This began with cloud. When software began running as a front-end in a browser, people began complaining about centralization.
But then it became normal.
The monopolization of knowledge and expertise is the next step. I don't mean as if it were intended, but it is the logical progress given the technological evolution. The cause is inventive structures: the tech is neutral (in my opinion), but the way in which it is used and deployed is subject to and disciplined by capital.
> Will we go back to PCs? As in: are we going to get cheap local hackable frontier AIs at some point?
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.
Today I opened newegg for the hell of it and figured I'd look at the cost of a 2 TB NVMe ... Fuck man. This is seriously depressing.
BUT! I feel that lost hope could/will turn into a new forms of "min-maxing" or whatever where we will see people focusing on small, efficient software to make the most of what we have to weather the drought. We got spoiled with cheap hardware. Time to make the most of all that cheap hardware we have.
Though of course, replacing this hardware as it breaks down will be expensive. Perhaps we could go back to 1/2/4 GB RAM sticks and 256/512 GB Disks. Then run minimal Linux installs, minimal GUIs, minimal services, minimal software.
To amend this: Reading the 8088 domination article and the little $8 RISC-V Linux board I think we have plenty of opportunity. Maybe we learn to shed our inefficient BIG computers for small, low power, purposeful, yet general computers. I play with Plan 9 a lot and its portability, small footprint, low resource, and distributed design has showed me we can do a lot with a little as long as we stay disciplined to keep things simple and to the point.
It also won't be worth it to make games for next gen consoles if the prices end up being what people are saying. So in the end they'll just keep doing what they're doing right now, and not increase the hardware requirements of their games.
not true. it wont be worth it anymore to implement Path Tracing or Ray tracing which is absolutely not needed for a prime gaming experience. its deterimental even because ull only get into games with a certain type of person who can afford a big machine.
Many games that come out still, and are quite successful, do not require such technologies.
1. Indy developer releases a game or trailer of a game.
2. Within an extremely short time (days to weeks at most) there are clones on the market.
3. These games often outperform the original.
It's absolutely not something that's gone on for ages.
It might be a novel gameplay idea / twist on a genre, and mere days after launch instead of being able to stand on its own and gather attention it's drowning in a pool of lookalikes. It's no longer distinct.
The speed of being able to slop together something like this is less than 1% of what it used to be.
It's interesting trying to be an AI "moderate," which as the owner of a 16gb card I definitely am. Still working on the balance, but it really does feel like I'm going to land on something like "use external AI services to build a few tools, but use my local rig to actually handle everything personal once those tools are built."
For me, qwen 3.8 27b on my m5 max is so slow and dumb that I can't think of a single use for it. Haiku, Luna, or data center scale open models are ten times faster and ten times smarter (and inference so cheap that it's essentially free). It was a nifty toy to brag to friends about but why would I waste my time goofing with something so slow and dumb?
Its interesting because I was at Costco the other day and they weren't even selling PCs unless they were gaming ones. It seems most consumer electronics have switched over to laptops.
Also, this reminds me so much of the download more RAM ads back in the day.
Most of it has switched to mobile phones and tablets. It doesn't help that almost everywhere digital classroom means tablet instead of laptop. Sure, the control is convenient for the teacher, but it also means we are raising our children in walled gardens. So much so, that whole generations don't even leave that garden in their spare time.
I'm still waiting for the day a mac air style shell exists where I plug my phone in and just get a real desktop experience. The chips in phones these days are plenty powerful. I always thought it would be where we were going, but alas, no major manufacturer seems to want to make it feel like a seamless, premium experience. Samsung got sorta close, but the peripherals involved never felt great or didn't make sense from a cost perspective.
I wonder what it would look like if Apple offered a slimmed down shell from the Neo for ~$300 that required a connected iPhone. Maybe as iOS and MacOS converge we'll get there.
Not just the Console and PC's market, the Phone market to. On my country before, IDR 2.000.000, you can have a 8GB phone with G100 Ultimate. How about Now? On that price, you'll just got the 4/128 with Unisoc T7250.
intel makes gpus :). Maybe games will be finally made again in a way that a PC can run them without needing a 3k GPU in there to get toward half the refreshrate of your monitor.
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 you seen the current prices on Steam Deck? Almost $800 for the base model.
And I assume they will only continue to go up. When it came out, purchasing one seemed like an easy decision. But I paid half as much for one with the same CPU/RAM (and upgraded my SSD for cheap).
If the AI bubble bursts and prices normalize because demand for AI hardware is reduced, then these companies might pay more attention to other markets like gaming again. But who knows the future anyway.
Regarding graphics capabilities, haven't we reached "good enough" like a decade ago? Does anyone actually want to see ultra realistic gore when attacking an enemy? I'd also submit that photorealistic art style is not the most popular one either nowadays except for a handful of special sims like race car driving.
If not for adults, my opinion is that teenagers/younger generations are gonna be interested within buying ultra-realistic games. Aside from Minecraft, Roblox, GTA 5 as indie games, most players in this age do in my opinion play AAA games or the most solid graphics game that the world has to offer (as much as their laptops allow them to)
It's worse than centralization. These AI models have gobbled up all the world knowledge. If for some reason the Internet dies we will have no option but to be dependent on these proprietary, for profit, AI models for any information we need.
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.
Not only if the internet dies. If the country or countries managing the AI decide they don't like your country and ban you from using their (major) AI providers, in a world where most knowledge and work tanks will require access, you're screwed.
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.
I have high hopes for AMD Halo / NVidia Spark or sth. similar - relatively open computers (unlike Apple) with unified memory. Now if those prices just came down a bit... :-/
- Large centralized compute is more powerful than portable compute
- Wired is better than wireless
- The public wants new things
- The tech industry grows to use/“use” the available processing power
As long as you’re not continuously comparing to AI in large centralized compute, what you’re really looking for is “when does portable compute become powerful enough to run AI models that are capable of meaningful work” and I’d say we’re already there and it’s getting better.
