| ▲ | digdigdag 4 hours ago |
| > Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here. Which governments, and what exactly would you want these governments to do? The demand is global. There are no levers a single government can pull to meaningfully influence the global demand without fully committing to an protectionist economic policy, in which case the U.S. doesn't have the facilities to magically pop up world class fabs overnight, and South Korea and Taiwan don't have the market demand that the U.S. generates to justify their investments in making these chips and China lacks the IP to be able to build anything comparable to Nvidia's silicon at the moment. No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers. |
|
| ▲ | carlm42 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Governments have sued DRAM companies for price fixing and forming cartels before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing. They can absolutely step in and if there are evidence of price fixing or anti-competitive behaviours, can impose fines. The choice of whether to do that though is political. |
| |
| ▲ | daedrdev 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Several of these companies almost went under before the AI boom. There isn’t a cartel. | |
| ▲ | lovich 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is there any allegations of price fixing in this case? The demand just skyrocketed. Other than legislation like the defense act in the US I don’t know of any governments that have jurisdiction over these ram makers that mandate companies produce more of a product. Especially not for consumer goods. | | |
| ▲ | wmf 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | If they're charging one customer $X and another customer $5X for the same chips... there's got to be some law about this. | | |
| ▲ | srdjanr an hour ago | parent [-] | | I missed that this is happening, is it really? I thought it's 5X for everyone | | |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | CamperBob2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers. I'm as fanatical a free-market fundamentalist as you'll ever meet, but if someone were to argue that government has a role in preventing bullshit like OpenAI's unilateral 40% attack on the entire DRAM market, backed by nothing but funny money, I would have a hard time coming up with defensible counterarguments. |
| |
| ▲ | bunderbunder 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don’t really know much about how this stuff works, but I have a feeling we wouldn’t even have to do anything punitive. We might just need to find and close whatever weird loophole allows the folks who are participating in this gold rush to feel confident enough that they’ve externalized their risks to be willing to engage in speculative data center buildout projects on such a grand scale in the first place. | |
| ▲ | rangestransform 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Apple used to do the same thing with TSMC’s newer process nodes, and nobody really complained because people were getting superior products. I happen to like US antitrust enforcement that considers consumer benefit primarily. | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Your attempts to insult what they are doing doesn't show they did anything wrong, but it does impeach the validity of your own argument. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hit dog hollers, sounds like. | | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's abuser logic. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The funny thing is, we're mostly in violent agreement, going by your other comments. This is a weird point to disagree on... so weird, in fact, that it's easy to believe you are associated with OpenAI. Hence my follow-up comment. What Altman did, and the way he did it, was not OK. Unless you believe that humanity's adoption of AI-based intellectual work is best served by concentrating an enormous amount of power in one company at the expense of everyone else, turning the market into a literal zero-sum game. Do you? |
|
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | newsclues 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| How much memory does it take for the consumer market not to be totally screwed? Can that share of production be allocated to consumers, and the AI fights over the rest? |
