Altman should be jailed for this. Single-handedly crashing consumer spending in an entire sector of the economy. At the very least for the reason that that was supposed to happen _after_ they had the AI in hand to supplant majority white collar labor, not before.
This is a dystopia no one really thought about. A handful of people anointed to spend borrowed money on a (so far unprofitable) quest to destabilize the world's economy, alienate the working class and make everything we've enjoyed the past 15-20 years a luxury.
No? Lots of philosophers and writers thought about the problems that happen when capital concentrates to the level that individuals can move nations.
It’s like a whole fucking genre.
What we call capitalism now is just reverting back to monarchism where the handful of rulers decide everything and we stop getting the market to be responsive to reality. Prepare for more absurd and random shortages as our betters play around with their toys
Companies that are essentially monopolies have greater income than most countries GDP, with government bailouts, with the Federal reserve printing money like crazy, the interest on government debt is greater than military spending.
The drive towards monopoly, tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over and under production and cyclical ever worsening crises are aspects of capitalism well studied and understood over a century ago.
I am not convinced by this whole AI water scare. Doesn't the water just evaporate? It's not a finite resource like oil.
If the problem is that these companies are creating an externality by straining the local water supply, then maybe we should simply tax water more where appropriate? I don't think any sort of shame will be effective.
For the past decade water has been mismanaged in inefficient farming practices, like bad irrigation practices or production of alfalfa to feed foreign livestock. We also waste a ton of water on our big dumb lawns. "cooling datacenters" doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
Fresh water is a finite resource. It replenishes extremely slowly in certain forms. Like ground water. Lakes and rivers can run dry if you pull too much from them, see: Iran. AI data centers are making the problem of overuse worse. We were already pulling too much water in areas. With these data centers, some places that didn't have a problem are starting to.
Yes? Reports are that OpenAI is buying unfinished memory kits which they have no capacity to complete. It appears that OpenAI is just buying them to remove them from the market and damage their competitors. In United States, that used to be considered against the law if we were actually enforcing such things.
Since COVID, this has been the norm for any industry that requires chips.
Operation handbook now dictates that you should have 3-4 years of all the ICs you'll need for production so you don't end up like the car manufacturers.
I doubt this is to create artificial scarcity. Especially when OpenAI is the biggest player thought to be able to build AGI first and that it is now backed by the US & the Saudis.
The US Government, Saudis, consumer/private investors apparently or at least the one that can build the most economically useful AI. I myself believe Google is most likely.
For the sake of argument, what if Amazon decided tomorrow that they would secure exclusive contracts with all food suppliers and then hoard all the food to starve out the people they don't want to have it? Or at least, drive up the price of food so it becomes completely unaffordable? I know people can simply grow their own food so it's a bit different, but hopefully it gets the point across. It's anti-trust on an unprecedented level.
But OpenAI legitimately needs HBM. Amazon in this instance doesn't need food and is doing purely to create artificial scarcity. If OpenAI were to actually not use the HBM then it could mean something.
That's the whole problem: it's unlikely that OpenAI will actually use all of that HBM. It seems probable that they are using it to create artificial scarcity for their competitors.
IANAL, but yes, I believe it can nullify the claim. Bumping into someone on the sidewalk is only battery if the prosecution demonstrates intent to harm.
Yeah it would definitely still be a problem, but history shows that life finds a way. Even if everyone has to eat nothing but planted potatoes from any patch of grass that one can lay eyes on.
What history has taught us is that life finds a way by staying together and each person having their function within society, only some of which is growing or producing food.
Simple: they create value for the right people. Namely, politicians who get their donations, and a generation that, despite not having enough children to grow the economy organically, doesn't want to work any... er... wants to retire.
Thus, they invest in retirement and pension funds, who in turn invest the money in businesses to earn a return. Since that return must increase constantly, and organic growth is no longer possible, you have to pull shenanigans as a businessman to meet the requirements of the shareholders, lest they kick you out of the plane with a golden parachute.
So we let them do those shenanigans and the politicians don't do anything about it.
> they invest in retirement and pension funds, who in turn invest the money in businesses to earn a return
maybe not a popular opinion but, this is the original sin imo; putting retirement/pension on the market makes for so many perverse incentives to keep things growing at any cost...
you create money based on debt, and eternal growth, and devalue savings, and force people to bet in order to try to preserve savings value, then each ten or fifteen years you allow someones to harvest the rewards of the casino.
And when population start to decrease (on developed countries), you rise the alarm, "more population is needed due to the decline in the birth rate", promoting an eternal growth that would need the resources several planets if everyone had a decent standard of living.