It was the same with cloud and software as a service. We underuse the power of our local machines and pay high cost for modest resources that are bandwidth constrained for most users.
One consequence has been lower power requirement for local machines. This is partly why a 2015 MacBook is still perfectly serviceable for basic use in this day and age.
The AI boom first reversed the trend, to now try to get back to that cycle.
Do you work in tech by chance? I work in an entirely non-technical field (to the point we barely use email), and I have several coworkers whose only “computer” is their phone or a tablet.
A smartphone is the main / only 'computer' for a lot more people than you think.
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).
Don't think of it as a step back, it's just a point in a familiar cycle:
New application of computing requires a lot of compute -> compute centralizes -> compute improves, smaller, faster, cheaper -> compute decentralizes -> new application of compute is found -> (return to beginning of cycle)
Can you think of examples of this cycle? I know this is roughly what happened with mainframes, but I struggle to think of other times it went like that.
There has been a relatively strong local model community since the days of llama-3. IMO, the number of non-technical people interested in qlora, adapters, parameter fine tuning etc is remarkable.
Yes, we will. Eventually, specialized AI hardware (ASICs) will emerge that will be good for AI, but not much anything else. PCs are general purpose computers that are good at many things, but excel at few. There are quite a few startups working on it already.
You know what that era has in common with fossil fuel? It takes a very specialized infrastructure and supply chain that you can limit with lobbying efforts and gatekeeping so that all the money only flows to you and your cronies.
I never left the PC era, but the RAM prices kind of hurt me. I don't
know when I would want to buy a new PC - it seems to be 3x the cost
for barely any real benefits over the status quo.
most games which require that big PC are poorly optimised and often times they arent even fun. these companies focus on visual fidelity and give all their engineers insane machines to build the games on. that has beenn destroying PC gaming way before AI/LLMs came into the picture.
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.
Yupppp. My current conspiracy theory, with all of the increasing hardware costs and how easy decompilation projects are, is that there is going to be a major push to eradicate consumer hardware and keep all software in the cloud.
Everybody will have a mini PC for the sole purpose of streaming content, with no storage to keep anything on it.
I don't know how much of a conspiracy that is. If the current trend of hardware costs keep rising to the point of pricing people out of having any real compute locally, and chip makers actively de-prioritizing consumer-grade memory, GPUs, etc, companies will (more) heavily push thin clients and streaming for everything.
This kind of makes my point. Consumers won't be able to run things locally, so you end up with Win11 in the cloud and your device is just a glorified browser because that's all you can afford.
I would have laughed at the thought a few years ago, but now I am slowly starting to adopt some of the viewpoints of American second amendment hardliners.
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).
Yes, but that's a lot of money if you don't already have the hardware, plus you'll still be paying for electricity costs. (No comment on relative capabilities.)
Yes but then you'd have to give closed-ecosystem-ass Apple money, which is worse than giving it to Nvidia who at least support linux properly. And you still get prompt processing speeds of a leisurely sloth.
The quote assumes that all of humanity has the same goals as a corporation does: that every individual person desires maximum utilization of components for the sake of company shareholders. Individual people want a computer and just can't buy them because the entire world's memory chip supply, flash storage supply, and increasingly hard drive supply is being swallowed into the maws of corporations who would love nothing more than to sell you tiny bits of that compute through a monthly subscription in perpetuity.
Not everyone subscribes to the "cloud compute is more important than everything else" outlook, but everyone is affected by it nonetheless.
It sort of is, no? To agree with it, you need to share the goal of maximum utilization. Sam Altman seems to take that as a given. But clearly people disagree and not just with RAM. Most kitchens and bathrooms are unused most of the time, but that doesn't mean every home having one is bad.
No, he was not saying that was his goal! That's what everyone seems to misunderstand about this quote.
It's like a highrise developer saying "people think our buildings take up a lot of land, but actually houses are much worse from a land use perspective". Which is objectively true, and yet does not mean the developer thinks the entire world should be turned into houses, or even that they dislike houses!
Except he was the developer who signed a deal with land owners to buy 40% of the land with the intention of building houses to rent and caused condo prices to 5x.
The difference is Codex couldn't shake its preference for making flashy, loud, obnoxious marketing websites that look like they're trying to sell you a SaaS. This website looks like it wants my money. Meanwhile the website from op is simple, focused, and far more comedic than codex's slew of AI-generated "jokes".
The quote wasn't weird and made total sense in Altman's POV. It was just egoistic and myopic regarding how people feel about ownership and independence.
It has nothing to do with his POV or even ego. It was an objectively true fact. GPUs in data centers do get more utilization than those used locally. That's all he was saying.
Especially when you take into account that people are largely unconcerned about true facts, and will gladly misquote or misinterpret you just in order to be outraged.
The whole context of Sam Altman and other tech billionaires is weird. The modern tech advancements are deeply rooted in exploitation, racism and eugenics, concentrating military, political and economic power, and stealing agency and power of resistance from the common people.
$15 is cheaper than a movie ticket and the creator probably got more enjoyment out of it. Also, sometimes getting a few giggles out of people is return enough out of an investment.
It's the proof that people have too much money and should instead give it to Sam Altman that will make a more efficient use of it for our collective wellbeing®.
From a quick skim of the page source (including a dynamically created iframe) it just does a little animation and locally allocates some useless arrays in JavaScript to waste your "uploaded" RAM.
There is probably no way that I can word this without my comment getting massively [flagged] and [dead] and me getting mass reported to the moderator. Considering the current state of things.
