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I think the epic mistake was made by investors and executives who bought tales about imminent super-intelligence about to displace millions of knowledge workers from entire industries replacing them with AI datacentres.

These people are the main reason why AI companies have unlimited funding, and can afford to buy global RAM supply for years in the future despite their expenses exceed revenue by billions.

I'd come at this from a different angle: we still want this to be market system, so we need to make this priced into the market. How can we price this in?

I would try to solve this by making the market structure reflect the underlying difficulty: we have to decide what capacity to produce years in advance, to construct the memory fabs. So this should be a futures market, and a capacity crunch would affect short-term-futures, but leave full term futures at the same price. Because the companies supplying the memory can just construct more capacity to fill those futures at the same cost regardless of the AI demand.

> How should the memory companies have acted differently?

Same way nVidia did through the crypto insanity - make sure they're supplying enough to the consumer market so it doesn't get completely destroyed and pulls down the other parts of the consumer market they're reliant for long term success.

> Should we blame this on memory companies or the AI companies bidding for memory?

Blame doesn't change the outcomes, neither does it improve the negative consequences. Think in terms of "what does destruction of our consumer market mean for my prosperity?" not "oh, how do defend poor companies again?"

For one, they could have could have not massively scaled back consumer memory manufacturing as a matter of duty to customers. But money and greed must prevail.

both of them

memory companies could have attempted to protect consumers, at least a little, but the AI money machine goes brrrr

> How should the memory companies have acted differently?

Well if your thesis is that they should have acted differently, then we should blame the laissez-faire capitalists.

>People have the option of just not buying stuff.

Unless you know, your main and only PC/notebook just died and need a replacement ASAP, they you don't really have an option to not buy. And no, the used market (where I live) is just as fucked, reflecting the retail gouging, with people wanting quite a lot of cash for tower PCs and notebooks from the Pentium 4 - Core 2 Duo era.

> Prices will crash.

Does your crystal ball also say when exactly? If my laptop broke, then I need a replacement now in the overpriced market, not in X years when prices will crash.

If this goes on long enough the prices crashing won't matter because the manufacturers of all the other PC hardware will be gone.

I think we're seeing the end of the PC as we know it, personally.

I hope so. I feel so, so, so terribly guilty for not building my wife a computer for her in 2023. She is rocking a 1080ti, and I really wish I had at least upgraded her system, but now I just straight cannot afford to even consider it, given the price of rent, food, gas, energy, all on top of the actual hardware prices.

And I am a SWE.I am not making bad money. I can't imagine what others are going through.

Way to miss the whole point of the article and fail to understand the point. Do you think if significant part of US industry goes bankrupt because they can't source parts for their products, work machines and consumers disappear... you'll still have luxury of running around in a Tesla?

yeah CMXT is likely to come online in the not too distant future

Make RAM half the price it was before and you'd still have very few people trying to do local AI on it because it's just so damn slow for the task. Having 12 channels of DDR5 in an Epyc system with NVMe storage is still one of the slowest ways I can run LLMs locally.

Did you dodge the phone price increase somehow? Phones also need RAM (and ambitions of running local models)

> We are all Capitalists, until the Market comes after the stuff we love.

Anyone with half a brain isn't a "Capitalist" (with a big C, like in your example) which is why every single prosperous nation (including USA) regulates markets to avoid destruction of their prosperity and society.

>We are all Capitalists

1/ speak for yourself

2/ where is your capital and your means of production? Your machines? Your factories? Your raw materials, your tools? How long do you survive tomorrow when you quit your job and you have no other income?

You're not a capitalist. You're just a consumer for them to suck dry. The faster you learn it, the better off you will be.

Someone misspelled let's tax ai companies until we get back to balance.