Anyone who's read a fair amount of my posts over the years would know that I'm not tech-savvy--never was, and though I've learned a lot thanks to this forum, I'm still nowhere near as knowledgeable as most of you all are.

But as it happens, my next door neighbor is even if he's not so much into crypto, and he was just telling me about the impending RAM shortage and how it might spread to a number of other common computer components (like GPUs), all because of the enormous demand from AI.  And though I never mined bitcoin, I do know ASICs are different than GPUs....but I've also heard stuff about miners turning their attention and electricity at least toward AI-related stuff.

Even if that's all true, I'm not sure how it would affect the markets in particular.  Mining is one thing, right?  But the market is supply and demand.  Supply is pretty much a known quantity, regardless of whether some big miners drop out of the game.  And I don't see any reason why demand should drop because of a diversion of resources (which might turn out to be temporary in any case).

Right now I see AI being used in a lot of places where it shouldn't be, e.g., in place of real-life customer service reps, and other sites seem to have inserted AI functions simply because of silly reasons only the site owners would know, but which are more annoying than they are helpful.  I've got a feeling there is indeed somewhat of an AI bubble, and maybe in 1-2 years' time some of these companies/websites will see the foolishness of their ways and will have scaled back on their AI usage.  Don't know if that'll help with the PC component demand or not, but it couldn't hurt.