But isn't mister Altman correct in a sense? Why the hell would people need 16 gigabytes of RAM or more to make spreadsheets and type documents? Receive and send e-mail, make travel bookings, listen to music and read the news. Maybe make a posts on social media, or publish on your own website.
Have we forgotten that all of this functioned very well when RAM wasn't even in the gigabytes? And that most of this functioned very well when RAM wasn't even in the megabytes? I remember this time, and certainly must many of you. Of course it is more comfortable today with more powerful machines
There must come a moment when we judge a machine or a system by the results they produce, by the fruits of the tree so to say. And those fruits haven't changed or improved noticeably in decades. There is one big improvement that undeniably requires more memory from the computer that I can think of, which is the much higher resolution of displays of today. Probably there are some more.
Specialized use is of course different, whether that's compiling code, rendering photogrammetry scenes, or playing graphics intensive games.
> And those fruits haven't changed or improved noticeably in decades.
Strongly recommend you get Gemma 4 12B QAT on a computer that can run it, and then disconnect the internet and see what it can still do. Even the smaller E4B will show you.
Local AI is the first thing in decades (since editing video, perhaps) that meaningfully changes what a disconnected machine is capable of.
This is silly, and I know Sam Altman said that consumers having RAM is not an efficient usage, but the real villains here are the memory manufacturers that have time and again have been proven to collude on price fixing and whatnot, and are now not scaling up production according to demand.
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).
As far as I can see, there's no evidence they're colluding here. They're just capturing the money that otherwise would have gone to scalpers.
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.
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.
Fair, I misread the GP's post, sorry. (For some reason I thought they were claiming that the companies that colluded in the past went bust, leaving only the non-colluding ones.)
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.
Treating the 4th time the same conspiracy would be happening—after 3 previous times proven to be true—as a nutty conspiracy theory is itself nutty. Detached from reality.
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.
If I said water was wet you are not obliged to Google it either. If someone continues to assert that water cannot make you wet even after being informed that water makes things wet because they hadn't been provided proof, and they didn't bother to check, that might be on them.
Hynix is charged with carrying out the conspiracy by:
* 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.
KOREAN COMPANY--HYNIX--AGREES TO PLEAD GUILTY TO PRICE FIXING
AND AGREES TO PAY $185 MILLION FINE FOR ROLE IN DRAM CONSPIRACY
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.
> are now not scaling up production according to demand.
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.
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.
Remember when the dot com bubble burst and after that the Internet became a billion times more important than before? Wikipedia didn't even exist when the dot com bubble collapsed!
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.
This is what I say about any financial collapse/bubble pop/credit crunch. Resources don't blow up, people don't drop dead in the streets. A few rich folk who thought they were getting paid, aren't. Everything that happens after is second-order effects of them getting huffy about it. They don't have to cut wages and fire people and disrupt the supply chain; they could sacrifice their own largesse to keep things stable. (And the job of government in those circumstances is to force them to.)
Nothing silly was said really. The remark was specifically about local inference and RAM supply issues and it’s entirely true - if all current AI users tried to switch to local models, it would make the RAM availability situation much worse. I userstand that regular Twitter folk doesn’t grasp that, but this isn’t Twitter.
Would it? First of all, all current AI users still need memory in their devices. You can't use ChatGPT with pen and paper. There would always be a consumer demand for memory, even without local inference. Secondly, it'd drastically decrease the demand for HBM, which has shit yields when compared to conventional memory. It's also questionable as to how much of the produced HBM is actually in use and not sitting in a warehouse.
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.
It really seems like the majority audience of this site (lukewarm left wing nerds, let's be honest) is trying to square a circle with the unwavering AI support (I mean the ecosystem and the people, not the technology, which is indeed great).
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.
> It really seems like the majority audience of this site (lukewarm left wing nerds, let's be honest)
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.
American exceptionalism again. If American politicians ban data centre builds in the US, that won't stop 'AI bros'. It will just run elsewhere, and at best Americans will just have a bit more latency on their AI services.
It was taken out of context for sure but still find this site amusing. Perhaps even prophetic, can we build enough ram and vram for future requirements when theres only a few holding the keys.
Obligatory: "we're curing cancer r-right?" No Nat we're making slop videos with it.
All are responsible - the AI greedy companies and
the suppliers.
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.
Except that's nonsense, any company that could make more ram absolutely would because the damand is insane. There is no universe or economy where it would be profitable to artificially lower your production to keep prices high when you can just make more ram.
It depends on how much inelastic demand there is. For example:
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)
Until making more means huge capex building extra factories. Semiconductors is famously a boom and bust industry, building too much in the boom will kill your company.
So… the major manufacturers, which operate across different continents with notoriously uneasy geopolitical tensions, are secretly operating a silicon cartel?
I enjoyed this alternate phrasing of the Sam Altman quote:
"From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to [let billionaires] have a bunch of the world's limited supply of [money] sitting in their own [stocks] and being used 5% of the time. You want maximum [taxes] if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that."
If you want the personal thanks from Altman without having to actually give up your RAM, you can download some here first https://downloadmoreram.com and then upload that to Altman.
The real solution is even simpler than having everyone upload their RAM to him: Sam can ask Claude (or ChatGPT, if OpenAI takes diversity hires) to build him a DRAM fab, using ultrathinking, making no mistakes.
