Open ai has been allowed to do dubious things that would be illegal in any sane society but alas they aren't in this world. What's different about this? They play with a different set of rules than we do.
This is the bed all you AI hypers made. Now all manner of disparate tools fall under the banner of AI, with something like this that are not LLMs or transformer type tool, they happen to get lumped with all the rest of them.
Altman and Amodei do not make a living out of that. They make a living out of being CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic. Whether they are doing well in this position is a different question, but that has little to do with their public predictions.
Nah they do, Sam does nothing but lie in an effort to keep up share price. Selling people an impossible future is the job of OpenAI CEO. If tokens were profitable it'd be selling tokens, but they aren't so the only other option is selling ridiculous predictions to investors
What? The only reason their companies make so much money is BECAUSE they make their predictions about AI replacing every job soon.
A couple months ago it seemed is was their ONLY job.
Neither company is remotely close to making a profit yet. To the extent people at those companies make money, it is unrealized capital appreciation driven by successively higher valuations during successive funding rounds.
In short, financially they are still running on hype. Quite a lot of operations are being paid out of capital, not revenues. So they have to keep selling a dream to keep raising capital. Next stop: IPO.
People who "make predictions" are like psychics. Unless those predications are uncannily good – in which case we call that person an analyst – we can assume that the person is either wilfully lying, or that they're stupid.
Ed's predictions have so far failed to come true. I don't think he's stupid (but I might be wrong). That leaves me feeling like he's the psychic who knows exactly what they're doing. They're telling a gullible audience a story they want to hear because it's a nice way to earn a living.
Comparing him to the CEOs of companies who produce incredibly useful products used by millions is facile nonsense.
750 comments but I can't believe how bad this article is. The paragraph on MAU says similarweb is untrustworthy but then cites "most estimates"...which? Sorry, I can't read this without thinking you're biased against Ed Zitron.
The best part is the spreadsheet, which makes him sound like he's just sloppy, but danluu specifically says he's being deliberately misleading elsewhere, like the opposite of hanlon's razor now? So is he being deliberately sloppy in his spreadsheets or is he just incompetent? I suppose both is a better read but you need more proof for the "deliberately misleading" line and the spreadsheet frankly is danluu's best evidence beyond the list of failed predictions which is less striking in my mind.
While I think he's probably wrong on the timing, which clearly has been wrong since 2024, it doesn't really address the greater critique, which is that ai companies and nvidia and memory manufacturers need revenues collectively in the trillions to make their investors whole. That is still unsustainable such that it's been called out by other investors and financial journalists.
Given the incentives (an ai booster account who is also prompting chat to write his posts) does this even belong on HN? I feel like our standards have dropped so much in the last two years.
It takes ten times longer to point out all of the things wrong with an LLM-generated post than it does to generate it. This is a losing battle and a miserable way to spend one's time. It would be preferable to simply not see zero-effort generated content drowning out real content, but because the zero-effort generated content outnumbers real content 100:1, it requires a high degree of active moderation intervention that sadly isn't present.
I think AI slop posts should be downvoted. I've flagged some myself.
This post didn't seem particularly AI generated to me (and notable even the OP didn't claim it was - just that they are "also prompting chat to write his posts").
It reads as someone with a moderately qualified opinion changing their mind on something and giving reasonable reasons.
The OP complaining that they "are an AI booster" and that they use AI seemed to be non-specific points rather than anything they didn't like about this post.
The top comment right now is essentially explaining my issue here. My problem isn't really the pro or anti stance, this is a booster account that is farming off of the engagement. This has been a thing since musk introduced paid premium blue checks on twitter, essentially these circles of accounts that just puff each other up with AI generated posts and replies now proliferate widely. You see similar accounts like gimmick accounts, accounts that post gender war or political content, age gap discourse, whatever is currently trending or spicy in order to get engagement and thus get that small cut of premium payment for said posts. Of course, in order to get a big enough return, they use scale, and thus LLM replies and multiple accounts. The AI enthusiast circle on twitter have a similar inauthentic accounts. It wouldn't be surprising if this is just one of the person's profiles.
The thing is these are more likely than not not sincere posts but are probably bots accounts used to get some skimming amount of money from the generated content. I'd rather read actually interesting details, not the "template engagement bait" (as the top comment) posted so we can debate that instead of this contentless generated post.
Tbf, this current era of capitalism really is a lot where absolutely no one wants to enter the market and take advantage of a clear overpricing of memory for consumers but simply wants to charge the same amount as everyone else. So much for "efficient markets."
Everyone always wants to charge as much as they possibly can, and if SK Hynix would be the only manufacturer prices would be 10x of what they are today. Especially new incumbents will not ruin the market prices as they have the highest upfront cost and their calculation of entering the market is probably based on the high prices that can be achieved. In the long run, more competition is still good as everyone ramps up production to profit more from the high prices and at some point supply will outpace demand and prices will fall (assuming no cartel / price fixing is involved).
US is stopping China to increase their DRAM and flash production as they would, by forbidding everybody to sell modern semiconductor manufacturing equipment and consumables to China.
China is increasing their production of DDR5 and SSDs, but much more slowly than it would have been possible in a free market.
The current prices for DRAM and SSDs would have never happened if USA had not started to sabotage the Chinese memory industry a few years ago, presumably because Micron wanted to eliminate their competition.
The US sanctions against memory producers have started exactly when Apple was considering the use of Chinese memories in their smartphones, so Apple had to cancel their plans.
The claims that the sanctions against the Chinese memory producers have anything to do with US "national security" or with military applications are just a big shameless lie.
