Comment by Alchemista

2 days ago

So frontier AI can monopolize all the silicon in the world, demand they be the only place to run inference, and then strictly control what people do with it. I'm sorry the way you pose it makes it seem like it is some free market.

What we are seeing starting to evolve is a deeply distorted market.

8 comments

Alchemista

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no-name-here  1 day ago

1. Is there no “silicon in the world” available to anyone other than frontier AI companies?

2. Which frontier AI leaders are demanding they are the only place to run inference?

  • johnnyanmac  5 hours ago

    1. if you haven't seen the whole ram supply thing... apparently the answer is virtually "no".

    2. I think that was OpenAI this time. But maybe it was Anthropic.

    • no-name-here  4 hours ago

      >> Is there no “silicon in the world” available to anyone other than frontier AI companies?

      > if you haven't seen the whole ram supply thing…

      1. I've read about RAM supply, but I've also actually taken a look at shops and silicon is still for sale, so I am not sure how the claim is defensible - how are you quantifying it? And for "all of the silicon in the world"? And how much for non-frontier AI, and how much silicon for non-AI? (For what it's worth, Google AI says the claim is false.)

      > demand they be the only place to run inference

      2. I searched but can't find such a quote from any company - perhaps the quote was made up by a site in order to push an anti-AI viewpoint? Or what is the exact quote you are referring to? (For what it's worth, Google AI also says that claim is false too.)

mrguyorama  2 days ago

I don't know what else to tell you, but yes a world where a company is free to single handedly buy all compute and then rent it out to you for insane prices is quite literally a free market.

If you do anything to prevent that, that would be a less free market. By definition.

Free markets have nothing to do with a market having healthy competition and sane behavior. Free markets in fact reward you with doing absurd things that fuck with prices to make your bag.

It is entirely the point of the free market that Micron can decide that selling all memory to only Anthropic is a better distribution of their resources and you can go pound sand if you can't find any memory any more.

So yes, monopolizing all silicon in the world and then demanding you pay them for using it is literally a free market.

Free markets trend torwards monopolies and other market failures without intervention excepting very specific markets that have genuinely mostly fungible products that are easy to sell, which we call commodities, and even those can in fact become failed markets like what once happened with onions.

If you think this can't be a free market because it's in a bad place for you personally, you don't understand market theory.

Free markets are also free to become "distorted" as you say.

  • pogue  2 days ago

    An excellent analogy for doing away with free markets and going back to, at the very least, mixed economys with some sort of oversight to prevent these kinds of things from happening again.

  • Alchemista  2 days ago

    Have you ever heard of antitrust... I know the US just threw out all attempts at curbing anti-competitive practices, so I can perhaps forgive you if you don't even understand the concept. I think your definition of free market is extremely distorted. Maybe you should check your history books and the field of economics.