Scientist says RAM pricing has risen to normalized 2007 levels, AI shortage undid 20 years of progress in a matter of months — memory prices had been falling exponentially for decades

@ThomasWilliams@lemmy.world 2026-08-09 02:25

RAM prices haven’t been normalised they are still rising.

@JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 2026-08-09 03:42

It should be noted that they haven’t become harder or more expensive to make. They just cost more.

@brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2026-08-08 20:07

Well, the current trajectory points to: LLM capabilities topping out. All the tooling around them not keeping up anyway. Actual “AGI” being distant and completely unrelated to contemporary models. Inference costs plummeting. The last one is critical. Right this second, you can run Minimax H3 on a desktop for the tiny fraction of the compute/RAM OpenAI Sora took. And it’s better. In a month, it will be ~8X faster. You can run DeepseekV4 flash, dirt cheap, and get what Claude was less than a year ago. And it’s gonna spread to every host out there, to systems like Cerebas ASICs that don’t even need HBM. So… Even if you’re an AI acolyte. And we go with that for the sake of argument… We don’t actually need all that RAM for hosting generative models? I’m very interested to see what happens to all these datacenters over the next two-three years. They spent all this money on something that’s gonna be cheap as dirt to run, largely run locally, and that won’t need so much matrix-multiply on GPUs once bitnet takes off, sooo… they can’t make money off that. What happens then? What happens to all those Stargate RAM wafers, and excess datacenters?

Open ##4509995

@StrawberryPigtails@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-08-08 15:35

About the only upside to this that I can think of is that maybe, just maybe, programmers will start being more frugal with their memory usage. Everything else just sucks.

Open ##4511172

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