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> Or it just be that demand really does seriously exceed supply. It's not fast to bring supply online, it's costly and risky to do so if the demand will not be sustained for a long time

This is exactly it. There's a lot of conspiracy theory in this thread without realizing that it's just what happens when an insanely large amount of capital is deployed: market distortion.

It's not just RAM, it's things like gas turbines and power transformers. I've seen suggestions that it's even affecting housing starts because the construction effort is pulling in workers, especially electricians.

However unlike you I'm not of the opinion that all that can be built, in that short timeframe. Even less so that it can be operated without pushing us over the 2C global warming threshold.

by fragmede49 minutes ago|

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Aren't we already at 2.5 C?

by HarHarVeryFunny5 hours ago|

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> I have been telling folks for the last 3 years that the price of AI compute

What does that even mean ?

The cost of AI itself (tokens/$ for a given level of intelligence) has been falling rapidly, and shows no sign of stopping.

by segmondy4 hours ago|

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What is the cost of AI tokens? You can't just calculate cost of inference. There is a cost to train, there is a cost for staff to build it all, the money investors provided for it all. When you run a business, all those costs must be recovered. Sure, it takes $2 in material cost to make a pizza, but what's the cost of pizza? You have to take into account, energy, rent, staff, insurance, and profit too. Tokens/$ is subsidized if you are talking about APIs

by HarHarVeryFunny3 hours ago|

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The big AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic may have rushed into it too fast, and in effect wasted a lot of money on early model generations that never paid for themselves, early model architectures that were not cost-efficient, experiments that never panned out, etc.

The AI pure-play companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are presumably in worst financial position, since others like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta (also Alibaba, Baidu, Bytedance, Tencent, Xiaomi) have generally been more conservative and are treating AI as an incremental revenue source not a highly leveraged all-in bet.

by ShinyLeftPad4 hours ago|

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they operate at a loss (they pretend to profit by excluding key costs in financial reports). they won't do it forever.