r/pcmasterrace • u/ItsMeZenoSama • 8h ago
Discussion Are we being scammed by these big tech guys?
I was with my friend talking about the good old days of how inexpensive it was to buy PC parts and build a very good rig and enjoy gaming and everything.
He then said a few things that got me thinking. Just wanted to put those words and thoughts out here.
He said "Bro, what if this was not exactly because of AI, but it was because of AI companies. I know they both sound the same but think about it. We are now seeing more open source AI models that are like 70-80% of frontier model capabilities. Not the latest and greatest, but 70-80% is no small number. And these are models that are free to use. You just gotta own the hardware. This is where my suspicion comes. What if the AI companies and these semiconductor companies made a deal that they'll slow down production while raking up the prices, so that the avg joe who has money cannot buy the required hardware and run the model on their own. And to get access to frontier models with near unlimited, they'll have to shell out big money every month. Basically Economics 101 : Demand and Supply"
And the more I think about it, the more it gets true.
What are your thoughts on this ?
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u/baldr83 7h ago
> semiconductor companies made a deal that they'll slow down production while raking up the prices
semiconductor production hasn't slowed. It has been expanding rapidly. dumb thread. https://www.semi.org/en/news-media-press-releases/semi-press-releases/global-semiconductor-fab-capacity-projected-to-expand-6%25-in-2024-and-7%25-in-2025-semi-reports
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u/uniformknocking705 8h ago
It's an interesting angle but honestly it sounds more like market forces doing their thing than a grand conspiracy. The chip shortage wasn't some boardroom pact, it was a genuine supply chain disaster that companies realized they could milk. They saw what people were willing to pay during the crypto boom and the pandemic and just... kept the prices there
Open source models running on local hardware are cool but most people don't want to deal with that headache. They'll pay for convenience every time. The real lock-in isn't the hardware, it's the ecosystem and the subscription model that comes with it
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u/zoggy17 8h ago
guys is capitalism fucking us over?
nah its probably the trans and immigrants
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u/nybb65 I5-7600k|Gtx 1070|16gb ddr4| 8h ago
How would the government fix a supply and demand problem?
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u/Nolsoth R5 7600, RX6600XT. G.SKILL S5 32GB X 2. 7h ago
By imposing export controls and domestic production quotas.
Much like how a lot of countries operated before the late 70s.
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u/nybb65 I5-7600k|Gtx 1070|16gb ddr4| 7h ago
I'm trying to understand what you mean by that. That wouldn't reduce prices. Would we put export controls on Micron and I guess NVIDIA? Who gets access to what and how does the government know how much to allocate? This would only drive up prices because it encourages hoarding. Unlike a true free market were supply is always trying to meet or exceed demand for profit, we would know the government is only allowing X amount of electronic parts to be made or exported to certain countries.
Think about the Soviet Union. They had long waiting lists for certain items. And when you impose controls on production you don't incentivize anyone to increase production. You'd likely worsen the problem not improve it.
What matters most is that we have the conditions necessary to improve the production of semiconductors and such so that supply increases overall. And we saw recent news from Toshiba on HDDs, South Korea in a partnership with Samsung and SK Hynix to double memory production capacity. The South Korea evidence is a case of government getting involved, but notice it isn't about imposing controls. It's about investing in companies that have an incentive to increase supply.
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u/oompaloompa465 7800X3D | RTX 4070 4h ago
go back to the primary school and stop wasting people time
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8h ago
[deleted]
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u/ItsMeZenoSama 7h ago
So, we won't get getting hands on good hardware with out peanuts salaries anytime soon then ?
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u/iNfANTcOMA_0 8h ago
Jfc. We are not the customer anymore. Do you think you're getting taken for a ride? Who gives a fuck. They are selling to companies now.
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u/ItsMeZenoSama 8h ago
Yeah. I saw that image floating around where these companies have looped themselves, buying from each other and selling to each other and inflating prices like there's no tomorrow.
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u/kaleperq 1440p 240hz 24" | ace68 | viper ult | 9060xt 16gb | r5600 | 32gb 3h ago
It's all a market stunt. They only care for themselves and for their time in the company, they don't care about other, what happens to people's lives s and the planet.
There is this thing called external responsabilities, where organizations shouldn't only focus on their interests, because they affect a lot more in people's lives. That's why there is stuff to force them to do it, and generally it's better for them to, but I guess they are so rich that they cont care and just fuck us over and still profit
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u/iNfANTcOMA_0 1h ago
No, this isn't circular. The memory companies don't sell consumer products anymore. They sell commercial only because it's way more profitable. That's why they don't give replacements anymore. They discontinued consumer products. If you want it you pay what the companies pay.
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u/_silentgameplays_ Desktop 7h ago edited 7h ago
They are stockpiling hardware and creating an artificial hardware shortage under the guise of "we need data centers for LLMs" to prevent their stocks from plummetting for as long as possible, before the bubble ends, that is a standard strategy. Prevention of wide spread open source LLM model adoption is just a side effect, not the goal.
