That was kind of my point, I don't buy any of these surveillance appliances.
But answering as a hypthetical roomba owner: As I am from the EU, this new ownership would actually be better for me. The US already mandates spying with devices like these, and has been caught multiple times doing so already. It is also known to share info with the domestic services, the latter point not being true for China.
the US does not mandate spying with roombas -- wtf are you smoking?
China absolutely shares info with all of its national police services, intelligence services, and military. Depending on the company these PLA may literally own some / most / all of the organization.
I am not in the US or China, and on balance I am less worried about the Chinese blowing my house up, but don't pretend they're nice, or that they're your friend. I don't want them having my data any more than I want the NSA, Research & Analysis Wing, or the NK Reconnaissance General Bureau.
You have the Stored Communications Act, the Patriot Act, the Cloud Act, FISA, and so on. Most of which don't require warrants if it is about non-citizens. Which is then shared, through Five Eyes and similar agreements, with foreign countries, so a workaround for not needing warrants in the target country. This is what I commented about, data sharing with the services in my country. Of course Chinese intelligence agencies will share info with the Chinese police, but they don't share with police in the EU.
Again, the root problem of course is that there is any data to share in the first place.
As an American, I'd much rather a Chinese company have data on me than an American one.
The American government and FBI and police don't have access to the Chinese company's data. But with a subpoena (and sometimes just with a friendly ask), they sure do have access to an American company's data.
Now if the US is at war with China and you're a politician or in the military, then of course get rid of every device in your home and workplace from China that could be used to spy. But if you're just a normal citizen worried about your government collecting information on you, it seems preferable to stick to foreign companies, like Chinese ones.
Yeah I think a lot of privacy advocates like to pretend they are some high value target. A nation you don't live in, that has no use for information about you is collecting information on you. What is the problem that wasn't there before? I can at least understand a principled stand of not wanting cloud connected cameras or microphones, but the China hawking is just ludacris.
It really depends. Where I live there is a large Chinese expat community, including many democracy activists from Hong Kong, Falun Gong practitioners, anti-CCP critics, and other expats who left China out of fear of persecution. They do have legitimate reasons to worry about the Chinese government tracking them down[1], and now they have to worry about whether their friends who invite them over for tea have a Roomba at home.
But if you live in an area with little exposure to these communities, I doubt the Chinese government would care about your private information.
But no matter who I am I certainly wouldn't want North Korea to have my private information, because they'd have no qualms about finding ways to use it to empty my bank account.
The US is the biggest world wide surveillance state by far. If you don't worry about that why would you worry about NK a country that has 0 soft power and will have 0 impact on your life whatsoever. At that point I'd give my data more willingly to Russia or China, at last it would equilibrate things a bit
BTW this also works the other way: I find myself to avoid US products more and more because they tend to come with inbuilt obsolescence, or, for digital products, with dark patterns preventing subscription cancelling.
I find it very telling that both Samsung and SK Hynix already stated that they don't plan to expand capacity - officially to prevent overcapacity in the future. It would also be plausable that both doubt OpenAI will follow through with the contract.
Expanding manufacturing capacity takes many years. Memory has historically been a cyclical business with boom and bust periods. It’s reasonable for manufacturers to be cautious about deciding to expand.
If the demand holds I’m sure they’ll expand. Until then, I think they see it as a short term supply spike.
They don't need to expand capacity to fulfill this contract.
They would want to expand capacity if they believed this increase in demand is long lasting - the implication is therefore that they don't believe it, or not enough to risk major capital expenditures.
You saw the same with GPU makers not wanting to expand capacity during the Cryptocurrency boom. They don't want to be left holding the bag when the bubble pops.
Part of that equation, FWIW, is that certain countries would flood the market with supply to make any new projects suddenly unprofitable.
Which sucks extra bad because if you shut the project down but start it back up you can't just flip a switch. Gotta put together a whole new team and possibly retrain them.
I sincerely hope that OpenAI goes down in flames with those DRAM contracts are going to the highest bidder then so probably Google or whatever AI competitor.
Honestly having problems remembering the other AI companies without googling it. I recall MS, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Anthropic.
When OpenAI fails, all the AI projects everywhere else will also be killed. Such is the nature of bubbles. With any luck the farm land where the datacenters were built will be sold back to the farmers for half off and they get a free barn out of the deal.
It's more likely that overcapacity is put to work in a plan B, like cheap cloud virtual desktops. Why spend effort on spying and tracking users when their whole desktop computer is in your data center?
I love the randomness of this question, at least in my context.
Las time I bought something at Sears was the spring of 2008; a new set of tires for my car, and they were bad so I never went back. Also, there aren't a lot of Sears in Mexico.
When the AI bubble pops, it's going to take the good parts of AI out with it.
Capitalism has never been about the survival of the fittest. That's just weird Nietzschean-Libertarian fantasy where someone ends up blaming the lack of truly free markets for their inability to get a date.
Any large building in a rural area will be used as a barn if it has no other useful purpose. It's kind of hilarious when I pass by the old AT&T long lines facility being used as a hay barn.
I refuse to read the AI slop that passes for journalism about the contracts OpenAI bought, but if they take physical delivery and open actual datacenters built with the RAM they'll be parted out at the minimum, if not absorbed by another AI provider or Big Tech in general.
> prevent overcapacity" is just a fancy way of saying "we prefer to gouge consumers at little risk to us."
No it’s not. Memory business has been cyclical for years. Over expansion is a real risk because new manufacturing capacity is very expensive and takes a long time to come online.
If they could make new manufacturing come online quickly they would do it and capture the additional profit of more sales.
