Posted by inigyou 21 hours ago
Pretty sure those devs were saying the same thing way before 2017 as well, which seems to be ~ the last time RAM was this expensive.
Now RAM in the cloud, now you're really paying the Java premium.
Since that peak in 2014 until today, the prices were lower than now. The peak in 2017 was more than 10% lower than today.
To reach permanently higher prices than today, we must go backwards until 2011.
So we have already regressed at least 12 years into the past, but more likely 15 years, and it is unknown how much more we will regress.
It seems worth noting here that DDR5 RAM is faster than DDR3 RAM, and was not even available until 2020.
1. Make extra greasy pizza. Nauseating-level of grease.
2. Put pizza through De-Greasinator 5000.
Sounds efficient.
Were devs supposed to optimize RAM for a shortage that might come? I’m guessing you had enough foresight to stockpile RAM?
1) .net app, one text field, one button; private bytes 22mb, working set 27mb
2) native app, two text fields, three buttons; private bytes 1.2mb, working set 7.3mb
Just tested
Posting instead of researching in hopes someone smarter can chime in, because I'm lazy.
Also, you have Meta and Google investing in simplified performant versions of their stack for developing countries which is similar.
What's funny though, I see people that sometimes says it's cheaper to build the app they need in a single prompt than to search for it.
Moore's law is alive and well.
(PS: It is time to let ASML sell to CXMT.)
Other manufactures like Micron do have aggressive expansion plans, but fabs take a long time to build and bring online - multiple years.
https://www.guru3d.com/story/cxmt-dram-capacity-reportedly-s...
Traded as CUSU for end-users: https://en.twsc.com.cn/enCUSU/index.html
Why? High demand and low supply is very good for shareholders and make indexes go up, their goal is not to meet demand, they want exponential qurartly revunes
To me it seems like they’re just riding the AI hype out, expecting a crash after, and not willing to risk a lot of capital on someone else’s bubble.
If memory is now upstream of so many companies, then maybe a higher regulatory involvement would be appropriate (like power companies).
Specifically, and it could fix all of this, capping the max % of their supply they're allowed to sell into the AI space.
The arguments for infrastructure being managed more tightly by the government is because it's a natural monopoly that everything depends on. Memory isn't a natural monopoly, if we found ourselves in a spot where we all depend on 3 companies then that's not a law of nature, we need more companies.
The big three are also expanding their capacity. IMO, it seems to make more sense to sell equipments to those who could make better, efficient use of them. ASML has a backlog of €38.8 billion and is fully booked for 2027.
Couldn’t intel repurpose some of its fabs (maybe the old ones?) to produce memory?
I’m no expert but… seems like an easy win?
I had previously ordered from Aeonfly, but they cancelled my order--likely because they wanted to raise the price.
Do deliver and they don't get paid because the buyer purchased with money that doesn't exist.
Lose-lose situation!
What we got in 2008 was central banks (eg Fed and ECB) willfully collapsing nominal GDP in their economies. Have a look at the dot-com bust or Black Monday for comparison.
What on earth are you talking about?
The credit risk was a very real problem; Kaupthing, Anglo Irish, RBS, Lehman etc.
In 2008 they didn't. Instead they actively tightened monetary policy by eg introducing interest on excess reserves. The ECB even hiked interest rates.
Companies defaulting on debt doesn't need to bring down the economy.
For the US, you can also see how the construction sector had been winding down for years (eg as measured in construction employment) without an impact on overall unemployment. The crisis was entirely avoidable.
See https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/09/14/scott-sumner/real-pr... for a bit more background.
Take what's currently happening to Flock cameras as an object lesson. People are so fed up with Flock that they're cutting their cameras down en masse, sometimes wiping them clean from entire jurisdictions. Tens of thousands of other people in those jurisdictions are cheering them on, even offering alibis for them before they've been caught. Law enforcement doesn't seem too keen to catch them either. You absolutely can be so hated that the law will not be enforced to protect your property.
If AI companies don't slow down and build some good will, AI data centres are probably at risk. They'd probably have been targeted before Flock were they not harder targets. A higher degree of cooperation and organization will be required to sabotage them, but it would be foolish to believe it won't eventually happen.
