alt Hacker NewsThe drop in memory stocks seems counterintuitive to me.
The demand for memory isn't going to go down, we'll just be able to do more with the same amount of memory.
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It especially doesn't make sense considering that TurboQuant has been public on arXiv for almost a year: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19874 So it predates the late-2025 RAM price surge! https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
I think that either investors were extremely skittish that the stocks might crash and jumped at the first sign of trouble (creating a self-fulfilling prophecy) or they were trading on non-public information and analysts who don't have access to said information are reading too much into the temporal coincidence of the Google Research blog highlighting this paper.
The stock drop isn't about demand volume, it's about pricing power. HBM vendors have been charging huge premiums because AI buyers had no alternative to buying more memory. A 6x compression result means per-GB willingness to pay drops even if total shipments hold. Flat volume at lower margins is a worse business than growing volume at premium margins.
Well, when a companies have 100billion dollar incentives to make discoveries like this, I don't know if we should assume this is the only optimization that will happen.
Given that increasing model size doesn't yield proportional increases in intelligence, there is a world where these datacenters don't have a positive ROI if we make these models even a fraction as effective as the human brain.