The RAM shortage could last years

Designing a part with a wide bus and putting the traces down on the board is what I would expect to be the easy part these days (surely).

But yield, yield comes for us all.

I wonder whether this is some kind of a racket.

Even a RTX 5080 has a lower memory throughput than a Radeon VII from 2019, 7 years ago, while being much more expensive.

The memory throughput of GPUs per dollar has regressed greatly during the last 5 years, despite the fact that the widths of the GPU memory interfaces have been reduced, in order to decrease the production costs.

RTX 5080 has a 256-bit memory interface, while the much cheaper Radeon VII had an 1024-bit memory interface. RTX 5080 has almost 4-times faster memories than Radeon VII, but it has not used this to increase the memory throughput, but only to reduce the production costs, while simultaneously increasing the product price.

AMD Hawaii GPUs still had 1:2 FP64:FP32, while the consumer variant of Radeon VII dropped to 1:4. The following AMD consumer GPUs dropped the FP64 performance to levels that are not competitive with CPUs.

Nowadays the only consumer GPUs with decent FP64 performance are the Intel Battlemage GPUs, which have a 1:8 performance ratio, which provides very good performance per dollar.

Reason number 7,322 why US-style ultracapitalism is self-destructive, anti-social, and dystopian.

Had we done more 10 years ago we would have been better of. The second best time to start is now.

The problem in the EU is not renewables, it's the same problem that Democratic states in the US face. Regulations and permitting hurdles that block private renewable energy developers.

If they had actually been communicating or colluding with each other, they would have put the screws to him, making it harder for OpenAI to assert control over the vast majority of the DRAM market.

Failing that, you'd like to think a regulatory agency somewhere would step in to keep a single player from hosing everybody else, but...

If anything, it shows it's possible for you to arbitrage this and in doing so help "smooth out the cycle."

At least with capitalism you have many different people with different perspectives on the risk making independent bets. That mitigates the more extreme negative outcomes.

Because that does not happen exactly as you say for all players. The demand signals will be processed and long-term risk is balanced against short-term gain in a distributed fashion, so not everyone will do the same.

It's more optimal than planned economies until we have AI planned economies with realtime feedback, I guess.

Consumers get cheap goods during oversupply and most inefficient companies get elliminated during bust while consolidation leads to economies of scale.

It is unlike a socialist system in that there are signals to read in the first place. What, do socialists claim that failure is optimal when you can't even tell if you've failed?

That's not what capitalists claim. Capitalists claim communism is responsible for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of death due to famine. And overall miserable ways of life, as if humans were termites deprived of any individualism and any freedom.

Capitalists claim that France importing 500 000 people from the third world each year, out of which only 10% are ever going to work (and these are official numbers) and yet offering them all a safety net is unsustainable. And that that socialism is only going to lead to one thing: running out of taxpayers' money.

Capitalists don't claim they have the best system: what they claim is that they haven't seen a less worse one.

> Capitalists claim that this is optimal.

Compared to starving under communism coz someone at top got the number wrong, yes. And it only really happens when there are massive, unpredictable market movements and governments not doing their job. Govt should look at the whole thing and just say "no", blame them.

No market system self regulates well enough, and it's government job to file down the edge cases like this. But the revolution happened in country which has two utterly incompetent parties, both in pockets of billionaires, fighting for power, and the clowns from one that won last battle use AI to smokescreen the economic growth their actions cratered

Do recent actions of Open AI give you the impression of a company that believes it is about to attain AGI imminently?

We've been projecting both FTL and AGI as future possibilities for almost 100 years now. Do LLMs get us a lot closer to AGI? I think they get us a little closer and Moore's "law" making compute faster probably is a much bigger factor, but I think we're still a very very long ways away.

I am not sure if OpenAI has that. Their edge regarding models is small, their strategy currently seems to be "buy ALL the hardware so nobody else can". Users can quite easily switch to other models.

China has memory makers who are creeping up through the stages of production maturity, and once they hit then there's no going back.

If the existing makers can't meet supply such that Chinese exports get their foot in the door, they may find they never get ahead again due to volume - that domestic market is huge so they have scale, and the gaming market isn't going to care because they get anything at the moment, which is all you'll need for enterprise to say "are we really afraid of memory in this business?"

Oh noes! Think of a poor memory makers!

The amount of money flowing both from the AI bubble and from quite literally scalping both the server and consumer market... They gambled on the opportunity and if they fail - it's their problem.

If I booked half a hotel's rooms then suddenly said "yeah never mind. Half my friends cancelled and we're not staying", basically any hotel would be coming at me for my money because there's no way they can fill their rooms now and they're losing revenue. But OpenAI can really get the whole world to pivot towards it then say "cool but we don't need your product anymore" and RAM makers are just going to let it go.