Monopolizing memory production for another year suggests that lessons have not been learned, the mad build-out will continue, and we're headed for some truly crazy stuff.
And if AI is putting people out of jobs and making everything expensive - or that's just the perception - that's gonna set AI back for years.
Civil disobedience? In this economy?
It seems inevitable that these lost cameras will simply be upgraded to drone fleets. Not an identical replacement, but still "good enough" for the original purposes. Had they anticipated this problem and skipped the first phase, it might have been harder to manufacture consent for privacy invasion. But now anybody who was okay with the original cameras feels like a victim having them torn down, which makes it likelier they'll be okay with drones everywhere.
> Tens of thousands of other people in those jurisdictions are cheering them on, even offering alibis for them before they've been caught. Law enforcement doesn't seem too keen to catch them either. You absolutely can be so hated that the law will not be enforced to protect your property.
At least one third of the country is still okay with them, because they believe it helps rid them of illegals and deter crime, with downsides small enough to ignore, in their mind.
In sum, we don't have as much control over these things as you seem to believe. Capital was always in control with its crude but effective propaganda pipelines to manufacture enough consent. Now imagine those pipelines becoming even more effective thanks to AI. Not looking good.
Who cares about those people? I would argue even they themselves hardly do. And sure, they'll be even more okay with even worse stuff, and that even worse stuff will be even more hated by even more people, whatever the people who are "okay with" (that can mean ignorance, obedience, or evil intent, but it's not justification). If they can be okay with mass surveillance they can be okay with other things, so they're basically a wash, they're just okay with stuff.
> At least one third of the country is still okay with them
Then they can be okay with the majority saying you know what, we're sick of you, you can either stop having your toys or you will be segregated from us and live under your own surveillance. "Being okay with something" isn't some magical wand or a fortress, it's just a limp shrug. It means "pass".
> In sum, we don't have as much control over these things as you seem to believe.
I don't see the connection with the sentence before that, which is a minority being "okay with" something and a majority willing to fight and out there doing it. It's not about controlling what a minority of people are okay with, it's about changing what is done. The people who are okay with stuff can go read a comic book until it's over, how does that not solve anything you raised about them? Or are you saying their being okay with stuff should be respected or even heeded? Couldn't they just make that claim themselves, if they wanted to?
Imagine a raging house fire, people stumbling over each other trying to help, and some guy steps up and goes "WAIT!" they all look at him, sure he has a major contribution for interrupting something like this, a good idea, a plan perhaps; and he goes "... I'm actually okay with this."
It's not the majority, though. Roughly speaking, among adults, we have:
* 1/3 who are willing to vote for the red flavor of lesser-two-evils (some of them don't even register it as evil)
* 1/3 who are willing to vote for the blue flavor of lesser-two-evils (some of them don't even register it as evil, including when it literally manufactures consent for the first third to win next time around)
* 1/3 who see the above as a uniparty of capital interests offering the illusion of democracy through "close" elections as the bullshit that it is.
I wouldn't do that unless you want your airspace filled with birdshot
Nobody wants this robber baron shit
It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.
It is also a term use in general trading anywhere traders open and close their positions quickly to make profit off an upswing which might be in part caused by traders doing this. If done with inside knowledge it is illegal, in this case more commonly referred to as “front running” (which is what many suspect happened with numerous ahemfortuitous/serendipitous position changes around announcements of changes in the state of the US vs Iran situation).
> Also, these companies supposedly intend to actually use the RAM they ordered, not reselling at some inflated price.
As well as the companies ordering for the purpose of DC roll-outs and upgrades, there will definitely be some buying purely to sell at a higher price a short time later.
> It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.
[and with reference to the sibling reply to this: “Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.”]
I don't think it will pop with a sudden bang, and even if it is it won't affect these memory sales or probably those for 2028. The first real effect will be those using the AI tools suddenly finding themselves needing to pay a lot more for them as companies offering those services deal with reduced access to “new” credit from the circling investment pool shore up their fanciful accounting that way instead. The DC builds/upgrades that are currently planned will happen but more funded by end users and less by the investment cycle. New plans might not be actioned at the same scale, but it will take a while for that to affect component prices as there is a lot of lead time involved.
A year ago the SOTA was GPT-5/Opus 4.1/Gemini 2.5 Pro, two years ago Sonnet 3.5.