Sam Altman's argument was that people tend to not run their consumer electronics at 100% 24/7, and so views the time that's not happening as wasted potential for RAM that could be sitting in a data center. I sincerely reject that notion, but from that... utilitarian perspective it's hard to argue that spreading out the world's limited RAM supply across thousands of personal machines would fix any issues
>so consumers are left to feel the guilt of having unused RAM in their computers
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" :)
Yep. Not only that but the quote (even if taken out of context) is factual. >99% of people load up their computers with comical amounts of ram when they really, really don't need it. This excess then only fuels the creation of memory inefficient apps. People are in shock when I tell them they could take the whole OS state when running any AAA game, reduce memory usage by an order of magnitude (if optimized correctly) and they couldn't spot a single difference. Most of those >200GB game installs could literally be reduced to a few hundred MB (no, you don't need massive textures + you can generate most on the fly).
I get that I'm falling for low quality bait here, but what about him saying that it's terrible for people to have RAM is "fake propaganda"? The entire exact quote is:
> 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!
Centralization is nonironically my biggest problem with AI. It feels like a step back towards mainframe era.
Will we go back to PCs? As in: are we going to get cheap local hackable frontier AIs at some point? I hope so.
This began with cloud. When software began running as a front-end in a browser, people began complaining about centralization.
But then it became normal.
The monopolization of knowledge and expertise is the next step. I don't mean as if it were intended, but it is the logical progress given the technological evolution. The cause is inventive structures: the tech is neutral (in my opinion), but the way in which it is used and deployed is subject to and disciplined by capital.
> Will we go back to PCs? As in: are we going to get cheap local hackable frontier AIs at some point?
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.
Today I opened newegg for the hell of it and figured I'd look at the cost of a 2 TB NVMe ... Fuck man. This is seriously depressing.
BUT! I feel that lost hope could/will turn into a new forms of "min-maxing" or whatever where we will see people focusing on small, efficient software to make the most of what we have to weather the drought. We got spoiled with cheap hardware. Time to make the most of all that cheap hardware we have.
Though of course, replacing this hardware as it breaks down will be expensive. Perhaps we could go back to 1/2/4 GB RAM sticks and 256/512 GB Disks. Then run minimal Linux installs, minimal GUIs, minimal services, minimal software.
To amend this: Reading the 8088 domination article and the little $8 RISC-V Linux board I think we have plenty of opportunity. Maybe we learn to shed our inefficient BIG computers for small, low power, purposeful, yet general computers. I play with Plan 9 a lot and its portability, small footprint, low resource, and distributed design has showed me we can do a lot with a little as long as we stay disciplined to keep things simple and to the point.
I think there is a second order effect of this: it won't be worth making games for PC. At least, large budget games.
It also won't be worth it to make games for next gen consoles if the prices end up being what people are saying. So in the end they'll just keep doing what they're doing right now, and not increase the hardware requirements of their games.
The extensive use of AI for producing better code (if so instructed) may even decrease the hardware requirements.
not true. it wont be worth it anymore to implement Path Tracing or Ray tracing which is absolutely not needed for a prime gaming experience. its deterimental even because ull only get into games with a certain type of person who can afford a big machine.
Many games that come out still, and are quite successful, do not require such technologies.
AI slop-cloning is killing small indie games too.
Is it really? Slop clones of games have been a thing for ages, I’d expext the market to be reasonably resistant by now.
Here's how it's been going:
1. Indy developer releases a game or trailer of a game. 2. Within an extremely short time (days to weeks at most) there are clones on the market. 3. These games often outperform the original.
It's absolutely not something that's gone on for ages.
It might be a novel gameplay idea / twist on a genre, and mere days after launch instead of being able to stand on its own and gather attention it's drowning in a pool of lookalikes. It's no longer distinct.
The speed of being able to slop together something like this is less than 1% of what it used to be.
[delayed]
There a lots and lots of great games that will run on computers that would be considered low power today. And I’m not even talking about older games.
I'm still hoping some future LLM is good and small enough for people to run local AI for everyday life.
It's interesting trying to be an AI "moderate," which as the owner of a 16gb card I definitely am. Still working on the balance, but it really does feel like I'm going to land on something like "use external AI services to build a few tools, but use my local rig to actually handle everything personal once those tools are built."
Already here. 3.8-27b is good enough.
5 years ago it would have been science fiction
Do you find it intelligent enough? What hardware are you using?
For me, qwen 3.8 27b on my m5 max is so slow and dumb that I can't think of a single use for it. Haiku, Luna, or data center scale open models are ten times faster and ten times smarter (and inference so cheap that it's essentially free). It was a nifty toy to brag to friends about but why would I waste my time goofing with something so slow and dumb?
Try DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017, feels much better: https://github.com/drawthingsai/local-code-community
For roughly the same reason you might slow down and read a book on how to do something as opposed to speedrunning 20 youtube videos?
Its interesting because I was at Costco the other day and they weren't even selling PCs unless they were gaming ones. It seems most consumer electronics have switched over to laptops.
Also, this reminds me so much of the download more RAM ads back in the day.
Most of it has switched to mobile phones and tablets. It doesn't help that almost everywhere digital classroom means tablet instead of laptop. Sure, the control is convenient for the teacher, but it also means we are raising our children in walled gardens. So much so, that whole generations don't even leave that garden in their spare time.
I'm still waiting for the day a mac air style shell exists where I plug my phone in and just get a real desktop experience. The chips in phones these days are plenty powerful. I always thought it would be where we were going, but alas, no major manufacturer seems to want to make it feel like a seamless, premium experience. Samsung got sorta close, but the peripherals involved never felt great or didn't make sense from a cost perspective.
I wonder what it would look like if Apple offered a slimmed down shell from the Neo for ~$300 that required a connected iPhone. Maybe as iOS and MacOS converge we'll get there.
It's also killing the console market. Sharp drops in all console sales after "adjusting" to ram prices.
Not just the Console and PC's market, the Phone market to. On my country before, IDR 2.000.000, you can have a 8GB phone with G100 Ultimate. How about Now? On that price, you'll just got the 4/128 with Unisoc T7250.
