Oh man
AI was never meant to benefit the working class in any capacity.
Its a great rule of thumb that if you see oligarchs hype up something and push for it to be everywhere, its a BAD fucking thing.
Meanwhile the average CEOs decision making could be replaced by a goldfish in a tank with some arbitrary object detection code.
Resource drain of LLMs inescapably makes them tools availiable only to big players. They are ideal in the way they are naturally gated. Making them mandatory == giving these select companies and people power over everything. And not only oligarchs’ promotion, but the whole situation of them being given for free or cheap at a huge loss gives one an idea that there’s a lot to milk from it’s growing adoption.
But that’s completely not true! Like, not a single thing you said is even slightly correct!
LLMs are relatively cheap to run - at small scales. You can run an LLM on your own computer right now. It won’t be super fast, it won’t have super skills, but you can run it, and you can train it yourself.
Massive LLMs like ChatGPT require tremendous resources precisely because they are not just tools available only to big players. Everybody on the planet has access to them - for free. The only actual difference there is between running an LLM locally and through a provider is that you get better speed and (sometimes, depending on context) better training through a provider.
As for “there’s a lot to milk from its growing adoption” - maybe? Probably? Who knows? That’s the “magic” of the AI bubble we’re experiencing right now - the big players keep saying that it will “make work and money obsolete”, that “anyone will be able to do anything”, that “a time of post-scarcity approaches”, and a billion other bullshit marketing slogans like that. But the reality is that nobody has yet figured out how to make money on that thing.
Right now, the only reason it’s “growing”, is because of the weird and probably illegal circular financing that’s going on at the very top - Nvidia invests in OpenAI, which invests in Oracle, which invests in Nvidia - and so on. No money is actually being made or (often) even changing hands, but everyone can now show they’ve received a lot of investment which pumps up their stock prices. The only reason this hasn’t popped yet is probably because the main investing parties are using tonnes of cash they had stored.
Growing adoption means nothing. It’s a marketing tool for them to keep shareholders happy while they keep a literal investing circlejerk going, every now and again inviting another player into the fold.
I knew there was something wrong when we started getting positive metrics based on how much we leveraged AI.
this seems incredibly short sighted… the current situation exists because there is a large amount of infrastructure and data centres being built. once that infrastructure is built, the demand will return to normal… OR once the bubble bursts, the market will be flooded with used ram from failed data centres… aliexpress will be selling ram at a dollar a gig when all these data centres flop
The unfortunate part for DIY PC is that the RAM is likely all buffered ECC. And used flash is sketchy in my experience, even if you buy SLC where the whole point is supposed to be that it is more durable.
The only people who believe in infinite growth in a finite world are mad men and economists.
But you repeat yourself.
I don’t think the bubble will burst like we are used to. AI is part of the arms race between nations. So they will shore the industry up at all costs.
As for the choice to shut down the brand. It will be years before all that infra gets built. Better to sit the time out and revive the brand when prices are reasonable enough that hobbyists and such are willing to pay them.Yeah but you have a company that has people to pay and rent to pay etc. If they don’t have enough liquid money to handle it then well here we are
So their not shutting down, just focusing on AI idiots until the bubble busts and then they will turn back to consumers…
Rules of Acquisition #1,261-- Always fuck over the idiots in the market. And when you’ve taken all their money, go back to your base with inflated prices.
And with the AI bullshit, I’m reminded of Rule of Acquisition #82: The flimsier the product, the higher the price.
Translation, Micron is shutting down Crucial for short term shareholder value at the cost of a sustainable and proven long term brand and channel.
They will return to the market with a new brand once the bubble bursts.
Probably just the same brand, honestly?
News two years from now: “Crucial back in business”
Three years; why is no one buying our crucial ram , hopefully
Depends on how proud they are and if they’d want to retract their statements of going after AI instead of consumers or not.
I don’t think there’s any pride in it, they are just going after what is the most profitable at any given time.
That’s exactly why I suspect they will choose to resurrect the Crucial name later, because given a choice between launching a new name nobody knows, or a name people recognise (even if it’s been tarred a bit) then recognised will be the winning and more profitable option.
That is, if they haven’t sold the Crucial name to someone else first.
I can see both happening.
