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They say those who actually made fortunes during the gold rush were the ones selling the pickaxes.
Maybe I should get into the guillotine business…
I still believe that half this swell is artificial, supported by an entire greedy industry that is blatantly price-gouging. Yes there’s a real boom, but just like egg producers who artificially inflated their prices during the egg crisis well beyond the new stress point, the same thing is happening here. We’re all being fucked and swindled at every possible opportunity.
There are only a handful of things billionaires hate more than dropping prices of anything.
Just wait till the bubble bursts.
Gonna upgrade my server with another 16gb of ddr3 soon.
£30.
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Every stars are aligned. We are At the top level of capitalism greed. For decades tech companies have piled up as much cash as possible sucking every dime selling their product. Now they want to rent their service instead. The best to do that is to host the service on a super computer, the user having only a low power terminal. They deliberately crippled the os to use the maximum ram and said we need to update our computer for ai and other things most don’t want, don’t need and don’t have the money to pay for it. The best move is to exchange their huge pile of cash to drain the whole market to build data centres. They now want everyone to become dependant on ai and pay them a significant part of our salary to satisfy their shareholders.
It should be noted that they haven’t become harder or more expensive to make. They just cost more.
More demand exists so they can raise prices and still sell out their product to someone, most anyone will take free money on the table. Would expect the prices to go down only if more fabrication plants come online in numbers enough to satisfy that demand with way more supply, or if the demand plunges (ex. AI bubble pops)
But it can take billions of dollars and years of work to build fabrication plants so new supply is slow to come online… and they want to be REALLY sure that they won’t become bagholders of epic proportion by investing that kind of money into plants only for a bubble to pop which would leave them with a lot of debt but only able to sell oversupplied RAM at very low prices
That’s a lot of words to say “illegal price fixing”.
They have fixed prices before but that looked different. See the circled area on the graph where there had been declining RAM prices but that decline suddenly stopped and became really stable? That period of 1998-2002 is where Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida were all found to have been fixing prices on RAM because all the supply they were bringing online was crashing the prices but they hoped to collude with each other to keep the prices stable rather than continuing to decline in price competition.
That coordination worked well for the way down (except when they got hit for hundreds of millions of dollars & euros in fees when it got discovered but eh), just a matter of agreeing on a number they all won’t go below. But how would they coordinate a continuous rise in lockstep with each other, that’s a LOT of phone calls anytime someone wants to buy? Why are many committing the billions of dollars to building new plants if they know that the only reason they’re making money hand over fist is avoiding selling product until it reaches a high price, why shell out money to bring supply up in that case? And why did their previous price fixing look only like a flat line if they were capable of having it go straight up? If they had that ability all along I don’t think you would have seen this somewhat sinusoidal graph with a sharply downward longtime trend for prices.
There’s already investigations and evidence that they are indeed price fixing, just check the Gamer’s Nexus video on it.
Well, the current trajectory points to:
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LLM capabilities topping out.
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All the tooling around them not keeping up anyway.
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Actual “AGI” being distant and completely unrelated to contemporary models.
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Inference costs plummeting.
The last one is critical.
Right this second, you can run Minimax H3 on a desktop for the tiny fraction of the compute/RAM OpenAI Sora took. And it’s better.
In a month, it will be ~8X faster.
You can run DeepseekV4 flash, dirt cheap, and get what Claude was less than a year ago. And it’s gonna spread to every host out there, to systems like Cerebas ASICs that don’t even need HBM.
So… Even if you’re an AI acolyte. And we go with that for the sake of argument…
We don’t actually need all that RAM for hosting generative models?
I’m very interested to see what happens to all these datacenters over the next two-three years.
They spent all this money on something that’s gonna be cheap as dirt to run, largely run locally, and that won’t need GPUs once bitnet takes off, sooo… they can’t make money off that.
What happens then?
What happens to all those Stargate RAM wafers, and excess datacenters?