Whoever decided that was a good idea needs to be fired and publicly shamed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act

Recently they had a second price fixing lawsuit thrown out (in the US).

Now with the state of things I'm sure another lawsuit will arrive and be thrown out because the government will do anything to keep the AI bubble rolling and a price fixing suit will be a threat to national security, somehow. Obviously thats speculative and opinion but to be clear, people are allowing it. There are and more so were things that could be done.

it was clinton who delivered the democrats to wall street and vice versa

The thing that enables this is pretty obvious. The population is divided into two camps, the first of which holds the heuristic that regulations are "communism and totalitarianism" and this camp is used to prevent e.g. antitrust rules/enforcement. The second camp holds the heuristic that companies need to be aggressively "regulated" and this camp is used to create/sustain rules making it harder to enter the market.

The problem is that ordinary people don't have the resources to dive into the details of any given proposal but the companies do. So what we need is a simple heuristic for ordinary people to distinguish them: Make the majority of "regulations" apply only to companies with more than 20% market share. No one is allowed to dump industrial waste in the river but only dominant companies have bureaucratic reporting requirements etc. Allow private lawsuits against dominant companies for certain offenses but only government-initiated prosecutions against smaller ones, the latter preventing incumbents from miring new challengers in litigation and requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

This even makes logical sense, because most of the rules are attempts to mitigate an uncompetitive market, so applying them to new entrants or markets with >5 competitors is more likely to be deleterious, i.e. drive further consolidation. Whereas if the market is already consolidated then the thicket of rules constrains the incumbents from abusing their dominance in the uncompetitive market while encouraging new entrants who are below the threshold.

Just look at Cuba, which could be a very rich country and one of the prime tourist destinations of the world.

Given the current tech, I also doubt there will be practical uses and I hope we’ll see the opposite of what I wrote. But given the current industry, I fully trust them so somehow fill their hardware.

Market history shows us than when the cost of something goes down, we do more with the same amount, not the same thing with less. But I deeply hope to be wrong here and the memory market will relax.

The advanced workflows such as programming are not the only use cases for LLMs. There are much simpler work such as answering simple questions or arrange simple tasks. Both will improve productivity. And more advanced model should improve productivity even more.

The recent enterprise revenue numbers of Anthropic

1. As a consultant pretty much every company I have worked with in the last 2 years are doing some kind of in-house "AI Revolution", I'm talking making "AI Taskforce" teams, having weekly internal "AI meetings" and pushing AI everywhere and to everyone. Small companies, SMEs and huge companies. From my observation it is mainly due to C-level being obsessed by the idea that AI will replace/uplift people and revenue will grow by either replacing people or launching features 10x quicker.

2. Did you see software job-boards recently? 9/10 (real) job listings are to do with AI. Either it is fully AI company (99% thin wrapper over Anthropic/OpenAI APIs) or some other SME that needs some AI implementations done. It is truly a breath of fresh air to work for companies that have nothing to do with AI.

The biggest laugh/cry for me are those thin wrappers that go down overnight - think all the "create your website" companies that are now completely useless since Ahtropic cut the middleman and created their own version of exactly that.

Batching inferences doesn't necessarily help that much since as models get sparser the individual inferences are going to share fewer experts. It does always help wrt. shared routing layers, of course.

Anyways, I'm both cases you don't really have to write it twice.

Native to the OS: write only the UI twice, but implement the Core in Rust.

Native to the machine: Write it only once, e.g. in iced, and compile it for every Plattform.

It's bad enough having to run one boated browser, now we have to run multiples?

This is not the right path.

About the only thing they share is curly braces.

This comment makes no sense.

and if not?

Hardware pricing and availabilty pre-COVID was pretty predictable and stable, which meant the consumer could extract a meaningful cost advantage if they were willing to do the relatively modest amount of work of sourcing components individually and personally assembling the build. Right now, though, some places like Microcenter appear to have a cost advantage that fundamentally relies on market and pricing instability and can only be achieved through deeper integration with the supply chain and bulk purchasing in advance -- something a retailer like Microcenter can do, but I personally cannot.

If I look at the Activity Manager in macOS, of apps that are less trashy but currently taking up a lot of memory, they mostly aren't apps that I'm willing/able to move away from to save on resource use: Firefox, Safari, 1Password. (For browsers, you can blame poorly optimized websites for a lot of it, but I just don't see anyone rushing to create lightweight clones of websites in order to save users' RAM.)

The risk with China taking over Taiwan is that they mostly expedite their own production research by a couple of years.

Can you please elaborate what you mean by "critical market"?

Edit: formatting