Posted by susanthenerd 11 hours ago
Let's say there are 10 companies that need 1 GB of RAM each in a life-or-death scenario. They would be willing to pay $100,000,000 per GB to get 1 GB of RAM.
At the same time, there are 90 more companies that need 1 GB of RAM each to make certain quarterly targets. They are willing to pay $10,000 per GB to get 1 GB of RAM.
If you make 9 GB of RAM, you can sell it for $900,000,000. If you make 99 GB of RAM, you can only sell it for $990,000, because the 10 life-or-death companies only need to bid high enough to push out a quarterly-target company.
It's a bit of a contrived example, but it shows you how restricting supply can boost total revenue if there is a segment of the market that has inelastic demand. (this is why medicine pricing has to be regulated - in the medical industry, there are lots of inelastic demand scenarios that can lead to predatory pricing)
Also, it is not likely to happen any time soon.
We have less rich gamers deciding to not upgrade their PCs at most.
Evidence: a friend of mine this month decided that he can't justify dropping $1.6k on a gaming computer.
As a PC gamer since I have memory, this whole situation makes me sad.
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...
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 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.
Everything you listed worked for decades with a lot less RAM, but was also more limited and potentially different in substance in critical ways. It's the "Mom I want X ! -> We already have X at home" meme, where the "X at home" is some poor version of what was requested.
I understand some people could still enjoy a retro style experience, but I wouldn't give up on my HDPI displays for instance. Or touch support. Or keeping 40 tabs open instead of hand managing my tabs or rely on some dumb auto-close algo.
Spreadsheets can now have dozens of thousands of line and still be snappy to manipulate, we can play high def videos while doing actual work without freezing the whole system. Photoshop and Lightroom used to be crash junkies for even basic operations and people would baby the settings to aleviate that; with the RAM we have now it has become a somewhat decent situation (still crashes, just way less)
I still have 10~20 years old machines around and boot them occasionally, there's just no way I'd get back to them full time and try to do the same volume of work as I'm doing now.
PS: there's also the "people only do email and browsing, perhaps some Word or Excel" fallacy. Nowadays phones will be enough for most of that, and people will mostly avoid doing them if it requires opening a computer. That's where we have so many budget management apps for instance.
So, computer are a lot more niche than before, and the requirement also go higher. People on computer are either power users or doing somewhat intensive things.
40 tabs open at once? That doesn't need a lot of RAM if websites were programmed to do what they actually do: Display text and images.
I don't think touch needs any special amount of RAM, would it differ for the operating system than a mouse?
Photoshop and Lightroom <- These I think fall into the category of special use cases for professionals, which absolutely need more RAM than a home user. For somebody who only occasionally wants or needs to do a bit of advanced photo editing, it's okay to wait a bit longer for operations.
> I still have 10~20 years old machines around and boot them occasionally, there's just no way I'd get back to them full time and try to do the same volume of work as I'm doing now.
Are you sure about that? If you actually sat down to only work, without having YouTube videos open or other things going on in the background? If you close your Amazon Black Friday tab you already liberate 500 megabytes of RAM.
> PS: there's also the "people only do email and browsing, perhaps some Word or Excel" fallacy.
No, in this case it is you who didn't understand or didn't want to understand. Nowhere did I say only. But the things I listed are what normal people do mostly. And nobody would want to type a long report or do spreadsheets on their phone.
> So, computer are a lot more niche than before, and the requirement also go higher. People on computer are either power users or doing somewhat intensive things.
Not at all. Most computers are used by office workers at their job, and I'd bet that most home computers are also used for non-intensive purposes. But I think you're right in what direction things are moving.
Technology should be allowed to evolve as needed. Smartphones were also supposed to be phones, and I'm sure I'm not the only to basically ignore the phone app unless forced to.
I'm totally fine with progressive web apps for instance, or how Figma is pushing the boundaries to bypass the whole native Store requirements.
> Lightroom
Photography is a mildly popular hobby. Even as phones are king, around 10 million dedicated cameras were sold last year [0], so having Lightroom as a home user isn't as exotic as you make it sound like.
The issue is not really the wait time, it's the instability and crashes, which are aliviated by less back and forth between the disc and the RAM. It's totally Adobe's fault, but I also think it wasn't a simple problem to begin with.
> only work, without having YouTube videos
I need YouTube and I suspect many do. Currently all of last year's WWDC sessions are on Youtube, as do most video tutorials, business presentations etc. Also work BGMs, podcasts, live streams etc. are resources people also use to keep focus or stay awake through their working day.
People used to listen to their own sound on dedicated devices, IMHO it mostly moved to their computers, especially as bluetooth gives more flexibility to move around.
> office workers at their job
I'd wager most of these workers job involves more than what you're giving them credit for. I've followed CS agents dealing with user requests for instance, one of the lowest job level in our org, and that involved a lot of multitasking, juggling with the ticketing system, and keeping stuff at hand. In particular the agent I was shadowing had a discord call going on about a third of the time, with me in a Meet session. Sure, 20 years ago we would have done it a different way. But nowadays that's just how they're doing it.
Traditional data entry jobs might be different, but how many of them still exist as of now ?
[0] https://www.dpreview.com/articles/2386206926/cipa-data-2025-...
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.
Altman made things I could buy at a reasonable price unaffordable.
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.
that could've been crummy for someone; you should warn that your cute little complaint actually eats ram; half is clearly fiction but the OOM isn't.
Do you also click on the links of the Nigerian princes?
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.
also, spare LLM credits from donations for use by community groups