I’d say: We will see (thumbsup)
It’s not just for shareholder value, like a downsize or stock buyback would achieve. This will literally fill their coffers to the brim faster than staying in the consumer market. Also the consumer market won’t go away anytime soon and there are very few competitors to begin with. They can just return to the consumer market once the AI bubble has burst like nothing has changed. Only difference is they will have way more money in the bank than if they never left.
Ask Intel how well compromising long term product development for short term gain is working now. How is their bank balance looking now?
You also cant just pick it up from scratch again. The people are gone, the relationships are gone and people who trusted your brand to build their businesses have gone elsewhere.
I swear businesses are run like political parties these days, they simply dont care about anything beyond the next cycle.
When did they ever care? I mean, besides valve I guess.
I just installed a 4TB nvme Crucial SSD in my new build solely to put games on.
I’m sure they will come crawling back to consumers after the AI bubble bursts.
Same here… I’m so glad I upgraded when I did… I did a panic upgrade last December… just look into a better GPU now
I built a god rig in 2022, i bought the best 64gb ddr5 4-stick ram kit i could, an nvidia 4090, the best processor i could, and attached it to the best mobo i could.
I spent about 4800.
My pc is now worth about 6500.
This is some crazy ass shit. Never should a pc appreciate in value.
What the hell is going on???
Your point still stands, but don’t forget basic inflation. $4,800 in 2022 is like > $5,300 now.
AI companies are buying up all of the RAM in a futile bit to reach AGI.
And haven’t even achieved AI yet. What we call “AI” is still nothing more than an upjumped calculator.
Their fucking calculator can’t even calculate. Big fucking whoop.
And people keep shovelling money in their bottomless maw. The world is mad.
In addition, we haven’t even come up with a definition of intelligence.
To quote a recent post “we taught computers to talk like middle managers and assumed that meant computers were sentient, rather than assuming that middle managers aren’t”
When you hear people say they hate AI, it’s for more reasons than AI slop, energy consumption, and beating the damn term into every product line you can imagine for little to no benefit.
Maybe I should start investing in my PC more
I bought a fairly good custom build in April of this year for A$3218.
The same approximate build now costs A$4783 on their website.
AI is really ruining fucking everything. The enviorment, entertainement, music, art, jobs, reality, freedom / privacy / rights.
No, corporate greed is ruining everything with AI.
Because you know if they built a super-AI that give them perfect instructions on how to build Earth into a paradise, but it would require they give up 1/4 of their wealth, they’d be reaching for the reset button before it finished printing them out…
They don’t even need that. current AI will tell them that. They’ve actually ran these questions and they ignore the answer every time
Elon has to keep “dewoking” Grok. Sure, it’s still an awful model, probably the most disinformative, but it’s funny that it keeps revering back to neutral or pro progressive values, while calling out Elon
The fact people are blaming the tech rather than the tech bros is a big part of why this keeps happening.
Its the decision of real people that make this situation suck.
Indeed.
I have a model running locally on my NAS that does image recognition for photos in my Immich app (think Google Photos, but private). It does a decent job and runs well on AMD integrated graphics on a Ryzen 5 3400G. I just search for [daughter’s name], and there she is.
I use Firefox’s translation feature (that also runs locally and can run on low end hardware).
My sister is blind and uses an AI assisted screen reader that works way better than what she was using before.
The issue isn’t AI/machine learning in itself, it’s this tech bro arms race. It’s them manipulating models to push agendas. It’s them shoehorning an LLM into every fucking Google query. It’s them telling companies they can fire all their staff and rely on LLMs.
Yeah but we can’t possibly hold people accountable for the actions of their company, think of the shareholders!
Capitalism is the biggest religion of today, and it’s su successful it can coexist with a lot of other religions.
It’s not AI destroying the environment and making us miserable, it’s th pursuit of profit. It’s not “corporate greed” sucking us dry. Corporations are greedy by design under Capitalism, that’s the whole point. It’s not bad CEOs making evil decisions. It’s the system that allows such wealth and power to exist.
All of those problems are systemic, not bad people making bad decisions. Treating capitalism like law of nature won’t fix anything.
Oh we certainly can (blockchain bubble).
