I do think the consumer market might still look depressing in upcoming years, but I don’t think there will be one AI company left. I mean, even if we don’t take it literally, like I also wanted to mention how OpenAI gets to build its fabulous data centers while Anthropic just signs partnerships, and both LLMs (ChatGPT and Claude) are good and competitive. And don’t forget about FOSS models like DeepSeek.

There is something those companies aren’t loud and clear about, like they don’t talk about architectural bottlenecks, that what they need is not scaling but an architectural shift. And once photonics enters the game, should we expect the prices[*] to drop or will they justify it by even more compute power.

[*] edit: I mean LLM pricing (tokens), not chips

AFAIK, before AI it was COVID coupled with cryptomining, yet the only thing it hurt was GPU prices going up, not DRAM. Now, we have both GPUs and RAM sticks costing as much as a decent PC that you could build at least two years ago… yeah, I am somewhat hurt over my dream of building a high-end battlestation, which might not come to reality anytime soon.

nobody is going to get sued

I gotta agree with you, because the people who are currently suing memory makers seem to be names I’ve never heard of, maybe they are trying to cut some money for personal profit. But even Valve was frustrated with the way how they are unable to negotiate the prices, it’s like only a few companies can (like OAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, etc.), basically the ones who are currently “in control” of stock market prices.

It makes me think of when Epic Games sued Apple: at some point, there could be more “smaller” companies like Valve that would be frustrated with the situation enough to do something about it. Maybe we should boycott the use of AI (unlikely), maybe we should boycott buying next gen consoles (more likely), etc. We can do something about it if we, as a society, become more conscious about the situation, even though conscious consumerism sounds overly optimistic.