The RAM I bought in 2019 for $100 is now over $500. at this rate I’ll sell it in a few years to put my daughter through college.
it will be ironic when consumers cant afford the end user devices needed to interact with the AI servers. House of cards??
Let me put on my tinfoil hat really quick.
They want to kill personal computing. You don’t need a full blown computer, you need a fire stick style device that plugs into your monitor and allows you to remotely access the virtual machine you rent from Microsoft on a monthly basis.
this has been “the plan” since 2005. when i was in high school trying to figure out what the heck “cloud computing” was, this is what they were talking about: anything requiring more compute than secure authentication and pixel drawing would be rendered in the cloud and delivered to dumb terminals. this is what netbooks, Chromebooks, and smartphones have been a step towards if not an implementation of.
This is 100% the plan. Also, I would not be suprised if in 5-10 years there are legal limitations on what kind of computing capacity a private person can purchase due to “national security” reasons.
Even those contain RAM.
Dumb terminals don’t need much RAM. Unfortunately, the minimal RAM would come with maximum rentiership and exploitation.
i am having visions of 3270 screens😉
I’ve come to terms with the fact I’m not going to be buying any new computer-type devices until the bubble pops.
I’m just terrified what happens if one of my existing devices breaks. If a RAM stick goes bad, I might have to mortgage my non-existent house.
In case you are being serious, there are ways around faulty RAM sticks, usually just a few cells/rows are affected. In case anyone needs to know this, here is a pretty good summary on stackoverflow on how to deal with this on linux. In general, look for “memmap”.
Keep your hardware running as long as possible! Iirc newer RAM is unfortunately somewhat more susceptible to failing. My DDR3 is still working fine.
I see this as an opportunity to get invested in non-tech hobbies because there’s nothing else I can do
Yup, was going DDR5 this year, got a new bike (Marin Larkspur) instead, such a good decision, renewed my love of cycling, having a ball.
Things are probably going to get worse in the short term, but the AI bubble is going to burst. Magnitude? We’ll see, but when investors realize that these companies cannot make a profit, and open source frontier models that allow you to run AI in house are removing vendor lock in, things are going to change. Also, LLMs are a dead end, and have little room to improve.
Newer paradigms are appearing, such as Yann LeCun’s JASP, which actually learns, and other approaches, which will make LLMs obsolete, and are way less hardware intensive.
Another factor is the Chinese closing in in consumer grade RAM. If it can be proven that no backdoor or other shenanigans are there, they will balance things somewhat.
While current reality is what it is, there may be a massive social and traditional media manipulation by the big three and other interested parties to fuel fear of rising prices forever, to push people to buy as much as they can at these prices. I have no proof of this, but I don’t think it’s far fetched.
And let’s not forget that for media outlets, fear and tragedy sells. (I think Hearst or some other news mogul said that last century.)
Thought I could wait to build a new PC, but at this point, it’ll be another 5-10 years before things start getting better. After the price of the steam machine, I ordered parts to build my own. Such a bad time to build, but it’s just gonna get worse the longer I wait.
If they get better. By the time the AI sector collapses under the weight of its own bullshit, things will have already gotten significantly worse. You’ll be less worried about RAM prices and more worried about bread prices.
Don’t worry you might get $25 in a class action for bread price fixing. I think there should be a class action against the manufactures of Ram and hard drives. Most companies scale up when they have more demand, these fucks ain’t, theyre pulling a classic OPEC
I could crash the prices by tomorrow if I wanted to. All I’d have to do is buy some ram today.
The ‘AI’ angle is purely cover for the manufacturers actively choosing to now behave like the pharmaceutical industry. They’ve identified a window to pull this shit, and coordinated this opportunistic collusion.
The only meaningful response is to create a diverse production base to remove the choke point the current incumbents are leveraging, but that would require a concerted, collaborative effort by parties who can’t see and/or don’t understand the problem.
To play devil’s advocate; it might be that the RAM producers see AI as a bubble, and it would be incredibly risky to expand their production now, when it won’t come into effect until a handful of years from now.
RAM and SSD manufacturers have already seen many many dips and rises in price over decades.
However, that all of them are deciding not to expand and potentially rake in the cash is more than a little sus.
I’m not sure how to feel about it personally. I hope the true cost of maintaining these AI models gets passed down to customers soon so that it either crashes and burn, or at the very least stabilises the market.
8Gb of ddr4 is $25 usd and 16Gb ddr4 sticks are going for about $75 usd goes up from there depending on speed.
8Gb of ddr4 is $25
Ha! My 32g was $600, so 6x that.
You may hate AI, but it’s not the reason we are seeing RAM costs skyrocket.
Looking at the manufacturing data and the historical strong-arm tactics used by Samsung, Micron, and SK hynix, who collectively control about 96% of the global DRAM market, AI just gives manufacturers the perfect public justification to stop chasing cheap bit growth, starve low-margin consumer channels (our RAM products), reprioritize wafers toward premium products (data center RAM), and force customers into multi-year contracts at shortage-era prices.
Sure it lets them make more money off us, but they really love locking in these rates with their data center-based customers.
