The same thing it was designed to do and has always done: create unimaginable sums of money out of thin air that it loans to the government, with interest.
How about if you run this loop (one year from now) on this kind of hardware but with something like Claude/Kimi K2. How about that? Because that's where it'll go.
I can't shake the feeling that the RAM shortage was intentionally created to serve as a sort of artificial moat by slowing or outright preventing the adoption of open weight models. Altman is playing with hundreds of billions of other people's dollars, trying to protect (in his mind) a multi-trillion dollar company. If he could spend a few billion to shut down access to the hardware people need to run competitor's products, why wouldn't he?
From what I understand the RAM producers see the writing on the wall. They’re not going to invest in massively more capacity only to have it sit completely idle in 10 years.
RAM shortage is probably a bubble indicator itself. That industry doesn’t believe enough in the long term demand to build out more capacity.
It's very difficult to "intentionally create" a real shortage. You can hoard as much as you want, but people will expect you to dump it all right back onto the market unless you really have a higher-value use for the stuff you hoarded (And then you didn't intentionally create anything, you just bought something you needed!).
Plus producers will now feel free to expand production and dump even more onto the market. This is great if you needed that amount of supply, but it's terrible if you were just trying to deprive others.
In my late teens, I worked as a bill collector. If I suspected an account owner was deceased, I'd call the Social Security Administration and ask them if they had a certificate of death on file. If they didn't, they'd tell me they couldn't comment. If they did, they'd say so, because dead people don't have a right to privacy.
Everyone has easy access right now. Everyone had easier access before the TikTok deal. That's the wrong direction for a free country and it's particularly alarming because the deal was forced by the government.
You should see what Google has done with the latest version of the Phone app. You used to be able to click on contacts and that would show you.. your contacts. Now it shows recent calls with a search bar for contacts. Say I want to call a friend named Dave. As soon as I start typing, search results begin populating, but none of the names it offers start with "D", they just contain "D" somewhere. It could be the middle of a last name. And I can't figure out why they'd fuck this up. There are no ads to be injected into my attempts to find a contact, so I have to wonder if this is just the beginning of a push to ruin every convenience so users will turn to Gemini for everything.
It's not as bad as you say. If you search in the Phone app, a single letter search returns contacts with a name field (and then a company field, and then a notes field) starting with that letter. It works reasonably well.
The Contacts app is worse and returns anything with a string anywhere in the contact details starting with that letter.
