Right… In this instance I would argue openAI is the shared channel. There are three memory manufacturers now illegally rigging the market as a push back against the corporate AI. Something like a memory oligopoly VS ai monopsony?

If we all have inference, we avoid clogging shared channel.

And as for megabytes, the value of the megabyte isn’t a finite resource and the value of it is determined by what data is served in the megabyte and the cell companies didn’t care what megabytes you’re getting charged for (example full bitrate advertisements on YouTube). I still think that’s a valid argument to be had.

By the value based on scarcity of bandwidth logic, the phone companies would be able to charge peak megabyte hours to specific websites (again like they used to for telephone calls with plans that included free calls at night) when in fact they can handle much more bandwidth now. In reality when it comes to that traffic, it’s often the providers at the ends of the line who have to suffer the constraints of demand. Maybe they should charge per minute of video accessed or it could be a solved problem in a hyper-competitive, over-saturated marketplace.

I understand what you are saying. I just don’t believe it applies in this specific domain any longer. This is potentially a more valid take an underserved market.

Ram is so cheap to make that until the AI demand companies basically had to create new levels of density/speed and sell for less just to keep the business afloat. This is like when cellphone companies tried to claim megabytes were a precious finite resource. We live in a post scarcity society and these billion assholes are like “well that just won’t do”.

It reminds me of that kid we all know who just learned economics from school house rock and then goes “now if I can simply find every evee Pokémon card in the world and burn them all except for the one I have, I’ll be rich!”

It’s just so frustrating to see this sheer stupid amount of greed all of the time. Thanks for coming to my TEDex talk.

“Game developers are seen as free labour” I emphatically agree.

There used to be a commercial for a school called Westwood College Online University. The gist of it was in the commercial it showed two dudes playing video-games. The infamous “tighten up the graphics on level three” commercial.

The message of this commercial pissed off so many people at the time but I often think people misread its intentions. A lot of folks would say to me “This is a joke, video-games are much harder to make. This school is a joke too.”

The message I got from it was much more sinister. It suggests three things simultaneously:

1. video game development jobs are dream jobs where you don’t do “real work”.
2. You should feel lucky just to have this job. You can be this lucky too.
3. You can defraud your parents by taking this college program but really you’re just playing video games. Your parents are dumb.

Video game jobs from that era into the 2000s were looking for eager young people to make games because these adult-children were often suburban, middle class kids with support systems in place. Studios could offer unpaid internships for any opportunity to work at their “dream job”. When in reality, these parents were effectively paying these studios to hire their children. They had hopes that their children could climb a corporate ladder starting at a higher level. Their parents often were boomers with access to that wealth.

TLDR; I 100% agree with you. The video game industry is the way it is because it’s been addicted to free labor for a long time. They have failed to cultivate and retain talent with developers “burning out” after five years on average. They break common sense labor rules and violate workers’ rights unlike any other tech industry. Everyone in that industry just complied for years because they were brain washed to believe they were “so lucky” to have this job.

I’m not surprised this is where it ended up.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.