The price reversal is caused by the unbridled demand for HBM.
    • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

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

  • late_pessimistic@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

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

  • DupaCycki@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    There are only a handful of things billionaires hate more than dropping prices of anything.

  • DannyMac@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    2 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…

  • Vespair@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    3 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.

  • DisgruntledPelican@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 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
      0·
      1 day 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.

  • JcbAzPx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

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

    • Nautalax@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 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
          0·
          3 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.

          • alphabethunter@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 days ago

            There’s already investigations and evidence that they are indeed price fixing, just check the Gamer’s Nexus video on it.

            • Nautalax@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              2 days ago

              I just saw some of the video. Refers to a class action lawsuit and quotes from it heavily. The class action seems to not be alleging price fixing per se (meeting in a smoky room and determining price) but rather than they are colluding to all cut DRAM supply and profit from the price spiking since the demand is unchanged. Even to the point of forgoing profits.

              It doesn’t seem all that convincing though so I don’t think it will go anywhere. Something similar was tried a couple years back that was shot down by the courts. It’s not illegal for competitors in the market to behave similarly if they consider it in their rational interest to do so, it’s only illegal if they are cutting a secret deal for it so you have to have some good quality “plus factors” to convince the courts that some shady deal is going on. If there are reasonable alternatives to explain the behavior other than collusion then your case is kind of cooked.

              It’s easier if they have slack production that’s being left idle to point to (which still didn’t work earlier) but now they’re all trying to churn out as much HBM as possible for insatiable data center demand and are building new fabrication plants. The video said as one example that they have better margins on DRAM than HBM but while that may be true in the current state where everyone and their mom is focusing on HBM, one question that could be posed is would that remain the same if one of the major companies swapped focus? Like one of the three biggest gives up on chasing the AI money and stops making as much HBM to prioritize DRAM. That would cut the supply for the former and boost that for the latter, which would send prices up in what they just abandoned while crashing the prices into what they’re re-entering. They could secure a lot of market share in DRAM but that could be considered to be a sucker’s bet to sacrifice the foothold in HBM and enormous stacks of AI cash in exchange for cornering the market on an older technology. Also they are reaching agreements to make HBM at longer prices but for a guaranteed period of time which makes their margins on HBM weaker but also gives them confidence that they’ll be getting that smaller amount of money for sure even if we get an AI bust.

    • mushroommunk@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      Normalized here means inflation adjusted. They’re saying RAM hasn’t been this expensive in a very long time

  • DFX4509B@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    Once again, thanks Madoff Altman for buying up all the chip supply just to monopolize it. I’m never gonna let that go.

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

    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.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 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 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?

    • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      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!

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          8 hours ago

          Thank you! Ah yes that makes sense somewhat I guess. Trading cpu usage for memory usage, an old classic 😁!

          Nibble * nibble look up tables could probably be fast too, it all depends on where you want the complexity I guess.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 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·
      3 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·
        3 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
          0·
          3 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

          • SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish
            0·
            3 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
              0·
              3 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.

          • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            3 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.

    • vala@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      3 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.