I can't shake the feeling that the RAM shortage was intentionally created to serve as a sort of artificial moat by slowing or outright preventing the adoption of open weight models. Altman is playing with hundreds of billions of other people's dollars, trying to protect (in his mind) a multi-trillion dollar company. If he could spend a few billion to shut down access to the hardware people need to run competitor's products, why wouldn't he?

It's very difficult to "intentionally create" a real shortage. You can hoard as much as you want, but people will expect you to dump it all right back onto the market unless you really have a genuine higher-value use for the stuff you hoarded (And then you didn't intentionally create anything, you just bought something you needed!).

Plus producers will now feel free to expand production and dump even more onto the market. This is great if you needed that amount of supply, but it's terrible if you were just trying to deprive others.

Hard drives and GPUs seem to be facing the same fate.