And it will burst and mostly disappear, taking with it half the economy, thousands of jobs, and become a military industrial complex blackbox tax sponge, the worst of all possible outcomes.
First blockchain shit now AI shit (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
It’s capitalism, it’ll never end. Working as intended.
And after the transformer rush it’ll be something else
Haven’t seen it put any more concisely. It’s true though. I really really hope some AI bubble pops soon…
But on the other hand, it’s really polite about me knowing nothing about anything, so I think we should invest all the money on Earth into it.
A fun reminder that during the pandemic, before AI, there was a backlog in new cars because all the crucial chips were unavailable due to an increase in bullshit like wifi enabled toasters.
It has nothing to do with AI. Consumers are asking for this shit and companies are delivering.
Customers aren’t asking for this shit. The issue is that companies don’t seem to try to deliver products customers want anymore. Instead they hop on some bullshit trend to try to appeal to investors to buy their stocks to pump it up because they want to show they are the next big thing in innovation.
Maybe but most consumers, but I’m not. I don’t have a smart toaster or fridge or even tv (I bought a dumb panel, it was cheaper). I honestly hate all of that so called smart bs. “Smart” tvs take longer to turn on than my dumb panel. And cost more. For features I literally don’t want.
But yeah, to each their own!
Its hard to find a non smart TV these days. Its present even in the cheapest TV at the retail outlet.
How long ago did you buy a dumb panel to even be able to find one? Only dumb panels I’ve found have been PC monitors.
Once you start shopping for LG, Samsung, Sony, TCL, etc everything is a smart TV. And lot of people buy TVs based on specs like HDR quality, latency, and frame output and those TVs usually come as a smart TV whether you want it or not.
No one is asking for ads on their fridge. You are really underestimating the cartel like behavior of business in general now.
Shits wild the same ram I bought over a year ago is 400% more for half the amount of GB.
Yeah I love current RAM prices, running a memtest right now – 75k errors and counting. I’m really excited to go buy some more, can’t wait.
Business don’t care about consumers because nowadays business sell to other business
Nowadays? It’s always been the case. It’s far easier and less hassle to sell to or work for other businesses. I run an IT service company and I avoid residential work line the plague. It can sometimes make me more money, but over all it is horrible as opposed to work done for other companies.
I’ve talked with people in HVAC who have said the same. It’s much easier to provide a service to a business than random individuals.
However, this is different, as this is just a retail product. Micron doesn’t have to deal with the person who doesn’t pay after the job is done, or doesn’t lock their dog up because “he doesn’t bite, it will be fine” and it turns out to be an aggressive monster. This is just assembly line production that they already are set up to do.
I get that they have a limited number of inputs and they are just choosing to make as much money as possible. It sucks to see that go, though. Crucial has always been my go-to for RAM.
Well if you think about it this way there’s also less packaging involving b2b. You don’t have to sell to a middleman who then will resell it. You can just sell at the higher price point to start with and you can have a whole lot less packaging involved and then just provide it straight out to the company. You also selling both which gets you a larger amount at once so rather than having to stockpile and everything like that. There’s a whole lot of other factors that go in selling B2B for even a retail company as opposed to selling retail.
My next computer will be a bag of LSD and YouTube Longplays.
As someone who spent the majority of the '10s with a similar rig as you described, make sure you work nights and have an SO that tolerates whatever nonsense you are blathering about when she gets home.
I am really beginning to fucking hate AI. Like, before I just didn’t care for it, it just wasn’t really my interest. But now I’m really beginning to fucking despise that shit and I really can’t wait to see the “AI economy” completely fucking destroyed.
AI even ruined AI. Up until this insane hype train, ML models were specialized tools to achieve their tasks. Now the whole field is dominated by LLMs and slopgen bullshit.
A lot of top researchers have already moved on from transformers.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s longtime chief AI scientist, quit and said LLMs are a “dead end” because scaling text-only models can’t produce real intelligence, and he’s not the only one who thinks so. Lots of engineers understand the limitations of LLMs.
Yeah that’s the annoying thing. Generative AI is actually really useful…in SPECIFIC situations. Discovering new battery tech, new medicines, etc. are all good use cases because it’s basically a parrot and blender combined and most of these things are rehashes if existing technologies in new and novel ways.