Looking at Opus 5 for SOTA performance and GPT 5.6 Luna for a viable cheap alternative, AI is much more capable now.
Honorable mention: GPT 5.6 Sol on Cerebras, capacity limited to a few customers, is supposedly serving 750 tok/s.
Compared to 90 tok/s for non fast mode 5.6 Sol, 56 tok/s for Opus 5, and 190 tok/s for 5.6 Luna.
I am very curious about the next generation of models, GPT-6/Astra is rumored to launch still in August. Not sure what is the state of Anthropic's next Fable checkpoint.
If these models also deliver significant improvements, I really do not see how one could seriously still argue among the lines of AI being a scam, and the demand not being there to support the size of the investments.
I don’t think most people are saying it is purely a scam (well, some do but I don’t think they are to be taken seriously). What all these talks about circular financing and VC money are saying is that demand cannot sustain the sector long-term, not that there is no demand. People are certainly happy to pay say $20/month for whatever AI chatbot, but would they still pay if it were $200/month, which is closer to the actual costs.
There are several other details that point towards a unsustainable projections:
- measurable benefits from AI-ifying companies are nowhere near what is commonly believed. AI providers are hoping that they can keep the show going until the models are good enough, essentially faking it until they’ve made it, but that is not a given. It is also unstable because it is susceptible to change in public opinion.
- permits for new datacenters are not going to become easier to get as public opinion keeps turning against them. They will have to concentrate in friendly regions, which will add cost (more demand for the same location, plus interconnection for network and electricity, both of which can easily become bottlenecks).
- the electric grids are not ready for all those planned datacenters, so something will have to give. Building more and more on-site diesel generator in times where oil supply is so constrained and random is not very sustainable either.
- eventually the loans will come due and if earnings do not match there will be a, possibly severe, correction.
If we look at the historical example of the dot-com bubble, the crash was not caused by no demand. It was just caused by over-estimated demand and too much money going to a single sector of the economy. We still use the Internet, and it is still hugely important, but the correction was still severe and real people lost real money.
- Chatbot usage in $20 plans is likely nowhere close to a $200 cost.
Inference cost has come down rapidly, with reports from July claiming OpenAI can now serve all of the logged out ChatGPT traffic on just a few hundred GPUs.
- Measurable benefit: I doubt anything of value is being measured. MS Copilot with GPT 5.5 Instant processing SharePoint files? Developers using AI as a fancy autocomplete under a "I review every line" regime?
I rely on my personal value judgement, based on 30h/week I spend using AI outside of my regular job.
I am developing a mobile app, competing with companies with millions in revenue and entire dev teams. I know it is viable. Others lag in effective adoption, their opinion is likely to change soon with even more capable models.
- data center projects in the US: They look to me to mostly be constructed in the most remote backwater. If even there projects with such moderate environmental impact cannot be realized, that would be an embarrassing policy failure
- the grid: I think that one is true. AFAIK the constraint would be gas turbines, not diesel, and oil supply is not structurally constrained
- the loans: Anthropic is rumored to have become profitable earlier this year because of large growth in enterprise revenue. It does not look so bad to me
To add to that, as an ex-software dev that mostly works in a semi-unrelated field now (and can only code as a small part of my job): I think a lot of software devs are underestimating what someone with reasonable technical skills and specialised domain knowledge is able to create with AI.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if, in 5 years' time, the majority of software used by (e.g.) potato farmers was primarily created by other potato farmers. The code might still be less elegant but I think it will be easier for the potato farmer to iterate with an AI than outsourcing to a dev firm.
I have little doubt that a competent potato farmer could possibly implement and sell such software today using Opus 5, Fable, or 5.6 Sol.
Now what I am going to say next may sound a bit crazy, and it is outside of my area of expertise. I hear the recent mathematical breakthroughs made by GPT-6/Astra are field medal worthy discoveries.
What if the current trajectory of improvement holds for another year or two?
Is it impossible that LLMs gain superhuman ability to reason over a large number of constraints so that they can make novel breakthroughs unimaginable to us today?
What I hope to see in five years is not potato farmers writing software, but programmable immune cells that safely kill cancer.
Perhaps I am an optimist.