What is more sensible: Listening to the best music on an average sound system or listening to average music on the best sound system?
There should be a big enough back catalog of great games for you to enjoy without having to buy a new gaming rig.
intel makes gpus :). Maybe games will be finally made again in a way that a PC can run them without needing a 3k GPU in there to get toward half the refreshrate of your monitor.
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...
Cyberpunk runs even on steamdeck, it doesn't need an extreme machine.
Have you seen the current prices on Steam Deck? Almost $800 for the base model.
And I assume they will only continue to go up. When it came out, purchasing one seemed like an easy decision. But I paid half as much for one with the same CPU/RAM (and upgraded my SSD for cheap).
At least you'll be able to get a Pi 5 for $700.
Pi6 might get very close to buisiness usage but i guess microsoft will use just more cpu/gpu for windows to stop that from happening.
What's the rumours on the Pi6?
its gonna be at around early 2028
On the bright side, you’ll be able to play Skyrim-halo-Pokémon-Minecraft as much as you want.
I'm just sticking with Tetris.
If the AI bubble bursts and prices normalize because demand for AI hardware is reduced, then these companies might pay more attention to other markets like gaming again. But who knows the future anyway.
Regarding graphics capabilities, haven't we reached "good enough" like a decade ago? Does anyone actually want to see ultra realistic gore when attacking an enemy? I'd also submit that photorealistic art style is not the most popular one either nowadays except for a handful of special sims like race car driving.
If not for adults, my opinion is that teenagers/younger generations are gonna be interested within buying ultra-realistic games. Aside from Minecraft, Roblox, GTA 5 as indie games, most players in this age do in my opinion play AAA games or the most solid graphics game that the world has to offer (as much as their laptops allow them to)
It's worse than centralization. These AI models have gobbled up all the world knowledge. If for some reason the Internet dies we will have no option but to be dependent on these proprietary, for profit, AI models for any information we need.
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.
Not only if the internet dies. If the country or countries managing the AI decide they don't like your country and ban you from using their (major) AI providers, in a world where most knowledge and work tanks will require access, you're screwed.
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.
I have high hopes for AMD Halo / NVidia Spark or sth. similar - relatively open computers (unlike Apple) with unified memory. Now if those prices just came down a bit... :-/
We currently have politicians in the U.S. talking about “stopping” AI.
So it’s plausible they’ll block me from accessing Mistral since they host DeepSeek models.
They're already censored
Yes, I know. I meant additional censorship that blocks whatever you're trying to do with them. In other words, that you are not in control.
Some things will always be true:
- Large centralized compute is more powerful than portable compute
- Wired is better than wireless
- The public wants new things
- The tech industry grows to use/“use” the available processing power
As long as you’re not continuously comparing to AI in large centralized compute, what you’re really looking for is “when does portable compute become powerful enough to run AI models that are capable of meaningful work” and I’d say we’re already there and it’s getting better.
Also:
- local latency is lower than network latency
- latency is important for action games
It was the same with cloud and software as a service. We underuse the power of our local machines and pay high cost for modest resources that are bandwidth constrained for most users.
One consequence has been lower power requirement for local machines. This is partly why a 2015 MacBook is still perfectly serviceable for basic use in this day and age.
The AI boom first reversed the trend, to now try to get back to that cycle.
People long ago stopped buying computers and started using Saas on their mobile devices instead. Ask HP.
HP was making shit laptops that barely worked a decade before SaaS was a known acronym.
Sure but businesses bought them and people bought them. Their quality is beside the point.
People keep saying that but I have never met anyone who doesn't own a PC or laptop.
I know youngsters who dont even have an email address. Though, this may change if they have to enter the workforce.
Lot of people using their office-notebooks at home, even if its not allowed. Most people out of tech do not have big hardware at home anymore.
Do you work in tech by chance? I work in an entirely non-technical field (to the point we barely use email), and I have several coworkers whose only “computer” is their phone or a tablet.
A smartphone is the main / only 'computer' for a lot more people than you think.
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).
Don't think of it as a step back, it's just a point in a familiar cycle:
New application of computing requires a lot of compute -> compute centralizes -> compute improves, smaller, faster, cheaper -> compute decentralizes -> new application of compute is found -> (return to beginning of cycle)
Can you think of examples of this cycle? I know this is roughly what happened with mainframes, but I struggle to think of other times it went like that.
Maybe arcade games?
There has been a relatively strong local model community since the days of llama-3. IMO, the number of non-technical people interested in qlora, adapters, parameter fine tuning etc is remarkable.
that was when RAM and GPUs were cheap. Now that is dying, too.
Only people who have no concerns about privacy would give up on it entirely.
But yes, it has been a test of just how few tokens you can get by on.
Yes, we will. Eventually, specialized AI hardware (ASICs) will emerge that will be good for AI, but not much anything else. PCs are general purpose computers that are good at many things, but excel at few. There are quite a few startups working on it already.
The only way this may happen is when the internet were to be somehow destroyed.
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.
> And your local AI could emulate the good parts of the internet.
Like talking to people?
People did not live in social isolation before the internet existed.
In fact, it was closer to the opposite.
Why are you here, instead of having your AI emulate HN locally?
Trump and AI-power security research are both doing a good job of promoting installable software!
You know what that era has in common with fossil fuel? It takes a very specialized infrastructure and supply chain that you can limit with lobbying efforts and gatekeeping so that all the money only flows to you and your cronies.
> It feels like a step back towards mainframe era.
:insert Will Smith presenting meme:
The Cloud
back to the mainframe era came with the insane proliferation of cloud everything, not with ai
Yes we will and we all know it. All those are raw materials.
