Yeah exactly. 150% is good. 1500% would be better.

Is OpenAI likely to fold?

They bought in one day a significant % of the worlds memory output for 2026. Two huge deals with two huge companies, announced at the same time. Neither company knew of the other deal. But those deals weren’t even for chips- they were for finished wafers. I doubt very much OpenAI has the facilities to slice and package wafers. So it seems to me the only point of the deal was to kill the DRAM supply market and drive up prices for their competition.

Wouldn’t be surprised if those finished wafers are going straight in the dumpster.

“For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread,”

I would correct that to say ‘for this to not be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this a. Exist and b. Are significant enough to justify the extreme costs of building these systems’

Right now I don’t see anything coming out of this that justifies even 1/10 of the $trillions being poured into AI.

In fact I think you could make an argument that the net result is negative, even for businesses that adopt it, due to the increased prices they will pay for hardware over the next few years. If it makes your employees 5% more efficient great, if it makes your technology 50% more expensive in return, not so great.

It becomes an everybody problem when we can’t buy memory chips

Sounds like a fantastic deal to me.

I’ll add to that- within a year’s time, less than 50% of the affected devices will even have a patch available.

The crazy thing is, none of these articles seem to want to admit that AI is bad.

As the old quote goes- “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.””

In such an environment, nobody wants to admit they are not mad, lest they be attacked.

Or as someone else said- I want a future where machines cook and clean and do menial work, so us humans can focus on art and poetry and writing. Instead we have a world where machines create art and poetry and books, so the humans can focus on cleaning and menial work. I don’t like this timeline.

Exactly this. I would love to see just one tech company stand up and say we are not doing AI, our AI budget is $0 and our product will not ship with AI. If you really want to use AI with our system you can download a plug-in or something but we won’t waste our time writing one.

They would get a million users overnight.

I general, I agree 100%.

There’s an exception for Remedy though. They have a strong track record of not releasing underwhelming unfinished crap.

I couldn’t agree more. Acting like a million dollar company is important.

A million dollar company would recognize that reliable, continuous production and sales is more important to growth than the occasional hickup or a few extra bucks in the payroll budget. Thus, the million dollar company would hire sufficient staff that an occasional absence, even at a critical moment, would not harm production or sales.

And a million dollar company would recognize that hiring sufficient staff is a wiser and more cost effective strategy than a possible labor lawsuit along with the associated bad PR.

If only that was a legal cause of action…

What’s there to sue for? Companies shut down product lines and brands all the time.

That’s why I said, different approaches.

My approach is targeted at somebody who just wants to get clean as quickly as possible, and the machine can help them do that faster and with less effort than a manual shower.

If you are going for luxury, or if you need help doing it like an elderly person, then the sit-down submerging spa is absolutely the way to go.

How so?

I think there’s two different approaches to this. This chair is obviously designed as a luxury experience, as the process takes a full 15 minutes.
My idea is designed for efficiency, to reduce the amount of time it takes to bathe in the morning without reducing cleanliness.

Interesting idea. Seriously over-engineered though.

If you want a ‘human washer’ you don’t need a $350k fancy chair with heart rate monitors. Just take a page out of the automatic car wash.

Human stands in a stall. Shower allows human washing of hair and face. Then just hold arms out making a diamond in front of you (think TSA body scanner position, but with arms forward instead of upward) and a 360° robotic sprayer starts at the neck and goes down spraying soapy water, then back up again with a slight up angle to get the groin and armpits. Shower comes back on to de-shampoo hair, then the same 360 robot does two passes with clean water to rinse everything off.

If you get fancy with machine vision and body position sensors, the 360 wand could flip 90° to do the hair and would be angled backward a bit so it doesn’t get water or soap in your face.

You could build this for a lot less than $350k. And instead of $1500 worth of body sensors you have a $50 waterproof emergency stop button.

Never said they were my friend. They might have been once, in the ‘Don’t be evil’ era, but that era is long past.

They are however somewhat more interested in open standards than Apple. Android for example uses OGG a bunch under the hood.

Nobody knows what to do with it because it’s proprietary and requires a license. If it was not encumbered, windows would ship with a decoder built-in for free and nobody would have a problem. If Apple devices didn’t use it by default, no one would have a problem because they just wouldn’t use it for anything ever.

If Apple got sick of paying the fee, they could switch to AVIF or JPEG XL or anything else. It wouldn’t be hard, just bake native support into the next OS of everything, and have the next iPhone take pictures in that format by default. The rest of the world will catch up right quick.

Actually come to think of it I’m kind of surprised Google doesn’t do that. Make the native Android camera shoot in AVIF by default…

Yeah but look at the AV1 hardware support matrix. A lot of current mobile silicon supports decode, not nearly as much supports encode. To have AV1 truly replace MP4/MP5 a hardware encode is necessary so you can do video calls in AV1.

The one who could really make this happen is Apple. If they decided to move away from MPEG-LA and embraced open codecs (AV1 / VP9 / Opus / FLAC / AVIF / JPEGXL / JPEG2000), supporting them in software, hardware, and their services (imessage/ichat/facetime, music store, video store) that would single handedly push the industry.

They did that with HEIC- before iPhones switched to HEIC by default nobody bothered with the encumbered format. Now it’s become de facto standard. That SHOULD have been something open like AVIF, JPEG XL, etc.

I’m kinda in the same boat. My main box was used, only a couple hundred bucks and it’s served me pretty well. Same thing with all my other personal PCs for the last 5-7 years.
If you’re not gaming, the benefit of going new is pretty limited. The hardware outpaced the software.

Perhaps, but if that involves desoldering BGA chips and remounting them on new cards, do you really think someone’s gonna bother to do that?
Especially if the chips are optimized for AI and don’t perform well for games?