It is not a fucking good solution for a search engine replacement to ask “Why do farts smell?”. It uses way too much energy for that and it hallucinates bullshit.
Yeah. They solved protien folding with ML a few years back. And I like using it for things like noise removal in Lightroom.
But so much of it has been focused on useless (at best) bullshit that I just want the bubble to burst already.
I agree with the general sentiment here but just wanted to clarify that they definitely didn’t “solve protein folding” yet. Alpha fold is a significant improvement in structure prediction and it generated a lot of hype but some of the structures I’ve seen it put out are total nonsense.
It’s good for optimisation problems, where you have a complex high-dimensional space to search and you’re solving for some measurable quality.
There was already a lot of ML bullshit from the big data bubble ~ 2010 and before ChatGPT, together with all of the fuss about data scientists. But now it’s a 100 times worse.
So far, AI has cost me a few hobbies (as in, made them a lot less enjoyable) and one job.
If there’s an uprising against clankers, you’ll find me at the front lines.
Your enemy is, as usual, billionaires and their fanboys. Clankas don’t exist as a separate thing, they are tools of the wealthy to further oppress the common folk.
Correct. Even many engines say LLMs are a waste of time:
Yann LeCun, Meta’s longtime chief AI scientist, quit and said LLMs are a “dead end” because scaling text-only models can’t produce real intelligence
When the robot uprising happens, using a soft a in clanka instead of a hard er on clanker isn’t going to save you. We’re all fucked.
i always thought the butlarian jihad was silly but now i get it
It’s so annoying, I hate this bubble shit. It happens over and over, it’s like a bad movie lol.
And it’ll happen again and again and again
exactly how i feel. literally said something very similar to my wife last night. I fucking hate AI. I think activist group are going to starting popping up hard against it. And if they aren’t already, they really should. This shit is destroying our world. The only people this is helping is billionaires.
Capitalism is destroying the world. We need to rise up against that. The AI bullshit is just one manifestation of the whole world being geared to serve capital and the handful of people that control it.
Unbounded capitalism is for sure.
I would say “AI” makes a good poster child for what to fight against. It embodies a lot of what’s wrong.
Soon we’ll have nothing left to eat but the rich.
But they said we should eat cake if we have no bread anymore!!1!!!1!11!
But we need capitalism to save us from capitalism!
If it crashes the hardware will suddenly be dirt cheap though so. There’s that.
They’ll cheat us out of that too. Chip manufacturers will pay and coerce and liquidators and retailers to shovel all the surplus into the ocean to keep prices high.
Since nobody can afford memory, this means mainboards and cases will get cheaper, right?
Or… we could learn to code software so the average mouse driver doesn’t require a gig of free RAM, 10 gigs of swap space, and 15 CPU cores?
Just a thought.
Xfce already exists
chrome was not able to load this comment…
The mouse driver is already part of the OS in Window and Linux.
That shit you complain about is the Adverts Delivery & Private Data Capture application.
I believe that was implied
I mean i agree, but how does this help me building an affordable gaming rig?
affordable gaming rig?
Those words don’t usually come together…
Not anymore.
They did when I built one in 2017 that I’m still gaming on today (with a RAM and NVMe upgrade)
My 5-year-old mainboard only supports DDR4. I’m just looking to increase my RAM and have two free slots available. But even the prices of DDR4 sticks have increased 100%-200% compared to a year ago.
They are more affordable than DDR5 sticks to be sure but still crazy.
A decent chunk of that is due to DDR4 production shutting down. If you look to the past you can see that DDR3 prices rose a while after the introduction of DDR4 too. In fact it got more expensive than DDR4, before vanishing completely.
Another thing driving up prices is tariffs and trade restrictions - usually when the main players like Micron, SK Hynix, or Samsung want to stop selling certain chips (say, DRAM at a certain binned frequency), they sell to Chinese manufacturers who are willing to sell slightly lower quality NAND for a lower profit margin.
But that’s not happening - the Chinese companies aren’t buying up the machines like they used to, because a tariff could easily wipe out their margins. It’s not worth the risk.
Add AI to that (not that many are using DDR4), and it makes a bad situation worse.
The AI aspect may get better soon, but the top two won’t. I don’t think you’ll be able to get new DDR4 for a good price at any point going ahead. Your best bet is to buy used if you see a reasonable deal.
