Oh when will China start making HDDs and SSDs and GPUs and CPUs
PLEASE China PLEASE flood the market with cheap, top shelf computer parts that will force Western corporations to lower their prices or go bankrupt when they don’t
I had an ExcelStor hard drive in the past and it was the most reliable drive I’ve ever had. I normally replace them when they died but that one never did, I just ended up retiring it when its capacity was no longer worth the electric cost to keep it running.
They do make hardware in most of those categories, actually, but they don’t sell much of it direct to consumer in the West. And unfortunately, the way things are going, they’re going to be able to get better prices for it from the AI-entranced idiots too.
They‘ll just make it with secret phone-home spying and backdoors.
It seems to be that you’re mistaken, the NSA and Snowden aren’t Chinese, they’re from the USA
Sooo, same as right now, but with way less possibility to be used against me? Sign me up!
For now, once China becomes the dominant power, they will certainly abuse it as much as the USA do.
Like they haven’t already done that in Asia?
Even if that happens (which is not an inevitability, since China historically has been doing things quite differently from the US), it is no worse than status quo. Until then, unless you are an active threat to China, and are planning on visiting it, you don’t have to worry about it.
Two wrongs make a right?
Also it is a bit easier to de-spyware chinese devices.
Well if the choice is between cheap spying hardware and expensive spying hardware…
Who is still using HDD these days?
HDD is still good for backups.
My 20TB zfs mirrored NAS. I’m not buying 40TB of ssds in this economy.
Such a naive take
It’s not a “take”, it’s a question
How much for 100TB of drives $1500
How much for 100TB of NVME $10,000
Yes I still use hard drives in my threadripper servers and NAS.
I do, I didn’t really need to spend 3-4x the money for my server storage and regular HDDs are fast enough for media streaming. 6x18tb would’ve been unnecessarily expensive as SSDs
HDDs are great for self-hosted apps. I own a NAS with three WD 16TB HHDs amd 2M. 2 SSDs.
Anyone who needs mass storage, that doesn’t need it at high speed, and don’t want to pay like $100/TB for it. Most HDDs are like $20/TB, give or take.
Sounds convenient after not long ago they cut production on the back of slowing demand.
“AI” more like thinly veiled business cartel on the back of low to no chances of law enforcement and regulation.
Fuck AI
HDD prices have been creeping up for a while now. I noticed this as I was looking to add more storage to my server, checked prices late last year, figured I’d hold off a bit longer, checked again a few weeks ago and they were much higher across the board. Also a lot less stock for higher capacities. Took the plunge, bought enough storage to get me through the next few years.
Glad I did as the drives I bought have continued going up in price. This article just confirms it for me.
Do your part to make ai unviable by salting their ai algos. Feed them false info & make junk ai requests.
The sooner this bubble pops, the better.
Remember: the tools they give you for free today will make the chains they use on you tomorrow.
I’m not sure feeding more misinformation to our systems and society is that good of an idea. I don’t think it’d be an effective influencing strategy either.
In the short-term, it isn’t. Long-term, I think it’s much better
It will force AI companies to find ways to combat bad data and intentional poisoning efforts. I’d much rather anti-AI activists be the ones abusing AI than for it to be a Russian, Chinese, or American APT
The second effect is that it would make more people aware of how often AI is wrong. Way too many people blindly accept AI results
Also, you can always poison AI to fit your own world view. Teach it that the Epstein files should be thoroughly investigated, with perpetrators prosecuted, or something
These psychopaths are absolutely giddy about taking all our jobs away.
While simultaneously acting like a bunch of whiny little crybabies about falling birth rates.
Spiralling
I’m getting distinct “fire sale” vibes from all of this.
Oh my god we’re having a FIRE sale
Haven’t seen anyone else ask this question, so I will. What on earth does an AI data center need all of this storage for?
The only significant use of AI is for text generation to my knowledge. Video gen is the only thing that takes up any significant space, and current models can only produce short video clips before they go off the rails. Also, very few people are interested in video gen. It’s an expensive toy without much real world utility. Is there something I’m missing? Are these AI companies planning to scrape every video off the net and store them independently for training?
Booking out this much HDD capacity would only make sense to me if 5 TikTok or YouTube competitors all came onto the scene at once. Not AI. AI needs fast, parallelized compute and high performance memory to hold the models it’s running. Text slop requires negligible storage.
It may be a little tinfoil hat like, but you cannot convince me that these companies are shoving AI in literally everything, buying all the hardware in existence, and building data centets on land that no one wants them at, just to “make a better ai for the consumer.” I believe this is an attempt at hardcore tracking and surveillence.
I think it’s a combination of that and the worry that there will be one winning ubercorp that practically merges with the US Government.
I mean, they are all pushing all their chips in at the same time. It’s like they know it’s now or never.
And govs are pushing it because it’s yet another arms race.
The logical course of action is to collectively just not do AI. But you can’t prevent your adversaries from doing such, so it ends up being like some sort of prisoner’s dilemma.
I mean, they are all pushing all their chips in at the same time. It’s like they know it’s now or never.
Even if they didn’t, they probably don’t want to seem like they’re falling behind, so once one person goes all in, so do the others.
They want to log ALL user data in the world. Every convo you ever had with the ai, in text or audio, images video, etc.
Thr most refined usage, and money dumped sector of Ai by far is image recognition. Its where all thr money from Amazon and others has been dumped (Flock Surveillance, Amazon Ring, FedEx Trucks, Wal~Mart and your choice of store)
Surveillance, ALPR, Facial recognition, gait recognition, etc. It takes a massive amount of data
Go see how much space you need if you want to secure data from 10,000 cameras at 480p/720p/1080p for a few weeks, let alone a year or two
Gotcha, wasn’t thinking about surveillance. We are the social credit system – China ain’t got shit on our authoritarian future.
