I'd come at this from a different angle: we still want this to be market system, so we need to make this priced into the market. How can we price this in?
I would try to solve this by making the market structure reflect the underlying difficulty: we have to decide what capacity to produce years in advance, to construct the memory fabs. So this should be a futures market, and a capacity crunch would affect short-term-futures, but leave full term futures at the same price. Because the companies supplying the memory can just construct more capacity to fill those futures at the same cost regardless of the AI demand.
ah yes, adding a futures market to a sector heavily invested in AI certainly won't lead to catastrophic over-speculation that will collapse the industry entire
Well, the best way to solve this problem keeping it a market system is if consumers band together and create a fab that will supply them.
Since almost everybody is a consumer of those companies, I do suggest we reuse the governance system we have that solves other "everybody problems".
the market can't fix this. the problem here is that the consumer market is dwarfed by big buyers. the consumer market is simply less profitable. traditionally when a market is no longer profitable enough for big businesses, it opens the room for new small businesses to step in. but that won't work here unless someone finds a way to make small fabs profitable.
I buried the lede in my suggestion. I was saying that a future would give enough time to build or expand the fab in order to fill it. This means the company can fill an arbitrarily large number of orders - both consumers and big players - because it will just build the capacity to meet it.
but if the AI RAM market is so much more profitable than the consumer RAM market, who is going to buy consumer RAM futures?
to buy consumer RAM futures i would have to predict the price the RAM can be sold at 5 or 10 years from now. that seems very risky. why would i do that instead of buying AI RAM instead?
glimshe · · focus · HN ↗
CBLT · · focus · HN ↗
I would try to solve this by making the market structure reflect the underlying difficulty: we have to decide what capacity to produce years in advance, to construct the memory fabs. So this should be a futures market, and a capacity crunch would affect short-term-futures, but leave full term futures at the same price. Because the companies supplying the memory can just construct more capacity to fill those futures at the same cost regardless of the AI demand.
paimapi · · focus · HN ↗
marcosdumay · · focus · HN ↗
Since almost everybody is a consumer of those companies, I do suggest we reuse the governance system we have that solves other "everybody problems".
em-bee · · focus · HN ↗
CBLT · · focus · HN ↗
em-bee · · focus · HN ↗
to buy consumer RAM futures i would have to predict the price the RAM can be sold at 5 or 10 years from now. that seems very risky. why would i do that instead of buying AI RAM instead?