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Your logic that OpenAI can by proxy afford to buy out the entire world's supply of RAM because consumers value OpenAI products more than other RAM-dependent things assumes that OpenAI's money comes from selling goods or services to those consumers. It doesn't. The overwhelming majority of people pay zero dollars per year on AI services, while almost everyone spends at least a few hundred a year on gadgets that need RAM and other services that run on servers that need it as well.

The money OpenAI is using to starve the rest of us of RAM is coming from pumped up valuation through circular investments, investor FOMO, cheap debt and often straight up gambling. Rich bastards know that they can pump money into the bubble to grow it and hopefully cash out before it bursts. Nowhere in that process did any regular person value AI datacenters over other uses of RAM.



What you're pointing to is uncertainty; it is a judgement call whether or not consumers actually value these things. But if they don't open AI will lose money, assuming the market is not interfered with by bailouts, which would indeed hamper the social function of pricing. In a similar manner, this social function is hampered by interventions which manipulated credit and deby. My assumption only works in an economy where debt isn't artificially created ad hoc by the federal reserve and other banks. But that is a problem with how federal policies condition debt and finance in the modern economy, not with surge pricing. I would like to see more criticisms of the fed which essentially bankrolls bubbles like this rather than surging pricing, which performs its social function either way.




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