If you present an operating profit of €25 billion USD, yes, in a healthy true market competition would force you to either A) eat into your profit margin by reducing prices or B) invest in R&D and capacit-
Actually, let me eat my words, you are right. As I typed this I saw some news from an hour ago[0] about SK Hynix planning to invest about $500 billion into 4 more fabs. I imagine [hope] Samsung will follow, and together with Chinese memory fabs ramping up both in capacity and technology, prices will return to earth in 2027, maybe 2028.
Guess I am just a little too bitter because GPU prices finally seemed to normalize after half a decade of craziness. Topped with corporations in the West usually forgoing investment and using profits like these to do massive stock buybacks and dividends, souring my expectations.
Additional profit? They're making a lot more money right now than if they had more supply.
The risk of overexpansion is real but I really doubt they want to expand much in the next couple years. They don't have to worry about being undercut by small competitors so they can enjoy the moment.
No they are making higher margins, but not getting as much profit as they could have.
Look at the standard Econ 101 supply-demand curve.
If they could make and sell twice as many chips, it would not cut there margins anywhere near half. They would be making much more.
When demand spikes up and down there will be pain. Because booms are not predictable, in timing, size or duration. And accelerating supply expansion is very expensive, slow, and risky.
Many boom prompted RAM supply expansions have ended in years of unprofitable over capacity.
Price spikes like we are seeing reflect tremendous pent-up/increased demand.
Any price increase reduces purchases by many customers. This tends to keep prices stable. With only small changes in price relative to regular changes in demand.
Yet prices have gone way up.
Which means that many people and businesses are cancelling, delaying, or scaling back their RAM purchases. And yet new demand is incredibly high.
To get prices down, supply would have to grow tremendously. Enough to soak up even more purchases from the very motivated, and to cover all the purchasers that have currently pulled back.
There's room for making more, but I don't think doubling makes sense from a profit point of view.
Especially because the demand curve that's skyrocketing right now is the RAM that isn't in long-term contracts. Doubling all production would much more than double the RAM available for normal purchases.
> To get prices down, supply would have to grow tremendously. Enough to soak up even more purchases from the very motivated, and to cover all the purchasers that have currently pulled back.
Is "down" here back to normal levels?
But normal levels are like a tenth of the profit margin. They'd make significantly less money doing that.
For the China part: Yes, the "by force" part certainly exists as a position, in competition to the peaceful unification approach. It's important to keep in mind, though, that the confrontative position of the first Trump administration and afterwards the Biden administration significantly helped the "by force" faction. There was an interesting piece in Foreign Policy about that, a social scientist from the US was questioning Chinese students at an elite university on this very topic and thus had the chance to do a time series observing the attitude change following US actions.
Secondly, in Taiwanese politics, Unification is actually a big topic and even has its own party, the New Party, advocating for it (plus the fringe CUPP). Not popular right now, but certainly existing - and evidently falsifying the notion that the all of "Taiwan doesn't want to be part of Beijing's China".
So according to your logic, it only counts if it's unanimous inside Taiwan to not be taken over by Beijing but it doesn't need to be unanimous for those who want reunification with China?
No. I pointed out that both the "by force" statement for China and the "Taiwan doesn't want" statement are so oversimplified that they became factually incorrect. The "logic" is your inference and neither stated nor implied by me.
The existance of a faction within Taiwan that wants Taiwan to reunify with Beijing's China isn't materially relevant if they don't have any path forward to accomplish their goal.
This is about international relations. You won't get any insight into it if you reduce any point you don't like to argumentative metaphors.
Even within the framework of (structural) realism so popular in contemporary US politics there's this well-known problem that the buildup of defense capabilities of party A looks like aggression to party B - and vice versa. See the seminal work Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Or the relations of Britain and Germany before WW1 and WW2.
The FP article I mentioned, "Trump’s Trade War May Make Elite Young Chinese More Nationalistic" [1], illustrates the argument. You have actual empirical data, changing over time, after exposure to the "treatment". So at least a hint of causality.
No no, I mean that one does not conduct foreign relations with fear that your approach might give fuel to the local autocracy to whip up fabricated nationalist riots.
How many crashes per mile for Waymo etc. would be the more interesting metric - if the competition has better numbers there is no excuse for risking people's safety with inferior tech
You'd have to be doing something where the unified memory is specifically necessary, and it's okay that it's slow. If all you want is to run large LLMs slowly, you can do that with split CPU/GPU inference using a normal desktop and a 3090, with the added benefit that a smaller model that fits in the 3090 is going to be blazing fast compared to the same model on the spark.
Eh, this is way overblown IMO. The product page claims this is for training, and as long as you crank your batch size high enough you will not run into memory bandwidth constraints.
I've finetuned diffusion models streaming from an SSD without noticeable speed penalty at high enough batchsize.
As someone from Europe, I certainly am at least equally uncomfortable with products from the US. Made in USA to me equals zero concept of privacy protection but plenty state surveillance (CLOUD Act, Cisco having hard coded back doors every two weeks etc.) and recently even lack of rule of law and even threats of annexation of European land and interference in domestic elections.
Sure, China will probably also spy and conduct industrial espionage, just as the US, but they appear to be a rational actor and have never threatened the sovereignty of European countries.
the US has a recent history of extra-terrestrial law enforcement, both in ally countries (kim dotcom, meng wanzhou), and non-ally countries (bin laden). that's the main fear. w.r.t. the US, everybody is at risk, all the time.
if you don't do anything wrong, you won't get into trouble, and out of 8 billion people in the world, only a handful of people get in trouble. the problem is, the definition of trouble can change.
