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 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.
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
Shits wild the same ram I bought over a year ago is 400% more for half the amount of GB.
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.
Translation, Micron is shutting down Crucial for short term shareholder value at the cost of a sustainable and proven long term brand and channel.
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.
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)
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.
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
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”
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.
Haven’t seen it put any more concisely. It’s true though. I really really hope some AI bubble pops soon…
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.
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.
No one is asking for ads on their fridge. You are really underestimating the cartel like behavior of business in general now.
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.
For a second I thought Micron was an insult for Macron.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Damn…