Caching. I’m guessing they download the internet to large storage arrays and then run neural network learning on them. Its probable they download all videos too and transcribe them later. So its not so much used for hosting content, but for teaching models.
The AI bubble is starting to pop. All of these companies have made hardware and data center investments far beyond what is needed or can be sustained. The debt is piling up and they are scrambling to justify the immense build out. Musk allowing porn and CSAM on Grock for paid users , Chat GPT pushing commercials, Microslop putting copilot in everything and forcing adoption. Oracles server utilization remains low, Etc. etc.
They now need to show immense growth and adoption in order to keep getting loans or justify burning cash to their shareholders.
Chat GPT and Oracle will be the first to fall, then xAI etc. Google and Microslop have other revenue sources that can weather the storm. But they won’t continue their massive investments.
I’m pretty sure the massive buildout is for training new models not for compute power for end users. Their justification is they need more compute to get the superhuman level intelligence AIs that they have been claiming. So if that pans out their probably gonna be fine, but seems unlikely that’ll pan out how they want it to
It’s the grift that keeps on grifting. How long can it keep going
Broadly speaking, yes, and it’ll keep going until they run out of money. However, I think there is a very small chance that one of the companies is able to make a breakthrough probably with a different kind of architecture than our current LLMs that does get us to models that make genuine discoveries and breakthroughs.
Very unlikely though.
At which point the government will step in because they will have become too big to fail
Partially correct. They’ll step in because they signed contracts and have moved AI under the umbrella of National Security. Brockman donated $25m back in September. Trump signed Project Genesis in November. So all these hardware companies feel pretty good because it’ll be backed by taxpayers.
This is the plan. They want us to rent virtual machines from them. No buy, only rent. You will own nothing, think of the shareholders and be happy, no….proud, you are here for their benefit.
That argument always befuddled me. There will be a saturation point of AI data centers when there’s enough equipment already installed and ready to use by these over bloated behemoth corporations. Once that’s over or when the market hopefully pops, the demand for memory should have a steep decline. With their cash cow tapped out, WD and all the other memory manufacturers would then have to go back to consumers they previously fucked over to sell their new production stock. I doubt it’ll be at the prices we saw a year ago but once enough memory hits the consumer market for a while, prices should start to dip back down.
Regardless of whether the bubble bursts, the massive amount of compute in these data centers won’t go away. It will be up for rent when this AI training falls out of fashion.
Why would a chip maker try to predict the market when they can make contracts for years worth of production?
If the manufacturers never go back to producing the useful consumer hardware, we would be forced to rent this data center compute.
Smells like cloud gaming.
OnlyPhones is the future they want. Walled gardens and highly addictive apps and subscriptions and micro transactions (aka gambling). Freedom and real compute power will be locked away in their servers. And the top of the line phones are already expensive enough that pretty much everyone that has one is on a payment plan for it
I have the HDDs, but I can’t get a nas at a decent price at all. These fucking billionaires have to go or they will happily end us all before taking their claws out
Find some random used office PC and strap the drives inside. Install treunas and let it ride.
Yeah, I just ordered some cheap stuff from Ali Express to build one out instead, 150 instead of like 500. I figured I’d rather have new old parts than used old parts, even if the specs are lower, I guess we’ll see how it pans out, at least it’ll probably have a better uptime than my old hobbling pc.
Thanks for the heads up on truenas though, wasn’t sure what I’d need to use, cheers for that!
Are all these companies going to go bankrupt when the AI bubble pops and their products flood the market?
Issue is that the production is for server gear not consumer. So it’s U2 and other connectors rather than SATA.
Same goes for RAM it’s ECC and won’t work in normal consumer PCs (AMD has like unofficial support)
Oddly enough ECC used to be quite common for consumer hardware…I had an old Mac desktop in the late 90s/early 00s with ECC memory. But at some point it was decided that consumers don’t want to pay the extra $ for error-free RAM and mobos largely dropped support.
I guess I’ll have to buy one of those racks when the bubble pops. Just add an LED strip on the outside and a gaming GPU on the inside. Surely they support PCIe?
So that’s why consumer drives and ram are not affected by the price rise! /s
They’re saying that even when it bursts and there’s all these components laying around, they’ll still be useless for consumers.
Eh, the market will adapt.
I’ve been looking at components on AliExpress. Even now, there’s lots of X99-based motherboards with LGA2011-3 sockets that can take both regular DDR4 (with some limitations) and ECC DDR4.
But the descriptions are quite hard to understand, and they are apparently quite picky about which RAM will work with them.I could get a combo of one of those motherboards with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2680 V4 CPUs (2.4GHz, 3.3GHz turbo, 28 cores, 56 threads in total) (hey, a dual CPU motherboard) for €120. And it’s got 8 RAM slots. So 32GB just with cheap 4GB sticks.
Unbuffered ECC DIMMs can be used as-is even on PCs not supporting ECC
Registered DIMMs can be unsoldered and the RAM chips reused in a pinch converting them to unbuffered DIMMs I suppose?
But reports of manufacturing capacity being moved to HBM will not benefit consumers if the bubble bursts.
They’d only go bankrupt if they were spending the capital to increase capacity and were left holding the bag. And nobody’s interested in doing that.
We might dine well on used datacenter hard drives in the coming years.
