The price reversal is caused by the unbridled demand for HBM.
  • Vespair@lemmy.zipEnglish
    6·
    21 days ago

    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.

    • FerrisEuler@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      20 days ago

      It’s a simple supply-demand issue that took 30 years to arrive and will take at least 5 years to solve unless the AI bubble pops a lot sooner to stop the hoarding by big tech cloud companies, Chinese state-backed investment and others who are betting it all on black like a has-been Hollywood actor at a Caesars roulette table on a Saturday night. The US never penalized US tech companies for shuttering the dozen memory plants since the 1990s so they just relied on the Koreans and a few others. Now Korea can’t keep up and the US tech companies have been caught with their pants down. While these kinds of people are very bright within their areas of expertise, leading to huge earnings, they’re not bright on most business topics and eventually the market shifts and they’re struggling.

      This is where the tech companies founded in the 1970s-2000s are right now. Their original ideas are long in the tooth at best and about to be disrupted, if not already disrupted. The cash cows are looking a little fatigued. They’re looking for a lifeboat to keep the good times going, thinking its AI, just now realizing their industry screwed itself with all of the offshoring but its too late now. They have to once again “fake it until they make it”.

      They just hope the people providing the capital don’t start asking about when the market will accept the higher price points so they can break even. That’s a question nobody acknowledges today when it’s asked because they know it could sink the boat if it becomes a hot topic of the month on CNBC and Bloomberg.

    • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      20 days ago

      For reference, that was the year Vista came out with a minimum memory of 512MB, with 1GB suggested.

  • DannyMac@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    21 days ago

    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…

  • StrawberryPigtails@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    4·
    22 days ago

    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.

          • NekoKoneko@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            22 days ago

            Well… Okay. But only if I can keep paying the subscription fee for the rest of my life in order to maintain access.

          • undrwater@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            22 days ago

            You still need to run streamed games in RAM. A lot of RAM.

            Well…we’ll go back to Zork and Venture.

              • undrwater@lemmy.worldEnglish
                0·
                20 days ago

                Processing, yes. Game data needs to be loaded in RAM.

                I suppose games of the future will be optimized to require less RAM while streaming.

                Even modern web browsers require at least 8gb.

                • village604@adultswim.fanEnglish
                  0·
                  20 days ago

                  No, it doesn’t. The client receives the video + audio and sends control inputs to the server. The game data doesn’t touch the client device.

                  It’s the same concept as RDP and VNC. With fiber being rolled out in more and more places, input lag will become a thing of the past.

                  Source: I used to be a VDI Engineer. I designed and maintained the infrastructure for 1k zero clients that had lower specs than a Pi 3.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      22 days ago

      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.

  • JcbAzPx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    21 days ago

    It should be noted that they haven’t become harder or more expensive to make. They just cost more.

    • Nautalax@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      21 days ago

      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

        • Nautalax@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          21 days ago

          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.

  • DisgruntledPelican@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    21 days ago

    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.

    • NutWrench@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      20 days ago

      This. These companies (Microsoft, Google, etc) are using OUR computer’s Ram, Hard drive space and CPU time to run their very own Skynets and making us pay for the privilege.

  • late_pessimistic@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    20 days ago

    Surely this will make them finally realize it is unsustainable to demand consumer to upgrade their hardware every few years?.. Right? Right??

  • dmalteseknight@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    20 days ago

    The meme of what to do with an old computer had always been upgrading the ram and storage as they were relatively inexpensive upgrades.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    21 days ago

    Well, the current trajectory points to:

    • LLM capabilities topping out.

    • All the tooling around them not keeping up anyway.

    • Actual “AGI” being distant and completely unrelated to contemporary models.

    • 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 so much matrix-multiply on 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?

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        21 days ago

        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.

    • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      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.

      • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        21 days ago

        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%.

        • Sparrow_1029@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          21 days ago

          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

          • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            21 days ago

            It’s more a failing socialist state thing, happened to my grandparents on my moms side, Capitalist states tend to go the inflation route.

          • SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish
            0·
            21 days ago

            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.

            • Nautalax@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              21 days ago

              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.

    • vala@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      Deepseek v4 Flash is insanely good and basically free. Especially the latest model which I think is only available from China right now.

  • rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    15 days ago

    The price of creating and shipping the ram has not gone up, tho. People just saw the rarity and decided to jack the everloving shit out of the price of stock they already held.