All I can say is,

- the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU.

- I'm really REALLY glad i decided to buy brand new gaming laptops for my wife and I just a couple months ago, after not having upgraded our gaming laptops for 7 and 9 years respectively. It seems like gamers are going to have this the worst - GPUs have been f'd for a long time due to crypto and AI, and now even DRAM isn't safe. Plus SSD prices are going up too. And unlike many other DRAM users where it's a business thing and they can to some degree just hike prices to cover - gamers are obviously not running businesses. It's just making the hobby more expensive.

It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them.

There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping.

The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all because there's a few CEOs who were REALLY worked up about it and there was a decision that workers had it too easy. Watching the executive class sacrifice profits for power is pretty fascinating.

Edit: A good way to decentralize the power and have better decision making would be to have less centralized rewards in the capital markets. Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed. Most market economics assumes that there's somewhat equal decision making power amongst the econs. We are quickly trending away from that.

This happens when you get worse and worse inequality when it comes to buying power. The most accurate prediction into how this all plays out I think is what Gary Stevenson calls "The Squeeze Out" -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUKaB4P5Qns

Currently we are still at the stage of extraction from the upper/middle class retail investors and pension funds being sucked up by all the major tech companies that are only focused on their stock price. They have no incentive to compete, because if they do, it will ruin the game for everyone. This gets worse, and the theory (and somewhat historically) says it can lead to war.

Agree with the analysis or not, I personally think it is quite compelling to what is happening with AI, worth a watch.

It’s maybe new to you (you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000!), but this kind of market failure has been going on since at least the south sea bubble and tulip mania, if not all the way back to Roman times.

This is part of how free markets self correct, misallocate resources and you run out of resources.

You can blame irrational exuberance, bubbles, or whatnot markets are ultimately individual choices times economic power. Ai, Crypto, housing, Dotcom etc going back through history all had excess because it’s not obvious when to join and when to stop.

> the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns.

This resonates deeply, especially to someone born in the USSR.

I disagree.

We have been living on the investment of previous centuries and decades in the West for close to 40 years now. Everything is broken but that didn't matter because everything that needed a functioning physical economy had moved to the East.

AI is the first industrial breakthrough in a century that needs the sort of infrastructure that previous industrial revolutions needed: namely a ton of raw power.

The bubble is laying bare just how terrible infrastructure is and how we've ignored trillions of maintenance to give a few thousand people tax breaks they don't really need.

It's not exactly a new type of failure. It's roughly equivalent to Riccardian rent, or pecuniary externalities for the general term. Though I suppose this is a speculative variant, which could be worse somehow.

I wonder, is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? Even a planned economy could succumb to hype - promises that improved societal efficiency are just around the corner.

They're treating it as a "winner takes it all"-kind of business. And I'm not sure this is a reasonable bet.

The only way the massive planned investments make sense is if you think the winner can grab a very large piece of a huge pie. I've no idea how large the pie will be in the near future, but I'm even more skeptical that there will be a single winner.

why do you think allocating hardware to gamers is proper usage?

maybe AI cures cancer, or at least writes some code

Games eventually will move to consoles and the whole PC industry will take a huge hit.

Markets are voting machines in the short term and weighing machines in the long term. We’re in the short term popularity phase of AI at the moment. The weighing will come along eventually.

> … showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns.

Technically speaking, this is not a market failure. [1] Why? Per the comment above, it is the individuals that are acting irrationally, right? The market is acting correctly according to its design and inputs. The market’s price adjustment is rational in response. The response is not necessarily fair to all people, but traditional styles of neoclassical economic analysis deaccentuate common notions of fairness or equality; the main goal is economic efficiency.

I prefer to ask the question: to what degree is some particular market design serving the best interest of its stakeholders and society? In democracies, we have some degree of choice over what we want!

I say all of this as a person who views markets as mechanisms not moral foundations. This distinction is made clear when studying political economic (economics for policy analysis) though I think it sometimes gets overlooked in other settings.

If one wants to explore coordination mechanisms that can handle highly irrational demand spikes, you have to think hard. To some degree, one would have to give up a key aspect of most market systems — the notion of one price set by the idea of “willingness to pay”.

[1] Market failure is a technical term within economics meaning the mechanism itself malfunctions relative to its own efficiency criteria.

> resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns

That's basically what the rich usually do. They command disproportionate amount of resources and misallocate them freely on a whim, outside of any democratic scrutiny, squeezing incredible number of people and small buisness out of something.

Whether that's a strength of the system or the weakness, I'm sure some rearch will show.

> the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns.

As someone who advocates that we only use capitalism as a tool in specific areas and try to move past it in other, I’ll defend it here to say that’s not really a market anymore when this happens.

Hyper concentration of wealth is going to lead to the same issues that command economies have where the low level capital allocations(buying shit) isn’t getting feedback from everyone involved and is just going off one asshole’s opinion

Going to be awesome tho when OpenAI et al fail because the market is going to be flooded with cheap parts.

> where resources can be massively misallocated

It's a little ironic but to call this a market failure due to resource misalocation because prices are high when high prices is how misalocation is avoided.

I'm a little suspicious that "misalocation" just means it's too expensive for you. That's a feature, not a bug.

how is that market failure??? this is literally market of supply and demand at its core

New type? Lol.

It’s a classic ‘tulip bubble’.

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