How'd that turn out? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday#:~:text=On%20J...
It's becoming increasingly clear that OpenAI is going to get lapped by Google on technical merits. So this is the "code red" solution? Supply shenanigans?
They are getting beat in the developer market by Anthropic. And getting beat on fundamental tech by Google. This is a company whose ostensible mission is to "benefit all of humanity" ...
Do you have a citation for what law is being violated? Or just vibes?
From the article
> OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses – like a kid who hides the toybox because they’re afraid nobody wants to play with them, and thus selfishly feels nobody but them should get the toys!
I guess we'll have to see if they in fact just keep "unfinished" RAM in warehouses like the article says and not roll them out into datacenters for a legitimate use as they are finished.
There are similar laws prohibiting the manipulation of commodity markets but I do not believe a US court would find RAM to be a commodity.
Obviously kind of a moot point because whether it violates antitrust law or not, what is guaranteed is the US Government is not going to do anything
Should be, as in, new legislation should criminalize it? What's the generalized principle? Or should be, as in existing law should cover it? And if so, what law / how?
This seems to almost be mentioned off-hand, but isn't this a really bad and un-free market? Korean companies are afraid of doing business with Chinese companies because of the US, because of retaliation? This was not the "free and global market" I thought we were supposed to have at this point.
Countries decided the extent to which they’d like to engage in free trade together. It is a knob that we’d hope our leaders would turn strategically. (Regardless of whether or not we think our leaders actually are doing a good job of it…).
Is the goal also to hurt South Korean businesses and all businesses in the world, just to "pwn China" basically?
There is always a ton of risk involved with protectionism. Primarily whether your taxpayer-subsidized domestic jobs and hypothetical national security risk significantly outweighs all the very real economic costs.
Perhaps you haven't noticed but the pendulum has been swinging the other way for a while already and has a lot of momentum behind it. It's mentioned off-hand because the ongoing return to a multi-polar global order is covered elsewhere already, across dozens of articles every day.
For the most part, free and open trade is beneficial to the Western world order. But I think it's quite straightforward to imagine conditions under which it is not, many of which are currently in effect.
US control of EUV technology is probably the most obvious present one, but limitations on nuclear proliferation are an obvious case where there is no free market. Even selling civilian nuclear technology is controlled.
You may think of it analogously to Free Speech. The dream is complete and total expression. The reality is that if you allow convincing enough liars, your society starts to falter. Consequently, certain kinds of expression are not permitted - notably defamation. Think of it as more a North Star navigation ideal constrained by the trade winds (I suppose the Westerlies would be more relevant, but I couldn't resist the pun).
If you want a couple of reads, I enjoyed A Splendid Exchange about the history of trade, which I followed by the resurgent-though-once-dismissed Zeihan's Disunited Nations (which is more a hypothesis book than a history book).
wtf. life sucks.
I'm not thrilled about this genre of "guy I don't like does totally normal thing so it's bad". It's too engagement baity.
That is not "totally normal".
I mean with that many wafers, I guess it is possible that they’d be doing something pretty custom with the things…
My takeaway, this sounds like an comparably easy fix for the consumer market, if prices are somewhat guarenteed to stay mid term significantly above this years spring floor for someone to sweep up the margins and negotiate a somewhat reliable way to get the last gen production lines up and running again. Will take at least half a year to pick up, but this is not a longterm RAM doomsday scenario in any sense.
I'm more worried about the low to mid-end embedded systems, that a have a dollar budget for memory components, that could get unbearably slow for the current/next gen if manufactures just use the bare minimum of RAM the bloated TV or tablet OS can run on, if the 1GB raspberry move is any indication of that. And consumers stuck with no way to upgrade them to a reasonably usable state.
That's not "dirty." That's hiding your intentions from suppliers so they don't crank prices before you walk through their front door.
If you want to buy a cake, never let the baker know it's for a wedding.
> OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses
They have no incentive to purchase a rapidly-depreciating asset and then immediately shelve it, none
They might have to warehouse inventory until they can spin-up module-manufacturing capacity, but that's just getting their ducks in a row
Also what are these contracts? Surely Samsung could decide to cancel the contract by paying a large fee but is that fee truly so large that getting their ram back when prices are now 4x of what they used to be is not worth it?
chasing0entropy•1h ago
OP is also marginally underestimating the impact this move would have on Google's competitiveness - they are making huge gains prototyping at light speed; this will halt their AI hardware acceleration plans pushing them back into slower software development on ever aging hardware.
It also shows why Nvidia is not afraid of competitors coming out with new desgings that obsolete their hardware: what good are superior designs with no fabs to produce them?
darthoctopus•48m ago
nerdponx•25m ago
There are some negative elements of captialism that we might simply have no reasonable regulatory apparatus to deal with. Preventing indivduals and companies from having so much market power in the first place seems to be the only thing that can work consistently.