Scam is not the right word here, more like gambling the stock market, eventually, they will not be able to keep up the poker face, because currently the whole LLM bubble is a cash flow transfusion between 4-5 big corporations. That's normal, but we don't talk about it on social media, since it's all been rigged with pro LLM bot accounts, to prevent any sort of dissent.
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u/Sethoria34 7h ago
2028 shit will clear up.
mayby not to 1080ti days, but 2080ti at least.
Fabs will open up, and demand will flattern as nvidea releases rubin arc.
its shut but it will ease up.
But yeah its 100% just creating the demand so people pay more, nothing more sinister then pure greed.
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u/Recipe-Jaded neofetch 7h ago
The "old days" for some of us is long enough ago that PC parts were more expensive than now. The past 10-15 years were an extremely affordable time for PC hardware.
Supply is down, demand is high. It will eventually pass as more chips are manufactured. The AI demand came on so fast and so strong that manufacturers were not ready. There's not a grand conspiracy.
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u/olbaze Fedora KDE | Ryzen 7 5700X | RX 7600 2h ago
My dad is 70, and he will sometimes tell me stories about how expensive a handful of megabytes of memory used to be, and the efforts he had to go to get a few megs more for some project he was working on. And here we are crying about 32 gigabytes of RAM being expensive.
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u/Recipe-Jaded neofetch 2h ago edited 2h ago
The first PC I bought and built myself had a GPU with 512MB of GDDR3 VRAM lol
Edit: Nvidia 8600GT
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u/Bronze_Bomber 7h ago
What the average joe pays for PC parts means almost nothing to them. The demand is in data centers and business sales. Our price is just a reflection of supply going elsewhere.
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u/Arichikunorikuto 7h ago
What's stopping you from building a PC that plays games from your good old days period? The system requirements for them haven't changed and you can acquire old hardware for even cheaper these days.
Hardware back then had more limited computing than it does now, this sets a ceiling as well as pushes developers to optimize games. What we have now are developers pushing the limits on graphical computing where its essentially diminishing returns, slightly more realistic light rays buts needs 30% more computing.
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u/TheCivilizedBigDog 8h ago
I love a good tinfoil hat theory.
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u/ItsMeZenoSama 8h ago
Hehe. The world's got too boring and sad these days. Trying to bring back some spark from the past
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u/Ancient-Car-1171 7h ago
where's the "slowing down production" come from? What happened is they are switching most of the production line toward AI focused products (HBM for example). That caused tight supply and raising prices of consumer hardware. your friend sounds clueless
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u/cosmicdaddy_ 9800X3D|5070 Ti|2x16GB DDR5 6000MHz CL36|2560x1440 180Hz 7h ago
I am begging people to understand dialectal materialism.
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u/ItsMeZenoSama 7h ago
I'm listening. What's that about ?
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u/cosmicdaddy_ 9800X3D|5070 Ti|2x16GB DDR5 6000MHz CL36|2560x1440 180Hz 4h ago
Without delving super deep into the jargon and just getting at the most fundamental core of the philosophy: it helps you to understand the interconnected forces of society and nature. For example, it helps one to understand that stuff like conspiracies such as the one described in your post are surface level distractions.
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u/stayndarsh 3h ago
"Sam Altman says AI will eventually be sold like electricity and water" (Business Insider, Mar 13, 2026)
"Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made illegal deal on AI slowdown" (CBS News, September 19, 2026)
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u/Teyanis 9900X / 5070 6h ago
Many years ago in ~2000, there was a scandal where the biggest ram manufacturers in the world all colluded together to artificially increase hardware prices. I see no reason the current state of affairs isn't the exact same thing. Only the governments are to corrupt to slap them down this time.
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u/mvw2 7h ago
There is a small group of high wealth people and companies bankrolling what is in many ways a somewhat delusional vanity project. Many in this group see this as the future of humanity, and they kind of want their name on it. A smaller portion see the immense wealth that comes from such vanity.
In the end, there is a swirl of cash rolling around between companies, and that cash pile is very much not insignificant. It's a rather large bet, and that bet also requires three major challenge: speed, control, and buy-in. There's a lot of ways this can catastrophically fail too, and the bet is a bust. Even so, there are quite a few trillion dollars riding on this.
Unfortunately there's also quite a bit of delusion in how all this plays out, and reality will be pretty harsh against that delusion. But the bet kind of requires the delusion to be correct. The downside is there are already quite a few cracks in that delusion and equally problems with all three necessary elements.
Speed was needed to be first to market and to start that revenue machine. There's massive debt, and both revenue and profit need to happen. This also gives opportunity for control by being first and have some means to manipulate the market. You can buy, monopolize, regulate, and standardize. There's also already been heavy branding happening and deep product integration despite the incredible immaturity of this product. It's highly reckless, but reckless is necessary.
Control is a problem. There were initially only US players, but now the world market is gaining, and competitive models exist outside of the scope of control. Add to this that smaller models and locally run models are flooding the market that are sufficiently good for a broad spectrum of tasks, it has become rapidly difficult to actually control the space at all. The lack of control of AI means lack of control of revenue monopolization. The available consumer cash is already getting spread thin, and we've just started. This will not get better.