I never left the PC era, but the RAM prices kind of hurt me. I don't know when I would want to buy a new PC - it seems to be 3x the cost for barely any real benefits over the status quo.
most games which require that big PC are poorly optimised and often times they arent even fun. these companies focus on visual fidelity and give all their engineers insane machines to build the games on. that has beenn destroying PC gaming way before AI/LLMs came into the picture.
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 is not a bad thing per se: most of use could use our devices a little longer than we usually do.
Yupppp. My current conspiracy theory, with all of the increasing hardware costs and how easy decompilation projects are, is that there is going to be a major push to eradicate consumer hardware and keep all software in the cloud.
Everybody will have a mini PC for the sole purpose of streaming content, with no storage to keep anything on it.
I don't know how much of a conspiracy that is. If the current trend of hardware costs keep rising to the point of pricing people out of having any real compute locally, and chip makers actively de-prioritizing consumer-grade memory, GPUs, etc, companies will (more) heavily push thin clients and streaming for everything.
I really don’t see it happening at all, not with current trends, you can barely run Win11 on 8GB ram anymore
This kind of makes my point. Consumers won't be able to run things locally, so you end up with Win11 in the cloud and your device is just a glorified browser because that's all you can afford.
I would have laughed at the thought a few years ago, but now I am slowly starting to adopt some of the viewpoints of American second amendment hardliners.
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).
There's a lot of hacking going on right now with small (qwen 3.x and gemma 4 based) and medium (deepseek flash and others) models alike.
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.
> A sensible point of entry is a 2899$ Mac mini.
> 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.
Yes, but that's a lot of money if you don't already have the hardware, plus you'll still be paying for electricity costs. (No comment on relative capabilities.)
$3k being a point of entry for a pale imitation of the models being compared to is not very inspiring.
Yes but then you'd have to give closed-ecosystem-ass Apple money, which is worse than giving it to Nvidia who at least support linux properly. And you still get prompt processing speeds of a leisurely sloth.
The quote in context really wasn’t that weird https://sputnikintelligence.com/things/quote/6vqm-hkv5-qm1d
The quote assumes that all of humanity has the same goals as a corporation does: that every individual person desires maximum utilization of components for the sake of company shareholders. Individual people want a computer and just can't buy them because the entire world's memory chip supply, flash storage supply, and increasingly hard drive supply is being swallowed into the maws of corporations who would love nothing more than to sell you tiny bits of that compute through a monthly subscription in perpetuity.
Not everyone subscribes to the "cloud compute is more important than everything else" outlook, but everyone is affected by it nonetheless.
It sort of is, no? To agree with it, you need to share the goal of maximum utilization. Sam Altman seems to take that as a given. But clearly people disagree and not just with RAM. Most kitchens and bathrooms are unused most of the time, but that doesn't mean every home having one is bad.
> Most kitchens and bathrooms are unused most of the time, but that doesn't mean every home having one is bad.
isn't communal living the most efficient thing resource-wise though?
I think that's exactly the point OC was making, it's the most efficient resource-wise but that doesn't make it the objectively best form of living
No, he was not saying that was his goal! That's what everyone seems to misunderstand about this quote.
It's like a highrise developer saying "people think our buildings take up a lot of land, but actually houses are much worse from a land use perspective". Which is objectively true, and yet does not mean the developer thinks the entire world should be turned into houses, or even that they dislike houses!
Except he was the developer who signed a deal with land owners to buy 40% of the land with the intention of building houses to rent and caused condo prices to 5x.
Sam Altman's argument is very conveniently self-serving.
I (or ironically, Codex) did something similar yesterday: https://ramforsam.zad.zip
The difference is Codex couldn't shake its preference for making flashy, loud, obnoxious marketing websites that look like they're trying to sell you a SaaS. This website looks like it wants my money. Meanwhile the website from op is simple, focused, and far more comedic than codex's slew of AI-generated "jokes".
I agree, and it's on purpose. I deliberately made it stink of vibe coding. It's also hosted as a ChatGPT site.
That quote wasn’t that weird in co text and Sam says a lot of things on podcasts see some https://sputnikintelligence.com/people/zlsl-zr6t-7llx
The quote wasn't weird and made total sense in Altman's POV. It was just egoistic and myopic regarding how people feel about ownership and independence.
It has nothing to do with his POV or even ego. It was an objectively true fact. GPUs in data centers do get more utilization than those used locally. That's all he was saying.
Something can be a true fact and still be an ill-advised or tone deaf thing to say.
Especially when you take into account that people are largely unconcerned about true facts, and will gladly misquote or misinterpret you just in order to be outraged.
Is it really "all he was saying" when he's single handedly responsible for creating a worldwide RAM and NAND shortage?
The whole context of Sam Altman and other tech billionaires is weird. The modern tech advancements are deeply rooted in exploitation, racism and eugenics, concentrating military, political and economic power, and stealing agency and power of resistance from the common people.
Error code: 5
Why do people pay $15 just to buy domains for these meme websites?
$15 is cheaper than a movie ticket and the creator probably got more enjoyment out of it. Also, sometimes getting a few giggles out of people is return enough out of an investment.
We pay $15 for frivolous things all the time
Because it’s cheap and fun?
$15 can be spent on other stuff too, something useful
The thing about fun and hobbies is that they are rarely useful. People spend money to have fun.
Just imagine the author had loads of fun making it.
$15 of serotonin is better than this stuff: https://www.amazon.com/stuff-under-15-dollars/s?k=stuff+unde...
Social commentary.
It's the proof that people have too much money and should instead give it to Sam Altman that will make a more efficient use of it for our collective wellbeing®.
