There’s always a collapse on the horizon, I believe many of these stories are worst-case scenarios or a way to help billionaires believe their own hype and swallow the turds to keep capitalism on life support.

Nah they're saying the like 3 places that manufacture RAM won't drop their prices after

I would bet on painful collapse, because the whole model is "winner takes all", which means there is an awful lot of duplication. Even if it ends up more like a commodity with multiple players (because why pay for super powered AI for a task if there is a cheaper low powered alternatives?), the constant scale up makes no sense at all economically. We're already well into diminishing returns with each scale up, and the models continue to be fundamentally flawed.

Lenovo are right that prices won't go back to "normal" - I think there will be a huge crash in prices due to oversupply when the AI boom ends, and some of the big AI companies collapse.

Sounds like Lenovo is one of many companies pumping stocks.

Wrong line of thinking.

They want you to stop holding out and just buy their crazy high (along with everyone else) priced stuff so they move inventory and make some capital.

If their ram claim ends up true (I call bullshit) they make some sales and they go happily along.

If their claim ends up being false, they still made those sales and no one remembers or cares how "wrong" they were about it.

Saying this is basically a no lose guess for them.

no they are not. the article was clear. after the ai boom, the memory companies wont drop proces because you dont have a choice.

my new soap box - the government should regulate this industry because its very important to society and there should be prive caps.

maybe i'm naive, but if it's so profitable to make RAM in the long-term, why wouldn't competition emerge? I get not investing in the startup costs just for a bubble, but that's not what we're talking about here.

I'm hopeful China is able to be a spoiler to this current tech hegemony

As awful as that sounds, I bet that's what will happen.

Why wouldn't China just charge the increased prices, same as the DRAM cartel? Primarily they want to make money.

Unless they offer below-cost RAM for a few years to drive the competition out of business before jacking up their prices of course.

The trump administration has determined that it is critical to national security that americans play all new games at medium graphics settings or lower.

It is critical to national profits. I wonder how trump's kids are involved in this like every other scheme he rigs.

Expect an import ban on Chinese made ram to be coming soon.

Yes. I do half-way expect that.

Of course, I also look forward to investing in novelty keychains, which just coincidentally come with a free teddy bear, which itself has a couple of RAM sticks sewn inside.

Thinking about that is most of the packagers for RAM are in china. Even if that silicon wasn't pressed in china, the company that actually buys up the modules slaps them on dims or sodiums, and ships them with custom Packaging are in China.

There is a whole middle step that most of us are completely missing, between the actual memory manufacturers and the distributors.

Supply demand economics was a great concept in grade 8, but in the real world, price fixing and monopolies rule unchecked.

Sure the prices will go down a bit, but never to pre-bubble levels. This is the new "market rate" now.

Invisible hand creates best prices when there is infinite supply, many suppliers, elastic demand. None of that exists and neoclassic economics is bullshit.

Help us Xi Van Jingping - you are our only hope.

Agreed, but still fuck data centers

We should dismantle AI companies and their data center expansion plans and see if RAM still is so expensive.

At work we were upgraded to 16GB last cycle. 8GB would've been plenty if not for all the shit that forcibly runs in the background. Now even the 16GB models are struggling, and I mean struggling sometimes. While my userspace apps use less than 2GB.

I was lucky I was forced to upgrade to 32gb right before the bubble, because my new job uses Jira with too many plugins.

Yeah, most people can probably be totally okay with 16GB (~150€ new, 50€ ddr4 used) too!

We seem to have forgotten that RAM has always been ludicrously expensive, except for a little while a couple of years ago.

Run less software then. You can do that today.

I think this may be a catalyst to software fundamentals.

It's not that fundamental. It's just corporations skipping the optimizing step and just shipping because that looks better for their project deadline and budget. As long as complaining is limited and sales don't drop they don't care.

Optimization will actually get much worse because software will be designed to run “in the cloud” on servers that have much more resources than the average budget pc or smartphone that 90% of users use for computing. You will own nothing etc etc

This must be the wisest thing I've read in a long time.