[acephal]

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.

[pmdr]

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.

[lovich]

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

[dontlaugh]

How so?

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.

[beeflet]

a dystopian world in which computer memory is sort of expensive, god save us

[derektank]

We’re contemplating jailing people for buying manufactured goods at the market price now?

[stackskipton]

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.

[hodgehog11]

As always, it's the intent that matters.

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.

[kasabali]

They didn't buy "manufactured goods", they reserved 40% of the yearly wafer output for the whole world that haven't even been made yet for themselves.

[sh34r]

The Sherman Antitrust Act has outlawed abuses of monopsony power since 1890.

What we should really be asking is, why did we ever stop jailing wanton criminals like Scam Alt-Man?

[Analemma_]

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.

[heavyset_go]

People go to prison for market manipulation all of the time.

[back_to_basics]

A gross mischaracterization, really.

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.

[Dylan16807]

Didn't they sign some big contacts to lock in non-market prices?

[energy123]

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.

[Palmik]

Jailed for what? Apple routinely buys out majority of TSMC's production capacity (at the bleeding edge), should Tím Cook go to jail?

[Der_Einzige]

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.

[jdprgm]

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.

[cyanydeez]

He's just one of the ringleaders of the AI parade. This certainly isn'tjust him, just like the american corruption isn't just donald trump

[beeflet]

Won't someone think of the gamers?

[neogodless]

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.

[Tadpole9181]

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?

[sh34r]

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.

[heavyset_go]

We need to normalize tar & feathering again.