You dont sound like a geek god.
a growing geek god
I believe the kids say "it's for the lulz"
Hey, it’s approximately 13 upvotes a dollar. /s
I suspect that this actually downloads something instead of uploading. I have no proof, but I believe it.
It's a reference to the old "download more RAM" meme.
I would be shocked if it did anything at all.
No, it does. I donated 16 GB, and my FF usage slowly went up to 24 GB
I tried to upload 16 GB to help Zuckerberg, but the GUI is suspicious.
From a quick skim of the page source (including a dynamically created iframe) it just does a little animation and locally allocates some useless arrays in JavaScript to waste your "uploaded" RAM.
There is probably no way that I can word this without my comment getting massively [flagged] and [dead] and me getting mass reported to the moderator. Considering the current state of things.
But isn't mister Altman correct in a sense? Why the hell would people need 16 gigabytes of RAM or more to make spreadsheets and type documents? Receive and send e-mail, make travel bookings, listen to music and read the news. Maybe make a posts on social media, or publish on your own website.
Have we forgotten that all of this functioned very well when RAM wasn't even in the gigabytes? And that most of this functioned very well when RAM wasn't even in the megabytes? I remember this time, and certainly must many of you. Of course it is more comfortable today with more powerful machines
There must come a moment when we judge a machine or a system by the results they produce, by the fruits of the tree so to say. And those fruits haven't changed or improved noticeably in decades. There is one big improvement that undeniably requires more memory from the computer that I can think of, which is the much higher resolution of displays of today. Probably there are some more.
Specialized use is of course different, whether that's compiling code, rendering photogrammetry scenes, or playing graphics intensive games.
> And those fruits haven't changed or improved noticeably in decades.
Strongly recommend you get Gemma 4 12B QAT on a computer that can run it, and then disconnect the internet and see what it can still do. Even the smaller E4B will show you.
Local AI is the first thing in decades (since editing video, perhaps) that meaningfully changes what a disconnected machine is capable of.
Yes, but system requirements bloated to this extreme point long before there was any AI at all.
If only everyone lived more optimised!!
being correct doesn't mean your reasoning isn't crooked. His implication is "You don't need it, but I do!"
It's a monopoly saying they do not have enough resources. It's the big man saying he needs more food.
This is silly, and I know Sam Altman said that consumers having RAM is not an efficient usage, but the real villains here are the memory manufacturers that have time and again have been proven to collude on price fixing and whatnot, and are now not scaling up production according to demand.
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).
As far as I can see, there's no evidence they're colluding here. They're just capturing the money that otherwise would have gone to scalpers.
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.
Well there was no evidence they were colluding until they got caught the previous two (three?) times.
Following this logic, I now suspect everyone of price collusion -- including myself
Ok, to put it simply.
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.
Fair, I misread the GP's post, sorry. (For some reason I thought they were claiming that the companies that colluded in the past went bust, leaving only the non-colluding ones.)
The RAM industry is littered with corpses. It’s a boom and bust business and fabs are extraordinarily expensive.
>and are now not scaling up production according to demand.
hopefully china does it and hynix burns in hell
>have been proven to collude on price fixing and whatnot
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
> where is the proof?
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.
If someone asserts something without proof, then it can be dismissed.
Simple as that.
If I said all donuts are spaceships, readers are not obligated to go and google it.
Treating the 4th time the same conspiracy would be happening—after 3 previous times proven to be true—as a nutty conspiracy theory is itself nutty. Detached from reality.
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.
Its an equivocation fallacy.
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.
If I said water was wet you are not obliged to Google it either. If someone continues to assert that water cannot make you wet even after being informed that water makes things wet because they hadn't been provided proof, and they didn't bother to check, that might be on them.
Hynix is charged with carrying out the conspiracy by:
KOREAN COMPANY--HYNIX--AGREES TO PLEAD GUILTY TO PRICE FIXING AND AGREES TO PAY $185 MILLION FINE FOR ROLE IN DRAM CONSPIRACYUS 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.
the fuck you talking about?
just asked about some kind of proof when world is full of conspiracy theories, nothing wrong with that, so stop being aggressive and snarky
and i knew about stuff from 2000, but thought there was something recent
I don't think you understand what the word proof means
Hi there, what is a blockchain?
> are now not scaling up production according to demand.
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.
If there was healthy competition, yes, because it’s not as if this hasn’t been going on for years at this point.
All the healthy competition is operational now.
New fabs will be operational in a while, which is too big of a risk to take in these times.
It takes a while to build those fabs.
> struggle to make it to the end of the year.
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.
Remember when the dot com bubble burst and after that the Internet became a billion times more important than before? Wikipedia didn't even exist when the dot com bubble collapsed!
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.
This is what I say about any financial collapse/bubble pop/credit crunch. Resources don't blow up, people don't drop dead in the streets. A few rich folk who thought they were getting paid, aren't. Everything that happens after is second-order effects of them getting huffy about it. They don't have to cut wages and fire people and disrupt the supply chain; they could sacrifice their own largesse to keep things stable. (And the job of government in those circumstances is to force them to.)
> and are now not scaling up production according to demand
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
Witch hunt?! Sam said something goofy, a goofy little website was made to poke fun at what he said.
Good god the internet is so sensitive nowadays
Nothing silly was said really. The remark was specifically about local inference and RAM supply issues and it’s entirely true - if all current AI users tried to switch to local models, it would make the RAM availability situation much worse. I userstand that regular Twitter folk doesn’t grasp that, but this isn’t Twitter.
Would it? First of all, all current AI users still need memory in their devices. You can't use ChatGPT with pen and paper. There would always be a consumer demand for memory, even without local inference. Secondly, it'd drastically decrease the demand for HBM, which has shit yields when compared to conventional memory. It's also questionable as to how much of the produced HBM is actually in use and not sitting in a warehouse.