You are 100% correct IMO for the AI stuff, just a question, what’s bitnet? Is it some supposed bitcoin-killer (because that’s not going to happen, IMO).
I also think we’re on the cusp of “having enough” personal computing power with the usual exceptions, take a bit, give a bit.
Our mobile phones are close to what’s needed for most people (8GB, 4k, gaming, …). Or so I think!
Bitnet is a catch-all title for ML models that use a specific mathematical trick.
If elements of a matrix are composed of only 1, 0, or -1, multiplying them is the same as as adding them.
That’s huge. LLM computation is basically all matrix multiplication, so if you replace that with simple addition, you reduce the computational requirements by orders of magnitude.
The catch is such models are hard to train effectively; its proven that it works, but research to get the technique usable and practical is still being done.
Personally, I suspect it’s unviable for many “dense” parts of models, but sparse hybrid bitnet models would be really cool.
I mention it because, if it takes off, suddenly the massive matrix multiplier accelerators we have for LLMs aren’t as useful. Chips with simpler architectures could get the job done, at least for parts of models that are bitnet.
What happens to all those Stargate RAM wafers, and excess datacenters?
The bigger question is what happens to the world-economy when the largest players bottom out and the companies betting on them are massively downgraded because of their huge investments in a fantasy about eternal growth. Hope everyone is setting aside extra cash; it’s gonna make 2008 look like a walk in the park.
Traditionally during such busts the government starts outright confiscating bank accounts or otherwise enacts some fiscal policy that renders all savings (especially those in cash) completely worthless in a last bid to pass the buck onto the 99%.
You’re saying there’s precedent that indicates the gov’t will just “confiscate” peoples savings? Could you elaborate? I’m genuinely interested to know about this, because that’s… not good
Per wikipedia:
Numerous individuals and companies were prosecuted related to Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6102. The prosecutions took place under the subsequent Executive Orders 6111,[15] 6260,[16] 6261[17] and the Gold Reserve Act of 1934.
There was a need to amend Executive Order 6102, as the one prosecution under the order was ruled invalid by Federal Judge John M. Woolsey on the grounds that the order was signed by the President, instead of the Secretary of the Treasury as required.[18] A New York attorney named Frederick Barber Campbell had a deposit at Chase National Bank of over 5,000 troy ounces (160 kg) of gold. When Campbell attempted to withdraw the gold, Chase refused and Campbell sued Chase. A federal prosecutor indicted Campbell the following day, September 27, 1933, for failing to surrender his gold.[19] Ultimately, the prosecution of Campbell failed but the authority of the federal government to seize gold was upheld, and Campbell’s gold was confiscated.
The case caused the Roosevelt administration to issue a new order under the signature of the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr. Executive Orders 6260, and 6261 provided for the seizure of gold and the prosecution of gold hoarders. A few months later Congress passed the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which gave legislative permanence to Roosevelt’s orders. A new set of Treasury regulations was issued providing civil penalties of confiscation of all gold and imposition of fines equal to double the value of the gold seized.
Back in 1933 the US was on the gold standard. If the government wanted to print the money they had to have the gold to back it up so that it would be convertible to gold on request. If the economy grows but the money supply doesn’t then the existing money becomes more valuable which is deflation.
Deflation sounds great - the money you already have can buy more! - but it can lead to a ton of economic problems. For example, if your money is becoming more valuable without you even doing anything, a temptation is to just do the equivalent of stuffing it under a mattress and to try to put off buying anything for as long as possible since the longer you can wait before buying anything, the more you can afford. That causes business to dry up because people are buying goods and services less frequently. So business revenues go down. Businesses with lost revenues have strong incentives to downsize by cutting their existing employment or reducing their wages. Those employees who are fired or with cut pay can’t spend as much which further reduces revenues. So that deflationary cycle keeps repeating and worsening the problem. In addition, consider loans and investment. Existing loans become more burdensome because they’re also worth more each day, so a lot of people will be defaulting because they didn’t expect the loan to be expensive. Those who lent the money can strike it rich if lucky or be ruined if unlucky so higher risk lending is disfavored in favor of low risk stuff like government bonds, similarly investments aren’t doing so great because so many companies are having worsening revenues so investing looks like setting money on fire and is less popular. No loans and no investment makes it extremely difficult to start or improve a business if you don’t already have money which means not many new startups are coming in to replace the folks downsizing or shutting down or come up with a new idea of doing things.
