Dramatic swings like the ones we are experiencing are -- in the long run -- not good. Altman is the mis-allocation. It's like fiber in the late 90s. To be the firstest with the mostest, they are paying tippy-top prices (with other peoples' money) for something that could be done at 1/2, 1/4, 1/10... the cost a year later. There are so many potential scenarios ending a price collapse. Product ends up in warehouses, sold for pennies on the dollar, or in landfills. Suppliers go from record profits to bankruptcy.

And worst of all, most house slaves in this country have their pensions tied up in the limited number of funds offered by their company -- most of which automatically feed into this mis-allocation. The employee is powerless to opt-out of it without sacrificing his company match and/or vestiture.

It smells like delusions of grandeur, to be so shameless about asserting his own enterprise as the highest priority for society.

Whether he truly has these beliefs or just cynically thinks it is a good way to message, it disturbs me. It only makes it worse, seeing how quickly these new platforms can invade and contaminate the fourth estate (or the mass-market communications that have essentially subsumed that role already).

I won't blame Altman here. Memory companies secretly love this. LLM will always be commercialized after people discovered it if it's not Altman it would be another person. And you cannot genuinely say people do not find LLM useful. You cannot genuinely say people will not use LLMs hence there is no demand for compute capacity. OpenAI and others are simply satisfying the compute demand here. Memory companies have secretly loved for an application to drive up the prices of memory chips. And you can't blame them, these foundry workers, physics Phds working at fab companies have worked much harder than your software web app engineers while earning far less. But what they build is a critical enabler of everything digital and much higher barrier to entry. If hyperscaler don't want to pay for exorbitant high memory prices, they can invest and build their own. But why don't they? This is exactly what you are describing free market economy, pricing is based on scarcity. Maybe its time for the world to actually value hardware and semiconductor for their worth.