How? Elon and Dario aren’t responsible? It’s all AI companies and hyper scalers. Let’s not forget how 3 companies in memory industry have got caught in colluding to keep things high.

Because he (on behalf of Open AI) made deals with 2 of the 3 major manufacturers of RAM to buy a significant proportion of their output, in the same week, without either of the manufacturers knowing that he was also making a deal with the other one. This directly led to the current RAM shortage.

This problem is far bigger than one individual. He's making rational decisions is his capacity as CEO of an AI company. If he didn't make large compute deals, all his customers would be upset when they're hitting usage limits 10 times a day and all his investors would be doubting his decisions, especially when competitors are also trying to hoover up all the compute.

Is there actual evidence that these deals caused the RAM shortage? Seems like a stretch to pin a global supply problem on one person when demand is coming from across the entire industry.

And if one person can indeed cause it then blame the system? I go back to the proven legal case of them fixing prices. Now there is just a scapegoat because it feel good?

The system shares some blame, but the individual is also the one exploiting a confluence of factors. Should the system prevent one person from purchasing 40% of global RAM production with fake money, yes, it should. But our systems are glacial to respond to edge cases they were not prepared for, and this is an extreme edge case - people who are not Sam Altman could not pull off purchasing 40% of the world's RAM production capacity on an IOU. Only a very few individuals in the world could have exploited this gap in the system, and the one who actually did deserves blame for it.

That just means he bought earlier than others, but there would still be a shortage had he not.