You guys think it will be together with the “AI” bubble or that it will independently pop sooner? Because all of the prices currently are inflated deliberately using artificial scarcity and preying on FOMO.
when ai dies like the dot com bubble did
All of this talk about AI bubbles and PC hardware and when the prices are going to come back down…wishful thinking. Unless there is a miracle breakthrough in compute, chips making and how AI can be accelerated by using less, the prices won’t be coming down anytime soon.
Did you know the Amazon didn’t make money for years? it survived through all of it (very likely through wall st and tech bro style funding) and now it’s a behemoth.
But let’s talk about macro scale even without looking at the supply chain of the entire chips industry. From a geopolitical standpoint, AI has become this “holy grail” to increase the speed of research. Not productivity. Research has ALWAYS been a bottleneck. Now how does that tie into geopolitics? There’s an AI race going on across the world if you haven’t been paying attention. Governments aren’t going to just roll over and let someone else beat them to it. So like the military industrial complex that gets money like its free in the US - yeah, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
What will really tank things would be if the US dollar goes through a crisis - the trajectory is possible but it wont be an over night thing. Central banks around the world are watching and coordinating to keep things stable - for now. So what can you do? It’s simple - withhold your unnecessary consumer spending and cause a crunch in liquidity. Unfortunately this will only work collectively. So good luck!
As they say, “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”, especially if AI Bro financial circlejerk BS is the only thing staving off a recession / depression in the US, and the fraudster in chief is getting his cut.
If they hold on long enough, they’ll have gone a long way towards making the population rent compute (after AI is found wanting, they’re gonna want to do something with all that compute) and you know how much the technofuedalists love rent.
About your username, I just want to say that I am still upset that Fox canceled Firefly, the TV programme. The movie was ok, world design took a nose dive though. :(
Gorram meddlesome Fox.
My fear is that when the AI bubble pops it will take many PC hardware manufacturers with it. Can Nvidia survive if OpenAI goes under? It will leave a massive hole in their finances.
A bubble popping might just make matters even worse.
Gotta get worse before it gets better
This one isn’t artificial scarcity, I’m afraid
There is literally less available for the consumer because all the various chip fabs have had their capacity bought for AI data centre expansion.
This is not the same as a scalper situation where the supply has been taken but ultimately needs to be sold back to consumers. You, a single consumer, are competing with the buying power of the likes of Google, Amazon & Microsoft.
Plus they have booked up this capacity pretty far in advance, so even if they stopped buying up more today (they will not until the AI bubble pops), consumer prices aren’t going to change until all of that capacity reservation has passed. Then after that, all the companies that wanted to buy capacity, but couldn’t compete with the big ones will get their turn. Then eventually the fabs might find themselves with a bit of surplus capacity to increase the production of consumer hardware. Then there will be the pent-up consumer demand keeping prices elevated for a good number of months or years (depending how long this all goes on for). After all that, supply and demand could see prices dropping back down a bit.
These fabs will start to physically expand on order to increase capacity if it goes on long enough, but these kind of expansions take many years to build and bring online.
Other things to remember, the current US administration is motivated to prop up this bubble as long as they can because it’s basically the only industry in the US that’s not shitting the bed currently, so when it pops a lot of US GDP is going with it and probably going to cause a pretty bad recession. Another is inflation; by the time this is all over prices might have inflated enough due to the devaluation of money that any drop in prices would be offset.
Basically, I wouldn’t hold your breath
It’s not really artificial scarcity, there is actually less consumer hardware available at the moment.
The underlying issue is that companies are selling ML hardware that doesn’t exist to data centres that do not exist, which have demand that does not exist. I call it artificial scarcity because there is no beneficiary at the end of this chain. It’s money that basically goes around in a circle between oligarchs, they play hot potato as if it were NFTs. And of course, Nvidia, AMD and Intel are very happy to sell to lunatics who think their data center is a goldmine, as Jensen puts it frequently. In a Gold Rush, only shovel salesmen make money.
Scarcity applies to the things that actually exist, or not.
There are fewer graphics cards being made for consumers right now than there were a few years ago, and they have less memory on them on average.
… because of datacenters that don’t exist for demand that isn’t there.
Someone is buying every single chip that SK Hynix and Nvidia are producing. The fabs they’re using are all running at maximum capacity.
Those chips are going somewhere.
… for no good reason.
The scarcity isn’t artificial though. The actual objects are not available in the quantities needed to keep prices level.
The reasoning for that matters not at all.
My guy tells me it will be like housing. It’ll never drop. You wount be able to afford to buy, so better rent, to Ben you won’t be able to afford rent either.
end goal is everybody just has phones with locked bootloaders
As long as FOMO gets enough whales to buy the top of the line, nothing will change. Why cater to the majority, when the minority is willing to spend that much more money?
