Did we live through the same pandemic? At least where I live, there was shortages for weeks, and scarce for months.

There was a real manufacturing shift that had to happen in the transition from commercial toilet paper to residential, which is made by totally different machines. The problem was real. It’s just that someone, seeing that real problem, triggered a panic buy that resulted in cleared shelves and a misallocation of the actual supply, making everything worse for everyone.

In the present case, OpenAI just took 40% of the world’s supply off the market. That is massive, and will have implications for RAM availability for many industries. As a result, every other company immediately bought up as much supply as they could.

Cars during Covid is probably the closer comparison, actually. A combined supply-drop followed by demand-shock resulting in skyrocketing prices and empty inventory.

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asa400 2 days ago | parent [-]

How much RAM should they be allowed to buy? Who should decide that?

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redserk 2 days ago | parent [-]

Perhaps a quantity below "a single company causes enough of a spike in global demand that it'll have demonstrable impact in nearly every single industry"

And usually trade regulators would be the entity to start being concerned.

I assume you're on a quest to assert a "let a completely unregulated free market roar" position, but do recognize that global supply issues of critical components have negative market effects, especially when it'll have some impact on nearly every industry except perhaps lawn care.

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asa400 2 days ago | parent [-]

> I assume you're on a quest to assert a "let a completely unregulated free market roar" position

No. I’m genuinely curious, because I agree with you about how critical these components are. I ask because it doesn’t seem to me like the answers are immediately straightforward and wanted to hear serious replies to those questions.

	▲	adastra22 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		How much is too much? It’s like porn: you know it when you see it. Basically one company (or a cabal of companies) shouldn’t be allowed to exert enough market-moving pressure on inventories as to disrupt other industries depending on this supply. Sam Altman masterfully negotiated a guaranteed supply of chips for OpenAI, and there is nothing wrong with that, by itself. But there are now a dozen other industries getting rekked as collateral damage, and that shouldn’t be something one man or one company can do.