And? Its not my debt.
If they continue investing in compute, memory, memory bandwidth, network infrastructure, etc. it makes a relevant contribution of progress in all of these fields which I will leverage.
A small form factor PC with 100gb fast memory and being able to run something like sonnet or opus level LLM would be massive.
I have so many things i want to do and still sitting it out due to cost.
Lots of people didn't invest in mortgage backed securities but still got screwed in 2008. When something is systemic, you don't have to be directly exposed to be effected when it goes sideways.
Is this in practice what's going to happen, or are (1) the prices going to hike (and never go down) for the consumer and (2) the memory companies will just continue doing what they already do because they're still selling their old shovels to the gold diggers?
I don't see how this will benefit the consumer, but I might be missing some second order effect?
I read somewhere that the memory companies were massivly pushed for lowest prices especially by companies like apple.
I want to hope that this money will lead to more capacity, more R&D and lower prices in the long term again.
Nvidia would have changed its GPU strategy a long time ago if the demand wouldn't be real. They still can afford the GPU prices. But memory is not a monopoly.
For memory though i do assume a lot more people and companies want a massive amount more memory than ever before. I have 64gb in my pc for a few years now, i was quite happy with that. It became a no brainer. But today? Hey give me 100, 300 and even more. I really want to run bigger LLM models locally.
The thing is they actually pushed the price tags of memory and disks high so we wouldn’t be able to afford it. Unless ofc you rent from them.
If hyperscalers flop, and there’s a good chance they will, memory and disk prices will crater. They are historically the most volatile asset in tech. If Samsung, Micron et al can’t sell to hyperscalers they will switch back to consumer, because they can’t just turn off a memory fab without losing billions.
only that is not so. disk prices maybe, the memory will not be available to consumers because it's a tech that makes sense only for datacenters full of GPUs and massive power/cooling. by now all fabs have converted to it, there might be a lot of HBM capacity freed but no consumer devices that can use it. retooling all fabs to produce consumer level memory will take a lot of time if they even do it at all instead of just pushing for consumers to rent datacenter capacity directly.
all three major remaining players in the mem sector have already tried in the past to collude for memory price fixing.
this is the first time I'm rooting for chinese chip tech to reach more or less parity.
That switch will actually take a few months, technically speaking. What may delay it is manufacturers strategizing to avoid oversupply and trying to minimize their loses from all the investment in tooling they cannot longer repurpose. It will be a logistical and financial nightmare for them too.
Yes that is unfortunate for sure don't get me wrong this affects me but the overall benefit will still be bigger i assume.
10 years ago i watched a talk about the problem of compute vs. memory. Compute increased significantly while memory speed did not.
This gigantic investment will solve this problem.
So either this blows and we will have way too much capacity which will lead to cheap and mass amount of memory for everyone + cheap GPUs again OR AGI. So win - win.
> And? Its not my debt.
For the moment.
There are several ways that ordinary investors and even simple pension holders could end up stuck with the downside of this.
The debt risk hidden in CDOs wasn't your debt either but if you had a pension plan, the crisis absolutely cost you money you would have earned, and in many cases pension fund values dropped by five to ten per cent within a year.
The SPV/CDO comparison being made is by no means exact, but hidden debt at this scale surprising analysts tends to cause problems. If more institutions are severely exposed than anyone thought, it is bad.
Especially since any success strategy is predicated on literally unbelievably rosy predictions.
> And? Its not my debt.
Your view seems very myopic.
AFAIK they have heavily relaxed the rules for IPO. Pension funds are practically forced to buy from the top-100 companies, and these companies risk crashing much more than the others.
SpaceX value is already lower than at launch. If this costs are externalized to the common public, this will be your debt.
All these companies are too big to fail, in an environment where you can buy pardons and laws.
Hell, a 3T$ crash will have global repercussion and probably partially crash many other countries, too.
Luckily so far only one index changed its rules to cover SpaceX and what the AI IPOs would need.
I don't know how specifically significant SpaceX being lower than at launch is, because actually most IPOs underperform the market and their own targets for the first three to five years. What is happening to it is not that unusual; its overvaluation is.
I do think there is a major risk here, and ordinary investors and pension holders will be hurt.
I am not sure any individual AI company is too big to fail, though probably one of the big two will be rescued, most likely Anthropic. I think OpenAI will fail, and it'll be stripped for parts. As will Oracle, who are overexposed to it.
Thats a Elon Musk / Space-X issue thought not a Google and co issue.
How much real impact is this really though?
If it crashes the global economy will crash and they will have to print money for a bail out which means another 30% increase to the price of everything
But minimal real impact
Is it your contention, then, that the 2008 crash had minimal real world impacts?
Exactly, this is how capitalism works. Let them shoot for the moon and let them fail. Worst case their over-valued assets are liquidated and continued on with at a more reasonable valuation. Just make sure they play by the rules and don't make new rules in the name of national security, ie boxing out open source.
Here in the US "let them fail" only happens to businesses without political pull, which I'm pretty sure these companies have.
Some dollars are more equal than others you know.
Except this is not how American capitalism works at this scale, and it’s ridiculous to think their debt isn’t your debt when you have the entire country’s history to look back on and count the numerous government bailouts.
Do you think the businessmen who sat on the dais at Trump's inauguration plan to just fail without getting him to put his small thumbs on the scales?
It has nothing to do with the administration. These companies did the same thing with the last, and they will do the same thing with the next.
You could say this but the previous administration was not talking about taking a 10% share in both companies; this one is (thanks to Sam Altman's very personal lobbying of the president)
It manifests in many different forms.