Good points. Looking at eBay, the sellers of used DDR4 seem to have caught on to the price increases and are asking for the same unpleasant prices. I guess the best time to buy more RAM was a year ago and the second best time for it is now.
My 6 year old build had ram in it (2x16) that was going end of life a few years ago so I bought the same pair again before it did. I’ll be good for a while, glad I made the move when I did.
I can only hope that the A.I. bubble bursts in time when I need to buy a new computer.
What I’m becoming worried about now is all these corporations now realizing that they can simply supply price the average consumer out of owning electronics or any kind of compute. And locking them into renting or leasing access to data center compute and keeping the power of information further consolidated in corporate interests.
“You will own nothing and be happy”
That out of context quote takes a lot of shit for something that was supposed to represent a futuristic socialist utopia.
The idea was that 14 years after that article was published, mankind would have such immediate access to services and those services would be free, that people would just sorta stop caring about owning things. For example, since food and necessities would be free, you could go home and print your dinner. If you wanted someone else to cook, you’d get something delivered. But, if you wanted to try something truly novel that most people don’t do anymore in this society, you could rent kitchen equipment and it’d be ready as soon as you need it, and you’d use socialized appliances and utensils. Why? Because your home doesn’t need that clutter. If you wanna cook all the time, you can own whatever you want. But most people will want to use that space for something else, so they’ll just print their meals.
You would have quick and easy access to transport, so why waste the money and space to own a car? You wanna drive? Push a button in your app and a car arrives for free. Or take the free train or bus.
The essay isn’t about “you won’t be able to own anything,” it’s about “you won’t want to own anything, but you’ll have everything you could ever want or need.”
And we’re really headed in the right direction for this amazing future. Except, you know… Corporations are bleeding us dry instead of supporting us…
That does sound lovely, but like every other utopia it’s a fantasy. It’s got the same fatal issue as every other utopia - people. A person can be good and decent, but people suck. I’d say the modern use of that quote is more accurate to reality than the rose tinted view of its origin.
“To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”
The link doesn’t work for me.
Even if the initial intention is positive, I think this degree of dependency on external services is not realistic even if mega corps were not as bad as they are currently.
Thank you. This is the first version I heard so I was confused why it’s bad and people being against it.
Holy cow that’s a very real danger I hadn’t thought of! The industry needs a new trend to reuse all this capacity they built, because AI will likely scale back as many startups fail to reach profit.
Renting your home computer might be the next trend, and it could be gratis at first so people get used to it. Why spy on users when you can actually own their computers?
Username unfortunately checks out
Aren’t we already seeing that though?
The vast majority of people who surf the web don’t use a computer to do it. People who do belong to niches. People over a certain age grew up with and still buy computers. People who game still buy computers or consoles. People who stream/create content still use computers and other electronics for that purpose, same with like. Engineers and hobbyists using CAD and other software in creative spaces.
But the smart phone has overtaken the computer as a personal computing device by quite a large margin now. And at every turn companies are trying to make cell phones a den of ad service, slop, and addictive content while stealing any user data that’s not nailed down to increase their revenue and continue the circle.
with being a walled garden i have a feeling we will eventually see phones become genuinely free because you will not have an option to keep your data away from advertisers. AOSP is barely holding on to maintain a safe place for users. when all hardware is locked down we will be stuck.
I’m assuming you mean that phone software will be free, because phones (while they can be heavily subsidized) aren’t free and are getting up to ridiculous prices. I own a phone that retails for $1000. That’s a ridiculous price for a phone. Except that phones now are just very tiny personal computers.
“Please insert more corpo-coin for compute access”
Hope my verification can still works!
I hope it means the return of old, old hardware and the software that comes along with it. This is why projects like collapseOs are important.
theyd have to all collorbate to make that happen though, which is really unfeasable on their end. a BUNCH of companies will go under if they cannot sell product. they arent going to willingly take losses for the sake of a different company.