So a lot of government efforts were put at the time in trying to beat deflation. The one this guy fell afoul of was that Roosevelt had by executive order suspended the convertibility of the dollar to gold and demanded that people with amounts considered in excess to take that excess to the government and be compensated for it for a defined exchange to paper money. That would get the government enough gold to make enough new currency so that it could pay for the many ambitious projects and programs Roosevelt envisioned to get the massive number of unemployed people back to work and making money so that they would buy goods and services and break the deflationary cycle. This guy however did not exchange his gold and had 160 kg of gold in a deposit that he was trying to reclaim (then valued at ~$100000 which is what we would now consider millionaire tier money), so he ran afoul of that restriction against hoarding. But if he had converted the gold to dollars earlier they would not have confiscated it. There’s no particular reason for the government to go around confiscating our accounts because there’s no gold in them, even if it were the dollar is no longer tethered in any way to gold, and even if that were the case we aren’t experiencing a deflation cycle that the government wants to create more money to break itself out of.
Thank you for this really detailed explanation!
They did it after the soviet union collapse for example.
Emory, if you’re out there somewhere ❤️
It’s more a failing socialist state thing, happened to my grandparents on my moms side, Capitalist states tend to go the inflation route.
Lower inference costs will lead to more demand for RAM
Will it though?
I posit there’s a saturation point where there’s “enough” LLM in use, and we are not far from that.
The whole pitch from Altman and such is scaling models up. But that’s not working.
Deepseek v4 Flash is insanely good and basically free. Especially the latest model which I think is only available from China right now.
which I think is only available from China right now.
Nah, 0731 weights were released. I’m running it locally right this second.
I don’t know about Deepseek API specifically, but there are tons of places to get it.
You are Mr. moneybags or you’re running 2 or 4bit quantized.
I have a 3090, 7800, and 128GB ram from pre-rampocalypse. It’s not nothing, but there are definitely crazier home labs.
Deepseek V4 is native 4 bit.
I am running this quant, but the quantization loss is measurably low: https://huggingface.co/Downtown-Case/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731-128GB-RAM-IK-GGUF
The native MXFP4 is only a bit bigger.
A used 3090 alone is like what, 4-5k now?
Your setup isn’t really achievable for most now.
The 3090 is from 2020. It’s under $1300 based on eBay prices I’m seeing (which is around what it launched at).
Crazy expensive, but not $5K.
The 128GB RAM is madly expensive now, though.
Lol what? I just checked, on eBay I can find a lot of offers between 800 Euros and 1300 Euros for a used RTX 3090. 4-5k would get you a brand new RTX 5090.
Okay, not as bad as I thought, there’s a guy selling a 4090 for “only” 2k. There’s nobody selling a 3090 in the local hardware forum. I’m not going to buy off ebay because if someone on ebay sells a dud, I can’t go back to punch him in the face.
5090s start at about 5200, that’s true. To be fair, the “4-5k” for a used 3090 was a bit hyperbolic, I’m just mad that they’re so expensive that my last 2 cars cost less than a USED 4090.
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Once again, thanks Madoff Altman for buying up all the chip supply just to monopolize it. I’m never gonna let that go.
About the only upside to this that I can think of is that maybe, just maybe, programmers will start being more frugal with their memory usage. Everything else just sucks.
Nah. They’ll use AI to code everything, and now you need more RAM to continue…
People have to buy the games… if the machine doesn’t support it, nobody to buy it.
Why not rent and stream the games for only $99.99 per month. Subscribe now!
Well… Okay. But only if I can keep paying the subscription fee for the rest of my life in order to maintain access.