I find it fascinating that he's had the benefit of the doubt for soooo long.
This is the shitcoin-for-your-eyeball-scans guy; the guy who didn't tell the board of his own company that he controlled their startup fund through an alias.
Yes, and I actually think it's a symptom of advanced societal decay that you think this is somehow an unreasonable proposition.
What OpenAI is doing will drive up prices for years, shredding consumer welfare, limiting competition and forcing marginally-profitable products off the market, and they're not even going to use the RAM. They're wrecking supply chains simply because they no longer have any technical advantage now that Google and Anthropic have caught up and passed them, and have to resort to dirty tricks like this and digital heroin Sora to try and justify their valuation. No functioning society would or should allow you to get away with that.
Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the commons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.
> Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the commons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.
Some days I think the devastating crash of the economy that will come if the bubble bursts is the least worst outcome. Do people not feel like the tensions around AI will not soon become internationally geopolitical?
(It's already nationally geopolitical in the USA: Trump is trying to assert federal control over the states' rights to set their own legislation)
In the USA, nobody need ever go to prison for market manipulation anymore; they simply have to be able to pay the price necessary for a pardon. No logical consistency applies to the process.
1. Said "consumer" is effectively hoarding Supply, and thus distorting the Market.
2. Said "consumer" has no effective means to either Deploy nor Utilize said products as neither the Data Centers nor the Energy required to power them are in existence.
3. Said "consumer" has articulated his belief that the Taxpayer should "backstop" his endeavors in some capacity, as well.
If you don't find this offensive in the least and possibly criminal at worst, then I don't understand your thought process.
That contract had little to do with this but I get why it's an easy, neatly packaged, personified scapegoat.
The ram price appreciation began 3 months before October 1st and his contract was about future capacity that has nothing to do with the current equilibrium price in consumer DRAM.
A surprising amount of people are gleefully happy to have their perceived enemies put in jail or worse even if and especially if there was no legitimate justification for it.
A lot of people on HN dislike Tim Cook for various reasons and many would literally “sacrifice” him just to get Apple to stop being so anti-consumer.
It certainly feels like this should fall somewhere along a spectrum of antitrust behavior. It's astounding the degree to which they are able to operate as if money isn't real. Strange circular deals and infinite VC money really fuck with markets and these past few years we've been venturing down a particularly concerning branch of capitalism.
Eh my (anemic) work laptop from 2019 probably won't get replaced for an extra year because my employer won't authorize the big laptop order at inflated prices.
I'm pretty sure this clearly runs afoul of anticompetitive laws, no? Altman is intentionally sabotaging the global electronics supply chain using their existing market dominance to prevent competitors from being able to operate.
And, tangentially, I really don't know what world you lived in. The US has arrested civil rights leaders and overthrown countries and went through an entire era of McCarthyism to get here: where the US president is having investigations into his political enemies for what amounts to "disloyalty". It's basically a national given that cops plant evidence on black folk regularly.
Since when has America been this bastion of lawfulness?
Since it clearly runs afoul of anticompetitive laws, it will be easy for you to find case law that demonstrates that, alongside credible sources stating that OpenAIs actions are prosecutable that make that case.
This is big news, it's not like the folks who write about antitrust would just ignore it.
I believe it depends on which parties are responsible for the criminal antitrust violations. Is it the manufacturers abusing monopoly power, or is it OpenAI abusing monopsony power?
I’m not a lawyer or a forensic accountant, but given how remarkably stable the RAM market was until SCAMA disrupted it, I’m inclined to think the answer to your question is a resounding “no.”
Clarifying because I think the downvoters maybe misunderstood the nature of my question: I meant, in the opinion of the parent commenter should the principals of Samsung etc. be jailed? I wasn’t taking a position myself, just asking what they thought.
You should look up the monopsony provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, as well as the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 which prohibits predatory price discrimination schemes. Scam Alt-Man should be paying the same price for RAM as us plebes, if the DOJ wasn’t derelict in its duty to enforce antitrust law.
It’s wild how Bork’s fraudulent legal theories have been converted to into dogma within a generation.
mo·nop·so·ny /məˈnäpsənē/ a market situation in which there is only one buyer.
It seems like the issue we're having is that we are buyers who are competing against OpenAI, who is another buyer. There isn't only 1 buyer or 1 seller of RAM.
Like monopolies, monopsony power exists on a spectrum. For example, Walmart exercises extreme monopsony power over suppliers, despite not being the only retailer in town.