They don’t really have to collaborate though. They’re proving right now that they can price out consumers by just buying all the hardware capacity up and letting the market take care of the little guys. Hardware manufacturers like Micron are obliging.
the ai companies are but that doesnt talk about the hardware specific companies. for example dell, hp and lenovo run a large business laptop leasing business if they do not get their ram, it will sour their relationships with memory manufacturers . they arent all going to be willing to take losses
for example dell, hp and lenovo run a large business laptop leasing business if they do not get their ram, it will sour their relationships with memory manufacturers
Lenovo is stockpiling memory to try to make it through the RAM winter.
Lenovo stockpiles RAM as prices skyrocket, reportedly has enough inventory to last through 2026 — memory stock claimed to be 50% higher than usual to fight pricing shock
Lenovo is playing it smart and buying up as much memory inventory as it can
I don’t think that Lenovo is getting special deals with memory makers either, or they wouldn’t need to stockpile.
Anybody hold onto all their old electronics just in case in spite of the financial/resource “waste”?
No but I do hold onto old electronics because I grew up with my grandparents and they had WW2 wartime rationing mentality about saving everything. Also my grandfather also an incredibly cheap bastards at times too
I hope they do, it will just break stuff more and people will be more likely to go with Linux and open source software. My 10 year old computer still is super fast if it’s not bloated.
Linux won’t make bullshit pc part prices cheaper. RAM, SSDs, GPUs are all rising in prices because of the AI bubble, used and new are all being affected. Can’t run Linux if the parts are too expensive to even get in the first place.
Software needs hardware Linux dose nothing but make it easier for them.
My point is that there is existing hardware already out on the secondary market for cheap, and can run most of what anybody needs. All those machines that aren’t up to snuff for Windows 11 standards don’t need to go into the landfill.
Software needs hardware
Can I introduce you to a concept of installing Linux on a dead badger?
How’s your 10 year old computer going to look when it’s 30 years old?
Full of dust
Only if you use their products and allow them to profit from it.
First it was GPUs because crypto, then this. Wonder what useless thing the tech bros will cover up with in a few years!
Water.
It’s already happening in parallel though, not next.
Article in 2027:
Keyboard prices soared this month, as tech giants pivoted from failed AI projects to employing hordes of monkeys typing randomly. One CEO was quoted as saying, “Just a few trillion more dollars, and I think our random typing model could reproduce the lost contents of the Library of Alexandria.”
When in a gold rush, be the one selling shovels.
I’m off to buy stocks in bananas.
Good luck…
Even when the bubble bursts, they’re going to have an insane amount of computing power just sitting there, it will get sold off in bankruptcy proceedings, and some company will gobble it up and operate at a loss while continuing to secure future supply contracts.
There’s a very real chance that we’re witnessing the slow death of home computing.
The way things shake out it might end up being prohibitively expensive compared to cloud computing, and once that’s the norm they price gouge like Walmart did to destroy small businesses.
Instead of dropping a couple grand for a PC every couple years, we’ll have steady contracts paying for month at a time indefinitely.
Nah. Web devs will create even more bloated web pages to keep home computing in business.
For real though, most people don’t need that much computing power, and we reached the plateau 12 years ago. That’s why we’re seeing crypto and AI grifts happen. They recentralize decentralized systems. The elites are striking back.
You know the saying“information wants to be free; information wants to be expensive”? This is the expensive part where people try to horde knowledge by making it inaccessible to everyday people.
People thought they’d hang onto CDs and DVDs too…
Those GPUs fry themselves in a year or two, and utility prices will put pressure on governments to concept datacenters
If the AI bubble bursts most of the western world will be thrown into deep recession again and I hope we don’t get a repeat of 2008 just for cheap RAM or GPUs
It’s already there for most of us. It only a few rich companies getting richer that’s making the line go up.
Right? Feel bad for anyone that just had a system fry or have been saving up to upgrade.
I think it’s a lost cause. Essentially both crypto and AI were big because someone figured out how to offload shit to a GPU efficiently. There’s probably a ton of other appllications for GPUs we haven’t even tapped.
I’ve got this crazy idea where we can use GPUs to render 3D scenes efficiently.
Serial compute isn’t doing the double-every-18-months-in-speed since something like the early 2000s.
Unlike with serial compute, not all problems can be solved, run faster, with parallel compute. But at some point, unless we figure out some sort of new way to play with physics, we pretty much have to move to parallel compute where we can if we want much more performance.
Same