That’s why we’ve created the GenPro tier of subscriptions, the first generational loan. Get it now and your kids can help pay of back!
You still need to run streamed games in RAM. A lot of RAM.
Well…we’ll go back to Zork and Venture.
But Zork needs 64Kb ram!
No you don’t. I can run moonlight on a potato. All the processing is server side.
Streaming only replaces storage, you actually need more RAM than running it from fixed memory.
Nah, you just need to show it like a video basically.
There is always a latency issue.
https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares-to-native-pc-gaming/
Not when the processing happens in one of the many data centers that’ll be sold off when the AI bubble bursts.
I fully expect them to start heavily advertising VDI in the near future.
Yeah, I think that’s the running theory of the corporate backup plan if/when AI falls through and they need to find a use for all the data center resources.
An AI data center cannot be used to run virtual machines. Cannot be converted into a gaming streaming service. They don’t work that way
You’re right, but I think you underestimate the intersection of what’s theoretically possible and desperation.
We’ll probably see multiple different things. Some of the equipment will be repurposed for other cloud GPU workloads. We’ll probably see some companies try to make adapters and drivers to get the server hardware compatible with consumer desktops (there’s someone who did a writeup, either on hacker news or hack a day who got older server RAM working on a desktop with an adapter and Linux tomfoolery). Buy up the stuff being sold at a loss, strap their adapter on it, and sell for profit.
But on a low level, all this shit is turing complete. There will be performance losses and considerable overhead, but in theory translation layers and emulation should be able to be written to effectively convert GPU compute to whatever other format is needed.
If it’s taking a total loss vs squeezing the last squirts of profit out, I think there’s going to be attempts to squeeze.
since its mostly use for AI, it will likely be left to “rot” as there are no use for it anymore.
The money is micro transactions and the whales have $7k gpus…
Everyone else is just fodder so the pay to win accounts have someone to feel better than.
COD a while ago got caught out for juicing the matchmaking odds right after you buy a new skin. Didn’t matter what you bought or how much. A purchase made your next couple lobbies be filled with scrubs on one side, and you and some above averages on the other.
After X amounts of games it wore off, and since those games pushed you up in the normal metrics, you’re now in lobbies above your skill level. So even if you get a “fair” game, you’re going to do badly, until you buy a skin again or lose to your actual skill level.
That’s why everyone started complaining about COD matchmaking, even if you bought nothing, everyone was on the same micro transaction maximizing rollercoaster.
A cynic would say that’s why it went free on Xbox, they need a population of players to make the whale milking work. Even if those people only fire it up a few hours a month and never buy anything, getting matched with someone above your skill level who just bought a stupid skin makes you the product they sell to the whales.
They’ll never understand that.
They’ll assume the poor sales have to do with the genre, the subject matter, millennials killing the gaming industry, literally ANYTHING but the actual reason their supposed customers keep yelling about.
programmers will start being more frugal with their memory usage.
They 100% will.
Windows had started only “certifying” machines with 32gb as “windows ready” because they wanted the headroom to cram on AI features and use what we pay for instead of a data center.
But because no one was buying 32gb machines and a machine without that sticker will end up with Linux…
They just dropped it, and now they’ll have to keep optimizing for 16gb instead of just letting everything bloat. If they don’t, they risk every entry level machine making people eventually switch to Linux for a much better experience. Windows has to run on entry level or people don’t get sucked in, no one converts to windows later in life.
That’s a huge deal, if 32gb was the default for windows it would be the default for everything. Every game and design/modeling program would feel safe to assume 32gb was the norm. Like, imagine what chrome would do assuming there’s 32gb to play with.
Now they can’t, and they’ll know requiring 32gb will cut off some possible consumers.
It’s not like Windows is the good guys tho, it never should have been 32, and arguably should be 8gb forever, even if it required a lightweight mode. Most people would prefer a super stripped down Windows even with 64gb. Most of the bloat is useless, I could live without any updates after we didn’t have to quit to DOS to launch a game.