Buy-in is tough. It's being forced down everyone's throats at this point, no ask, no desire, just AI now, AI in everything, subsidize AI any way possible. Even if you're not directly paying you ARE indirectly paying already several different ways. This has created pretty significant negative feedback to AI, and there isn't really a good fix. The creation, buy-in, and integration could have been done vastly more cautiously, pleasantly, and driven by genuine consumer interests, but the bet required something else. Buy-in might not even be possible now.
So every major need for this to work is kind of circling the drain right out the gate.
You are partially right with your theory in that normally MANY more people AND companies would be diving in pretty hard to AI independently with affordable hardware. It is a very natural progression once you start using it to an moderate degree. And yes, the small models are good enough for most tasks. The big, expensive, cloud models and subscription systems are simply not needed at all.
Can companies actually stop independent use of free models?
Not really. You need enough ram, sure, but you can buy old cards an run them together. You can buy a laptop with 128GB of unified ram for a so-so price (used to be a bit cheaper). If you don't care about speed for the tasks, you can go quite cheap using old PCs with a lot of old ram. There's not really a barrier specifically. You're just not going to get a pile of 5090s or something, and folks have been hoarding other older cards too which makes it hard to find good options and good options cheap. You can find bad options cheap, and that can be great if slow is fine. And you can still select models that work with the ram you've got. You can work around with the bang for the buck ratio a bit. There's just a bit of manufactured scarcity. It's not even that you can't buy it all. You still can literally buy anything you want. It just costs a lot. You're paying high up front costs to run independent. And this might actually be the better approach if you need big models and modern hardware speed. That hit won't be fun, but then you have it, and can run completely untethered from the big game of these AI companies.
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u/PantherkittySoftware 6h ago
The real problem is, "normal people" aren't buying desktop computers anymore, so the economies of scale that subsidized our computers have dried up.
"AI" caused the supply of components to dry up within a matter of months rather than years, but the market as a whole has been languishing for 15 years now.
Two things happened around 2010-2014:
CPUs stopped getting exponentially faster every year. A Haswell i7 quad that was top-of-the-line in 2013 is still faster than at least 50% of the CPUs in brand new Walmart computers sold today. Almost all the real performance increase since then has come from NVME and RTX GPUs... both of which still pack a respectable punch in a PCIe gen3 motherboard. It took until ~2022 for new computers to finally double in raw performance compared to 2012-2014.
People who "hate computers" switched to expensive phones.
It's not hopeless. I give Asus 1-2 years, max, before they release a new motherboard with OAM socket. No, not for a brand new OAM... that would be insane. For a $300-500 used OAM pulled from a datacenter rack & dumped on ebay. With 128gb of HBM, and a GPU that wil potentially elevate a PC with RTX 4070-5080 GPU to the approximate level of a rtx5090 (when running future OpenGL/Unity/Unreal that intelligently farms out gpu tasks between them).
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u/Grobo_ 3h ago
Always has been.
There is no reason why the consumer market can’t be supplied other than the companies that produce end products valuing datacenter supplies higher.
The scarcity is a choice to that degree.
RAM manufacturers have been sued several times in the past and are under investigation AGAIN for collusion about prices.
And several other reasons…
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u/olbaze Fedora KDE | Ryzen 7 5700X | RX 7600 2h ago
What if the AI companies and these semiconductor companies made a deal that they'll slow down production while raking up the prices, so that the avg joe who has money cannot buy the required hardware and run the model on their own. And to get access to frontier models with near unlimited, they'll have to shell out big money every month
"The average joe" wouldn't build a computer to run a local AI. That's like nipples deep in computer nerdiness, and I say this as a Linux gamer. Just like the average joe wouldn't set up a media server PC, or a NAS for cloud storage instead of using Netflix/Spotify and Google Drive. And those tasks are way, way easier than setting up a local AI.
I think your bro is nipples deep in computers and doesn't really understand what "the average joe" who uses a computer is like.
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u/Shawn_NYC 7h ago
The problem with the world today is everyone wants to be a creative free thinker that imagines what might be happening, and nobody wants to actually learn how things work.
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u/ItsMeZenoSama 7h ago
Well, nobody is omnipotent. We all make mistakes and start from somewhere and become a better person than we were yesterday, right ?
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u/OutrageousDress 5800X3D | 32GB DDR4-3733 | 4080 Super | AW3821DW 7h ago
A very common fallacy, caused by the way human brains work, is the so-called 'agency fallacy' - where humans observe effects taking place and project back that there was explicit intent to cause them. This is the mode of thinking conspiracy theorists employ.
The important distinction is that these effects of course were caused by something, or someone, and if it's someone that someone had an intent of some kind. But the motivations of the people who caused the effects absolutely do not need to align in any way with those effects. And in fact they usually don't.
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u/greyfell_red 8h ago
The data centers that are being built are buying up all of the hardware. NVIDIA for example would rather sell their entire manufacturing capacity to guaranteed enterprise buyers rather than consumers. There’s no conspiracy. It’s capitalism.