Military applications are content with older memories, which China can produce in sufficient amounts. The SOTA DRAM modules and SSDs are more important for consumer products and the US "sanctions" have the only purpose of maintaining artificially high prices for the consumer products, which steals money from millions of people all over the world.
> Aren’t prices sky rocketing precisely because of excess demand?
Not exactly. The RAM crisis was sparked by OpenAI contracting with multiple vendors to take vast quantities of raw, unfinished wafers off the market. Wafers which OpenAI had no use for -- they just wanted to starve competitors.
This is different from an "AI is so popular that manufacturers can't keep up with demand" story.
OpenAI and Anthropic are the sleaziest companies that have come out of Silicon Valley in a long time, and that's really saying something.
i don't have much to contribute except to say i'm surprised this kind of thing is legal, especially at the scale of what's happening; its extremely damaging to basically everything
It basically Silver Thursday all over again but with RAM. I wish they crash and burn like the Hunt brothers did, Altman goes the way of Sam Bankman-Fried and Micron gets bought by the Chinese. That's what they all deserve.
I think you are splitting hairs. Both arguments boil down to 'AI companies are taking all the chips'. It doesnt really matter why, the result and reasons are the same.
Sorry, that was a tangent unrelated to the original point. Seeing people chalk this situation up to “high demand” when anticompetitive sabotage was the cause just makes my eye twitch.
It all depends on the particular situation as to whether there is elasticity of supply or demand.
In this particular situation there is a bit of inelasticity of supply because it takes a long time to spin up a DRAM factory and if people believe it is temporary they won’t make the investment
You don't want to build a huge factory if you believe the market might deflate suddently.
A lot of industries got bitten by greed and the sudden deflation of demand and huge unsold inventory post COVID. The reality is the market was overly and abnormaly inflated and consumers who bought the stuff during COVID period were equipped for the next ~10 years in stuff like sporting goods and had no reason to buy new items in the subsequent years.
I do believe we will always need more RAM even if there is a market correction or AI bubble burst whatever you want to call it. It will not destroy AI completely, just cleanup the market. But how much will we need? I guess the chip makers makes their own guesses but don't want to make their company in peril either.
> Cherrypicked dates? But I'd like to hear analysis comparing the Nixon shock to the covid shock since one was monetary and one was supply and demand.
Of course!
* In 1971 and 2019, the M2 money supply was flooded. In 1971 by the Nixon Shock, in 2019 by Covid: The amount of US dollars that existed between 1961 and 1971 increased by 100%, the amount of US dollars that existed between 1971 and 1981 increased by 253%. Assets are denominated in dollars and the flood of money that the Nixon Shock caused led to the inflation of the late 70s and 80s. The flood of money that Covid caused led to the inflation of the last six years, 2022 in particular.
* The other factor that contributed was the lack of oil supply. In the 1970s, it was caused by a war in the Middle east. Will we see history repeat again? My bet is yes.
Note that the Fed data is difficult to read in the 70s, you'll want to play around with the length of the time window. It's difficult to read because the supply of money has grown so much.
But they are building huge datacenters for AI. The investment appetite is there. So there must be some worse bottleneck when it comes to memory itself.
The one building the datacenters aren't the ones making the chips. A construction of a datacenter can be halted suddently and an order of chips cancelled. We might assume that the chip makers are ready to supply said datacenters, just they don't necessarily feel necessary to build new factories for the consumer market which itself might not be ready to spend the same amount of money on RAM chips. And building factories do not magically create price reduction, quite the contrary. The consumers buying $150-200 smartphones aren't necessarily ready to buy $400 ones. Most would just buy on the second hand market and replace less often their phones instead.
Whales being whales, they will pay the highest end iphone at any price, no question. But the market is not made entirely of whales.
No, this is not Capitalism working as intended, because there is an entity, the US government, whose purpose is to sabotage those who are willing to increase production to satisfy the extra demand and decrease the prices.
So the market is not free at all, the lack of competition is maintained by force.
Already for many years, the prices of various products like smartphones, SSDs and memory modules have been kept artificially high by the anticompetitive measures called "US sanctions".
You can't be serious about conflating a host of technologies with fucking image generation or all things. This is the worst HN comment I've seen in months and there's been loads of competition.
Clearly something like this would need to be approved by the FDA, it is literally irresponsible to promote something like this as being more powerful than a MRI.
You shouldn't promote something like this as being useful for medical purposes, because some patients might think this is real and start sending their doctors these "scans" or even worse, some shitty doctors will use them to diagnose tumours in their patients so they can then make banger bucks out of their new hallucinated cancer patients.
Stuff like this needs to go through approvals for obvious reasons before they can advertise them for having medical purposes.
Of course a lot of it is about the energy and overall exposure, and the harms of this, if any, are more likely elsewhere, but it's completely reasonable to question extraordinary promises made by people who up to this point have shown no expertise in the field.
I swear, it's like some people have already forgotten about Theranos.
The sci-fi writes itself. Someone hacks the spa’s schedule to find out when you’re getting your scan done, then hacks the machine to push the output to 11 when you’re in, and liquifies your insides.
"Dangerous" is a loaded term. But yes, even "soundwaves" can cause harm, same way use of pharmacological medical interventions can cause harm. Dosage, application methods, side effects, etc. all exist for medical use of ultrasound too. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8954895
Focused ultrasound is already used as an actual surgery method and they have to carefully balance the parameters so it does not produce heating and damage [unrelated] tissue. Obviously a scanner would not aim for the same power/effects but it is possible to cause harm, yes