If corporate lets them use Qt instead of Electron, yes. If not, we will continue to see memory usage rises all over the place.
no one converts to windows later in life
That’s why you gotta start kids off right. Perfect starter laptop is the 10 year old clunker running Mint.
Have seen multiple ones going back to Windows after years of Linux usage, usually those who saw Linux as not a tool, but a “hobby OS” to tinker with. The moment stuff became “way too easy”, they left. (Also they’re usually bigots, and didn’t like the “trans coder” stereotype.)
No, you only need 4gb to run Win11.
The 32gb referred to gaming PC’s
Have you ever tried running win11 on 4gb? It runs about as fast as pouring molasses.
I am quite amazed at your knowledge and foresight. Really cool!
I never assumed such a scenario where ram limit will limit our infrastructure too. What do you consider will happen with people who are actually needing ram but unable to afford? And that number reaches significantly higher volume, like 60% of population?
Like maybe an open source project of building ram seems feasible?
What will happen is they’ll start selling zero clients and a subscription to a virtual desktop, using all of the data centers left over after the AI bubble pops.
Unless someone decides to enter the chip fab industry just for consumer hardware, owning your own machine might not be a thing in a few years.
That does make sense. That means cloud storage is cheaper, few years from now. And more tracking of our personal data.
Going to invest in Linux + HDD, because these things will only push us to subscription bs.
At this point i don’t see why we would need more RAM for basic OS or web usage tbh.
Like we’ve hit a point where things are covered. Obviously this won’t stop capitalists from doing capitalist bullshit though… and bloat is a thing.
Not going to disagree, but “web usage” is basically everything. You can literally run an entire desktop operating system from 2007 on a virtual machine emulated in JavaScript in your browser now.
Windows had started only “certifying” machines with 32gb as “windows ready” because they wanted the headroom to cram on AI features and use what we pay for instead of a data center.
Meanwhile as of 4 days ago: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsoft-quietly-purges-32gb-of-ram-recommendations-from-its-website-company-reels-from-the-effects-of-the-memory-shortage-as-it-released-8gb-base-models-for-surface-laptops-this-year
Buddy, really?
But because no one was buying 32gb machines and a machine without that sticker will end up with Linux…
They just dropped it,
Did you not understand it or just assume none of the later text kept explaining it so you immediately stopped ready?
It’s not just you, I see this shit all over these days, what the fuck are you people doing?
Everything is a Browser.
No chance.
Of course a chat program needs a 4GB electron app. That’s the bare minimum to match 1990s ICQ.
I remember moaning about icq gobbling 75k.
There are plenty of IRC clients that don’t use electron.
I think it was a comment on the use case for an app not really changing but the resources to run it bloating significantly… E.g. software running on a computer with MB of ram then and now the app alone requiring GB.
did you know Edge has a fucking task manager?
shift-esc to see the bullshit
It’s a fork of chromium, which has it.
AFAIK Firefox also has one.
Yeah so does ff
TIL, thanks!
Not most. Most only concern themselves with “developer productivity”.
“how many commits have you done today workerslave_96?”
That’s been my hope. Maybe get another wonder like Doom
Or just… Play Doom :)
wonder “like” Doom. Something that is efficiently created in the same capacity as Doom. Doesn’t even have to be a game.
Well theres Doom Emacs ;)
RAM prices haven’t been normalised they are still rising.
Normalized here means inflation adjusted. They’re saying RAM hasn’t been this expensive in a very long time
Gordon Moore is turning in his grave
The new Moore’s Law: the amount of RAM you can afford halves every six months.
Look on the bright side. If we hook up a dynamo to his coffin we might be able to power an AI data centre.
For all the reasons I despise Sam Altman, this is the primary reason. It was shrewd of him to lock up the entire market, but that doesn’t make it any less sociopathic. The entire world is negatively affected by this. What an asshole.
Almost like it was planned to prop up a noncompetitive business model.
And to push us regular folks out of computing.
