Avoiding the winner-take-all trap requires a lot political efforts of the kind that's non-existent at the moment. Besides, winners and losers can be hand-picked these days, it's a simple process.
Because there are a few winners who are happy to collectively monopolize the market - e.g RAM - nobody is increasing production, China is blocked from the market by sanctions and tariffs, the rest are more than happy to ask for a 1000% more than just a few years ago. Why would they do anything else - it's absolutely not in their interest for the prices to come down.
> There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI.
There isn't and won't be any "intense competition" - nobody can compete without hardware and it's now monopolized and affordable only to a token few.
> It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.
In the light of the current reality, this can only be classified as hallucinations. Actually, previously commoditized markets have become inaccessible and the trend is the exact opposite of what you're saying. It's bizarre to read naked assertions, which are not only without evidence but with all evidence pointing to the opposite.
> That competition is going to bring down costs for everything.
Back to reality, a new Teddy Roosevelt isn't going to magically reappear, not in either of the two parties. Imagine the world without him... we're almost there.
> The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle.
Untrue. Technology has been evolving perfectly fine for the last 50 years. If anything it has slowed down lately due to getting close to the physical limits - which were reached without any AI whatsoever. We were getting insane gains in clock speed and memory capacity some 20 odd years ago, it's not the case any more.
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years.
No we don't, inflation tells you that loud and clear. If the Fed wanted to really take care of the raging (but under-reported) inflation, they'd have to raise interest rates a lot more but that would kill the pump-up operation of the AI market bubble. So the Fed is sitting on their hands.
> Give me everything you have got.
That figures. I'm pretty sure you're never going to say "We're giving you everything we've got". The asset pump works only one way - up, trickle down is for losers. You see, the trillionares aren't waiting for the bright future, they're grabbing all they can right now, only the peons are forced to "give everything they've got" while on a steady diet of hallucinations which can never materialize.
Of course it's gatekeeping, that's obvious. What's a little less obvious is that the gatekeepers are using bots for their anti-slop SLOP. It takes just a bit of fine-tuning to make a low-param LLM work well as a generator of anti-slop SLOP.
This form of gatekeeping is so fiercely defended because it's one of the cheapest, easiest and with effects that far surpass its cost. It's beloved by bot-farms everywhere and old as the world, or at least as the first story about the thief yelling "catch the thief".
> If you are a software dev, go volunteer at a library and offer up your time to do this.
You misunderstand the environment, "offering" doesn't work if the library haven't asked for help, in that case you're just ignored. You see, whatever you do for them would require participation and at least some effort on their side.
Some other organization could help here, but going to the library and begging them to let you help them is a non starter.
Public libraries are public institutions and are controlled by towns and counties, in a few different common ways. To affect change in the town or county's library, you can participate in that process.
History is repeating itself, as a farce, of course. The 2008-2009 bailout of insurers actually bailed out the crooks insured by them... oh look, they are now fully insured all over again.
It hasn't been long since then but no lessons have been learned or even facts remembered. We are again fighting fictitious nukular weapons, scamming the market, insurance and the financial system as a whole. The so called Social "Science" is nowhere to be found, not even to remind us about the pertinent facts.
> I haven't heard of that being a problem for Starlink, whatever they've done there seems to be working.
Starlink doesn't need GPUs, they use hardened chips. The first question is, can whatever works as a 2nm GPU work where Starlink is?
The second question is even funnier: Starlink satellites have a limited lifespan and regularly burn up in the atmosphere when they fall back to Earth - that's due to the need to fly them at low altitudes where, coincidentally, the radiation is lower.
Where then will the flying data centers be - high with higher radiation or low with a higher fall rate? And I doubt those heavy birds are going to burn up fully before hitting somebody's head.
The question is why supply is restricted, primarily by sanctions and tariffs to China, and the expressed refusal of RAM makers to even think about increasing supply, they are actually all sweaty about China taking a bit of the unrestricted market.
> on Hacker News, I've come to associate its readership with cheap bastards
They might be cheap but they surely aren't stupid. They sure know who not to trust, security beats imaginary profits promised by cheap used-car salesmen who did move software jobs to wherever they could spare a dime.
And you want us to defend their current profits which they swear to use for the removal of the remaining software jobs...
Avoiding the winner-take-all trap requires a lot political efforts of the kind that's non-existent at the moment. Besides, winners and losers can be hand-picked these days, it's a simple process.
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