> A lot of AI 'influencers' love wild speculation

You mean like Sam Altman, who repeatedly claimed AI will cure all cancers and diseases, solve the housing crisis, poverty, and democracy? I was going to add erectile disfunction as a joke, but then realised he probably believes that too.

https://youtu.be/l0K4XPu3Qhg?t=60

It’s hard to point fingers at “AI influencers”, as if they’re a fringe group, when the guy who’s the face of the whole AI movement is the one making the wild claims.

> Even in this scenario, the capital gains on the lump sump invested in AI far outpaces the money that would be spent on the salaries of these workers

The yearly salary of knowledge workers in the US are about 10 times the public OpenAI investment to date, and in the entire world about 70 times...

> a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two.

I'm really interested in what will happen to the economy/society in this case. Knowledge workers are the market for much that money is being made on.

Facebook and Google make most of their money from ads. Those ads are shown to billions of people who have money to spend on things the advertisers sell. Massive unemployment would mean these companies lose their main revenue stream.

Apple and Amazon make most of their money from selling stuff to millions of consumers and are this big because so many people now have a ton of disposable income.

Teslas entire market cap is dependent on there being a huge market for robo taxis to drive people to work.

Microsoft exists because they sell an OS that knowledge workers use to work on and tools they use within that OS to do the majority of their work with. If the future of knowledge work is just AI running on Linux communicating through API calls, that means MS is gone.

All these companies that currently drive stock markets and are a huge part of the value of the SP500 seem to be actively working against their own interests for some reason. Maybe they're all banking on being the sole supplier of the tech that will then run the world, but the moat doesn't seem to exist, so that feels like a bad bet.

But maybe I'm just too dumb to understand the world that these big players exist in and am missing some big detail.

> Even in this scenario, the capital gains on the lump sump invested in AI far outpaces the money that would be spent on the salaries of these workers, and if we look at the scenario with investor goggles, due to the exponential nature of investment gains, the gap will only grow wider.

Interesting hypothesis, do you have the math to back it up?

I really agree with your statement and people forget, but the reason third world countries are able to buy devices is because they are cheap, increase the ram price and thus every computing device and I think it will impact everyone of us but disproportionately due to power purchasing capacity and other constraints in an economy

I genuinely hope that this ram/chips crisis gets solved ASAP by any party. The implications of this might have a lot of impact too and I feel is already a big enough financial crisis itself if we think about it coupled with all the other major glaring issues.

We are now moving to a post human economy. When AGI automates all human labour, the consumer i.e. the bulk of humanity stops mattering (economically speaking). It then just becomes Mega corps run by machines making stuff for each other. Resources are then strictly priorities for the machines over everything else. We are seeing this movement already with silicon wafers and electricity.

Or the value of everything non ai drops to zero, which makes the value of ai infinite by comparison.

We are certainly seeing citizens wake up to it. There was a proposal for a new datacenter to be built near where I live which was to be voted on, and a large majority of the people voted against it. No one wants higher power and water bills.

Yes. Like theft.

It going to be misleading to look at the fraction and I think it's misleading to only look at PE investors. It's more important to look at the fraction of demand for homes that are on the market.

Investors bought 1/3 of the US homes sold in 2023. This is, I think, quite alarming, especially since a small amount of extra demand can have a large effect on prices.

Of the housing market? That seems to be what GP said, doesn’t it?

They create demand which increases price. Plus they can afford to hold their asset longer, this reducing supply.

I think one of these fab compaies have already invested/talked about investing 700 BILLION dollars (I think it was micron? but I am not sure)

I have heard that in the fab making industry, things moves in cycles and this cycle has been repeated so many times and the reason that ram is so expensive was that at one time during covid there was shortage so they built more factories and they built so so many that these companies took a hit in stocks so they then went and closed and at just the bottom of their factory production levels, the AI bubble started to pop in and need their ram's and now they are once again increasing factory levels

And after the supply due to AI gets closed with the additional compute etc., I doubt it

I think that within 2-3 or maybe 4 years of timeframe ram will get cheaper imo.

The problem is, if someone can fill the market till that time.

And they never went down to pre-crypto pricing. For quite a while, Intel was the only company producing reasonably specced GPUs at somewhat reasonable prices.

They decreased 2025 production, to increase memory prices, profits and their stock prices,https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419776

Someone, I can't remember who, explained it better than me, but the gist of it is by not voting, you are effectively checking yourself out of politician consideration.

If we see politician as just a machine who's only job is to get elected, they have to get as many votes as possible. Pandering to the individual is unrealistic, so you usually target groups of people who share some common interest. As your aim is to get as many votes as possible, you will want to target the “bigger” (in amount of potential vote) groups. Then it is a game of trying to get the bigger groups which don't have conflicting interest. While this is theory and a simplification of reality, all decent political party do absolutely look at statistics and survey to for a strategy for the election.

If you are part of a group that, even though might be big in population, doesn't vote, politician have no reason to try to pander to you. As a concrete example, in a lot of “western” country right now, a lot of politician elected are almost completely ignoring the youth. Why ? Because in those same country the youth is the age group which vote the less.

So by not voting, you are making absolutely sure that your interest won't be defended. You can argue that once elected, you have no guarantee that the politician will actually defend your interest, or even do the opposite (as an example, soybean farmer and trump in the U.S). But then you won't be satisfied and possibly not vote for the same guy / party next election (which is what a lot of swing voters do).

But yeah, in an ideal world, everyone would vote, see through communication tactics and actually study the party, program and the candidate they vote for, before voting.

I don't have a stake in forcing people to vote or not, because I generally agree that uninformed people shouldn't be pressured to make a last minute decision if they don't want to. I think everyone knows elections are at their least honest days before the vote.

But to engage with your question, not voting is the same as voting. You are forgoing your voice and giving more weight to the people that do vote. It's limited to your district, yes, but whatever the outcome, you gave the majority power to do that. So it's not surprising that people get frustrated when non-voters see themselves as "outside" of politics, especially when they complain about the state of things.

Just so we're double clear, the other voter base says this is exactly how it should be, using with different words.

All the ills of modern (American) politics stem by the blaming one side for the problems caused by both.

Just so we're clear, the voter base of over a year ago asked for this because they were actively lied to, and were foolish enough to believe said lies.

Current polling however says the current voter base is quite unhappy with how this is

Those are all temporary events and circumstances.

If the market is big enough, competitors will appear. And if the margins are high enough, competitors can always price-compete down to capture market-share.

> Crucial is dead.

Micron stopped selling to consumers to focus on the high margin enteprise market. Might change in the future.

The business that owns crucial is producing more chips than ever.

Rare earth metals are in the dirt around the world.

Supply and demand curves shifting, hence prices increasing (and decreasing) is an expected part of life due to the inability to see the future.

It's not even the economical theory. Supply should not increase to increased demand. They want more profit, and if less supplies is what accomplishes that, they will absolutely keep the supplies constant and manufacture a scarcity. This is the economical theory.

You are wrong. Memory production is being expanded in 2026 and will expand further in 2027 and 2028 as the memory suppliers catch up on fab shell capacity.

This is exactly it: supply of high margin products is increasing at the cost of low margin products. Expect the low end margin to catch up to the high end as long as manufacturing capacity is constrained (at least 1 year).

They aren't making less though.

No just stop being cynical. The reason almost every electronic item is cheaper now than 2 decades back is just becuase the demand(and thus supply) is higher.

Am not talking about LLMs this is like making an argument about DC power. I am talking about inventing intelligence which is greater even than fire.