|
| ▲ | riskable 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Perhaps we can call this type of maneuver, "The Sam Altman": Your expensive business's mid-term outlook not looking so good? Why not use all that cash/credit to corner the market in some commodity in order to cripple your perceived competition? |
| |
| ▲ | mschuster91 2 days ago | parent [-] | | He's not the first one though. The crypto miners used to do the same (I distinctly 'member first GPUs, then HDDs, then ordinary RAM being squoze by yet another new shitcoin in less than a year), and Uber plus the food delivery apps are a masterclass in how to destroy competition with seemingly infinite cash. | | |
| ▲ | kasabali 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Crypto miners isn't comparable at all. They were buying finished products and immediately putting them into use. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | chairmansteve 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| These gambits never work though. In 6 months you'll be able to get memory chips and GPUs for nothing..... There's a few historical examples here.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market |
| |
| ▲ | mschuster91 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > In 6 months you'll be able to get memory chips and GPUs for nothing. I highly doubt that. Memory chip production takes years to scale up, which is partially a reason why the memory market (both RAM and solid-storage) is so susceptible to "pig cycles" - high prices incentivize new players to join the market (although less likely than decades ago, given just how much capital one needs and how complex the technology has gotten) and for established players to scale up their production, and then prices collapse due to oversupply. For GPUs, the situation is even worse. During the GPU crypto mining craze, at least that was consumer GPUs so there indeed was an influx of cheap second hand gear once that market collapsed due to ASICs - but this time? These chips don't even have the hardware for rendering videos any more, so even if GPU OEMs would now get a ton of left over GPU chips they couldn't make general-purpose GPUs out of them any more. Additionally, this assumption assumes that the large web of AI actors collapses in the next 6 months, which is even more unlikely - there's just too much actual cash floating around in the market. | | |
| ▲ | Y_Y 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You can play Counterstrike on a H100 if you really want to. | | |
| |
| ▲ | Y_Y 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | !RemindMe six months Of course I'm joking, there are LLMs to check these things now. |
|
|
| ▲ | dismalaf 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is a huge Hail Mary... IMO they'd be better served slowing down the training pipeline, becoming profitable now, hiring a bunch of scientists and figuring out the next AI technology. |
| |
|
| ▲ | zb3 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Was this market manipulation legal? If so, that's crazy.. |
| |
| ▲ | mschuster91 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Oh, both Uber and AirBnB did get dinged by the courts - but it took them years and the damage was already done, on top of that the fines were laughable. We need the corporate death penalty aka forced dissolution for egregious cases of misbehavior, we need easier ways to pierce the corporate veil (and I'm more and more inclined to actually support the death penalty here as well, despite the potential for abuse), we need corporate fines to all be measured % of gross income, at least double the profit margin. And we need all of that fast. |
|