Altman is still 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
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.
You are misunderstanding the quote.
In which way?
It’s almost like it’s a calculated move to distract from other things.
> but the real villains here are the memory manufacturers
Ah yes Sam Altman is not a real villain despite OpenAI locking up 40% of global DRAM supply.
They are both villains.
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.
It wouldn't matter if they made enough of it to meet demand.
It really seems like the majority audience of this site (lukewarm left wing nerds, let's be honest) is trying to square a circle with the unwavering AI support (I mean the ecosystem and the people, not the technology, which is indeed great).
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.
>everyone hates AI
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.
> It really seems like the majority audience of this site (lukewarm left wing nerds, let's be honest)
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.
American exceptionalism again. If American politicians ban data centre builds in the US, that won't stop 'AI bros'. It will just run elsewhere, and at best Americans will just have a bit more latency on their AI services.
It was taken out of context for sure but still find this site amusing. Perhaps even prophetic, can we build enough ram and vram for future requirements when theres only a few holding the keys.
Obligatory: "we're curing cancer r-right?" No Nat we're making slop videos with it.
All are responsible - the AI greedy companies and the suppliers.
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.
+1
Its because of the companies too i mean they are not making too much ram on purpose to make supply low and demand high.
No, the foundries are just redirecting production to HBM, which is in much higher demand.
Except that's nonsense, any company that could make more ram absolutely would because the damand is insane. There is no universe or economy where it would be profitable to artificially lower your production to keep prices high when you can just make more ram.
It depends on how much inelastic demand there is. For example:
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)
We are not getting this level of scarcity yet, so that mechanism (life of death desperation of rich players) is not entering picture yet.
Also, it is not likely to happen any time soon.
We have less rich gamers deciding to not upgrade their PCs at most.
We have less rich gamers deciding not to buy a new PC in favour of streaming games from NVIDIA GeForce NOW.
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.
Yeah except price differentiation exists. There's a reason Nvidia doesn't allow consumer GPUs in data centres.
Until making more means huge capex building extra factories. Semiconductors is famously a boom and bust industry, building too much in the boom will kill your company.
Obviously, but I understood OP meant that they have capacity right now they are just choosing not to make more RAM right now.
Really? You never heard about how OPEC?
OPEC that in an equivalent situation was desperately trying to increase oil production, to discourage looking for alternatives to oil? This OPEC?
So… the major manufacturers, which operate across different continents with notoriously uneasy geopolitical tensions, are secretly operating a silicon cartel?
You mean the exact thing that happened before involving a dozen companies and that ended with prison time and fines?
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...
This is stupid.
I feel like you had to live through the download more RAM scam/meme of the early internet to fully appreciate the joke. I remember installing it.
I enjoyed this alternate phrasing of the Sam Altman quote:
"From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to [let billionaires] have a bunch of the world's limited supply of [money] sitting in their own [stocks] and being used 5% of the time. You want maximum [taxes] if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that."
If you want the personal thanks from Altman without having to actually give up your RAM, you can download some here first https://downloadmoreram.com and then upload that to Altman.
Someone should just FXP it over
While I’m not sure what this does, I’ve made sure to have chatgpt do it for me, safely from the cloud.
I figured it was a cute tongue-in-cheek thing, and crashed my browser tab with a 16gb ask.
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.
What did you expect to happen instead?
Do you also click on the links of the Nigerian princes?
Leave Sam alone! Your wit and guile is not appreciated. We would prefer you punch down or across in future engagements.
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.
> community based compute donation
also, spare LLM credits from donations for use by community groups
We don't have to talk about paperclips anymore, it's RAM. Anyone want to play a game of ram chip maximizer?
I tried donating 16GB of RAM and it crashed my browser :D
Same. Hope it was a zipbomb right into his mailbox.
I've donated 25 GB, but the ungrateful brat is still frowning.
https://codeberg.org/TheZoq2/uploadyourram.org/commit/3b5727...
"Iniital commit"
Lol, little cringe "Look guys, how human I am!!"
Of course, because no human can be sloppy with commits on a stupid one-off joke repo...
You people are obnoxious.
i agree with sam.
Plus it's far more efficient to buy tons of gpu's for the shelves rather than actually use them.
The real solution is even simpler than having everyone upload their RAM to him: Sam can ask Claude (or ChatGPT, if OpenAI takes diversity hires) to build him a DRAM fab, using ultrathinking, making no mistakes.
Why isn’t Sam Altman just using SoftRAM?
Tweet this at him everyone
This is his stupidest argument ever! I can't believe no one replies back properly:
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)_/¯
Sam Altman's argument was that people tend to not run their consumer electronics at 100% 24/7, and so views the time that's not happening as wasted potential for RAM that could be sitting in a data center. I sincerely reject that notion, but from that... utilitarian perspective it's hard to argue that spreading out the world's limited RAM supply across thousands of personal machines would fix any issues
>so consumers are left to feel the guilt of having unused RAM in their computers
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" :)
Found the person who consumed the fake propaganda about the Sam Altman quote.
Yep. Not only that but the quote (even if taken out of context) is factual. >99% of people load up their computers with comical amounts of ram when they really, really don't need it. This excess then only fuels the creation of memory inefficient apps. People are in shock when I tell them they could take the whole OS state when running any AAA game, reduce memory usage by an order of magnitude (if optimized correctly) and they couldn't spot a single difference. Most of those >200GB game installs could literally be reduced to a few hundred MB (no, you don't need massive textures + you can generate most on the fly).
I get that I'm falling for low quality bait here, but what about him saying that it's terrible for people to have RAM is "fake propaganda"? The entire exact quote is:
> 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!
This is tremendously fake news. Everbody knows it. The best people say it's fake.