The RAM shortage could last years

That card only had 16GB of memory; its memory bandwidth was 1TB/s.

That guarantee is not as much of a guarantee as stated in the media. You get a guarantee it will be planned at a certain time (as in looked at), not that it will be build. The cost of doing business is taking risks and mitigating them. There is a reason the nuclear plant in Borsele was build: an aluminium smelter. Maybe you should arrange for something similar as a datacenter (no politician will fall on a sword for that but you can try). The (original) power draw is about the same 80-100MW.

China already has a well developed DRAM industry, as DRAM is somewhat easier than logic, and can tolerate a much higher defect rate. The industry will figure this out.

Another point is I often see the money argument - like country X has more money, so they can afford to do more and better R&D, make more stuff.

This stuff comes out of factories, that need to be built, the machinery procured, engineers trained and hired.

Maybe if they had no competitors...

love that theres virtually infinite capital there. meanwhile in the rest of the world there is virtually no food.

I think you're massively overestimating how much money is really accessible here. The parent comment's right that all of the easily available VC & private equity investment is basically used up. OpenAI was struggling to sell $600M of private equity, the big multi-billion dollar investment packages had lots of conditions and non-cash in it.

> more can be reallocated from the federal government (funded with debt)

While this is the most reliable funding, it's still not very accessible. OpenAI is a money pit, and their demands are growing quickly. The US government has started a bunch of very expensive spending. If OpenAI were to require yearly bundles of it's recent "$120B" deal, that's 6% of the US' discretionary budget. 12.5% of the non-military discretionary budget. (And the military is going to ask for a lot more money this year) Even the idea of just issuing more debt is dubious because they're going to want to do that to pay for the wars that are rapidly spiralling out of control.

None of this is saying that the US government can't or wouldn't pay for it, but it's non trivial and it's unclear how much Altman can threaten the US government "give me a trillion dollars or the economy explodes" without consequences.

Further deficit-spending isn't without it's risks for the US government either. Interests rates are already creeping up, and a careless explosion of deficit may well trigger a debt crisis.

> from public companies (funded with people’s retirement funds)

This would be at great cost. OpenAI would need to open up about it's financial performance to go public itself. With it's CFO being put on what is effectively Administrative Leave for pushing against going public, we can assume the financials are so catastrophic an IPO might bomb and take the company down with it. Nobody's going to be investing privately in a company that has no public takers.

Getting money through other companies is also running into limits. Big Tech has deep pockets but they've already started slowing down, switching to debt to finance AI investment, and similarly are increasingly pressured by their own shareholders to show results.

> from people’s pockets via wealth redistribution upwards

The practical mechanism of this is "AI companies raise their prices". That might also just crash the bubble if demand evaporates. For all the hype, the productivity benefit hasn't really shown up in economy-wide aggregates. The moment AI becomes "expensive", all the casual users will drop it. And the non-casual users are likely to follow. The idea of "AI tokens" as a job perk is cute, but exceedingly few are going to accept lower salary in order to use AI at their job.

There's simply not much money to take out of people's pockets these days, with how high cost of living has gotten.

> from offshore investment.

This is a pretty good source of money. The wealthy Arabian oil states have very deep slush funds, extensively investing in AI to get ties to US businesses and in the hope of diversifying their resource economies.

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"Was". Was a good source of money.

While we're giving away bags, I'd like HDD manufacturers to get some too.

They won't be, prices are high because they are refusing to build capacity for demand that may evaporated by the time they are done. They are holding back and building only enough so when the bubble pops they will be fine.

I am not convinced that more context will be useful, practical use of current models at 1mil context window shows they get less effective as the window grows. Given model progress is slowing as well, perhaps we end up reaching a balance of context size and competency sooner than expected.

That's not what consumes the most memory at scale. The KV caches are per-user.

I think RAM shortages would be the least of our problems…

Assuming China takes TSMC in one piece (unlikely without internal sabotage in the best case scenario), it would still probably take years before it produces another high end GPU or CPU.

We would probably be stuck with the existing inventory of equipment for a long time…

> They’re basically a cartel,

The lawsuits in the past prove that statement to not be basically but actually.