r-right?" No Nat we're making slop videos with it.
where is the proof?
>and are now not scaling up production according to demand.
fabs are being built by maaany companies, but it takes years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.[3]
re "what proof means": Im not your house boy. Go get it yourself.
proof ... the thing a narcissist demands from you, but will never acknowledge having received.
its a good lever when it works.
Simple as that.
If I said all donuts are spaceships, readers are not obligated to go and google it.
* Participating in meetings, conversations, and communications in the United States and elsewhere to discuss the prices of DRAM to be sold to certain customers;
* Agreeing, during those meetings, conversations, and communications, to charge prices of DRAM at certain levels to be sold to certain customers;
* Issuing price quotations in accordance with the agreements reached; and
* Exchanging information on sales of DRAM to certain customers, for the purpose of monitoring and enforcing adherence to the agreed-upon prices.
* Under the plea agreement which must be approved by the court, Hynix has agreed to cooperate with the government in its ongoing investigation of other DRAM producers.
US DOJ link: https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2005/April/05_at_207....
This is remarkably different than someone claiming donuts are spaceships when the company itself was charged and pleaded guilty, and it's a matter of public record.
Theres never any "proof."
Theres no "proof" on the internet.
All we ever have is "evidence," and varying degrees of trust or mistrust in it.
Reality ... always good for downvotes.
You're free to doubt it, it's not absolutely certain, but pretending the chance is near zero is just not even remotely as rational as you seem to think.
Apparently the last three times this cycle happened, the manufacturers that built out capacity went bankrupt when it popped, and the ones that didn't didn't, so they're actually being wise.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
If an event happens, and multiple previous times that event happened a cause was identified. It is reasonable to suspect the same cause was responsible this time.
It does not give proof, but it does give reasonable suspicion.
If the USA were a real democracy they would do something about it. After all this even violates capitalism, e. g. free market leading to reduced prices. But the USA is run by a criminal gang, pocketing away money - the TechBros and their cronies. They just make any legislation they want to, with a bit sugar coating on top to not appear too overly evil or greedy. But they are.
Truly an unimaginable and ludicrous suggestion in a time where regulators are less likely than ever to pursue it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing#200...
Let's say there are 10 companies that need 1 GB of RAM each in a life-or-death scenario. They would be willing to pay $100,000,000 per GB to get 1 GB of RAM.
At the same time, there are 90 more companies that need 1 GB of RAM each to make certain quarterly targets. They are willing to pay $10,000 per GB to get 1 GB of RAM.
If you make 9 GB of RAM, you can sell it for $900,000,000. If you make 99 GB of RAM, you can only sell it for $990,000, because the 10 life-or-death companies only need to bid high enough to push out a quarterly-target company.
It's a bit of a contrived example, but it shows you how restricting supply can boost total revenue if there is a segment of the market that has inelastic demand. (this is why medicine pricing has to be regulated - in the medical industry, there are lots of inelastic demand scenarios that can lead to predatory pricing)
Also, it is not likely to happen any time soon.
We have less rich gamers deciding to not upgrade their PCs at most.
Evidence: a friend of mine this month decided that he can't justify dropping $1.6k on a gaming computer.
As a PC gamer since I have memory, this whole situation makes me sad.
that could've been crummy for someone; you should warn that your cute little complaint actually eats ram; half is clearly fiction but the OOM isn't.
Do you also click on the links of the Nigerian princes?
"Iniital commit"
Lol, little cringe "Look guys, how human I am!!"
On a less sarcastic note, I wonder if a community based compute donation could actually help offset knowledge and compute centralisation.
Incentive is difficult but anti-AI sentiment is still as strong as ever. Maybe an A-v-A (in the spirit of H-v-H) campaign might pull in some.
Plus it's far more efficient to buy tons of gpu's for the shelves rather than actually use them.
Just give us back our RAM prices so that everyone can afford 256GB DDR5 and run their models locally!
This solves the datacenter problem and it's impacts, RAMageddon, SSDgeddon, etc..
and they can just sell us the improved models without the hassle of doing the compute themselves..
What's the problem? With the proper ToC's they would still get our data.. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Funny WEB Site!
Not me, I have 2 8G DDR4 sticks sitting in a draw that I purchased a few of years ago when they were cheap. I was going to use them to upgrade my W541 to 32G, but I have one of the first models that the max is 16G. So saving them in case I have RAM issues.
If Sam wants them, he can pay me 5000 USD each for them, otherwise I will proudly hang on to them. If I knew his email I would send him a pic of them saying "hahaha" :)
> From a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time. You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment.
That's a ghoulish point of view that puts real living humans on a lower hung than the poor poor corporations who just want RAM to be so expensive that everyone needs to buy compute from them. Convenient for the corporations!