5 ms·

Something can be both technically incredibly impressive, genuinely useful and yet at the same dramatically over-hyped. That may be the case for AI today althoug

Something can be both technically incredibly impressive, genuinely useful and yet at the same dramatically over-hyped. That may be the case for AI today although the range of possible outcomes makes the latter point genuinely unclear. The difference for me is that Web3 was never shown to be at all useful.

password54321 4y ago
The comparison is between the level of hype not the technology itself. If you take the time to read the thread he is more than well aware of the practical aspects of AI.
- klelatti 4y ago
  I know that - I read the thread - and I respect Chollet and the fact that he knows an awful lot more about AI than I do. I personally don't think though that the comparison to Web3 is helpful even with the clarification deep in the thread.
loveparade 4y ago
> The difference for me is that Web3 was never shown to be at all useful. Because nobody agrees what web3 even means, it's a totally useless term, not that dissimilar to AGI or consciousness, which nobody can properly define. People who hate crypto define web3 in terms of all the negative stuff, while people who have a vested interested in pumping token prices (like VCs) will define web3 in terms of all the potentially positive stuff. I believe that the that fundamentals of crypto are incredibly useful and will eventually be adopted, and have been in meany places, but all the web3/NFT/etc stuff (whatever that means) is just useless hype and ponzi schemes. Crypto has a much more negative image because it's full of scams, but that doesn't mean anything. It's just significantly easier to create scams with crypto because money is at the very base layer, than it is to create scams with AI. But that doesn't imply anything about the usefulness of these technologies.
- CipherThrowaway 4y ago
  >I believe that the that fundamentals of crypto are incredibly useful and will eventually be adopted, and have been in meany places, but all the web3/NFT/etc stuff (whatever that means) is just useless hype and ponzi schemes. Could you elaborate? It's been 15 years since the bitcoin paper and I still don't see where the game changing commercial applications of crypto are beyond the black/grey market uses for which it has already been adopted.
  - welshwelsh 4y ago
    One big use case is decentralized cloud computing. The advantage over centralized services is low prices due to market pressures. For example, Filecoin lets you store data for $2.33 per TB per year. If you used S3 that would be $150. The Golem network let's you run compute jobs for $0.003 per CPU core per hour. The only barrier here is software. There just aren't enough developers to build anything useful. There could be a user-friendly web service like the AWS console that enables normal developers to use this stuff, but nobody has built one yet. Golem could support GPU compute so that people can use it to train AI models cheaply, but they are short on devs so that feature is still in the backlog. Give it time. Encrypted email has been possible since at least the 90s, but many hospitals still haven't adopted it and are using fax machines. Before people can adopt crypto, they first need to understand it, and that's not going to happen for a long time.
    - ajmurmann 4y ago
      It's so strange to me that what you describe genuinely sounds useful and fairly straightforward, millions of person hours have gone into "web3" and it's all grifter stuff translating one shit coin into another and giving cheap credit or farming coins. Yet, something as obviously useful as you describe doesn't take off. Where does the discrepancy come from?
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      Both your Filecoin and Golem examples might be inexpensive but they have no sort of SLA for end users. They can also evaporate tomorrow taking your data and compute resources down with them. Both systems are only viable if the cost to run the systems is below the money made from running it. If the whole reason users pick Filecoin is the price, they'll abandon the platform if the price ever increases (to make running nodes profitable) which creates a feedback loop that will collapse the network. While Amazon might cost more, they're unlikely to go out of business tomorrow or in ten years. They also have an SLA and predictable prices and predictable capacity. if you build something on AWS that works today it'll likely work tomorrow.
ht85 4y ago
Web3 outs grifters like no other thing before, so there's that.
- dustymcp 4y ago
  This made me chuckle abit, not that you are wrong i dont know. But it reminds me of how my parents generation understood the internet, full of scams and grifters :)
  - garbagecoder 4y ago
    I might be in your parents generation and yes, there were a lot of scams. The difference is, there were some useful things. We still use the web and email for example.
littlestymaar 4y ago
François Chollet already have a response[1] for you in his thread: > One last thought -- don't overindex on the web3 <> LLMs comparison. Of course web3 was pure hot air while LLMs is real tech with actual applications -- that's not the parallel I'm making. The parallel is in the bubble formation social dynamics, especially in the VC crowd. [1]: https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/fchollet/status/1612178630494523392#m https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/fchollet/status/1612178630494...
- klelatti 4y ago
  The first tweet says ‘the current climate in AI’ and ‘everyone’. But actually it’s just social bubbles especially in VCs. It’s not a response or a clarification it’s a change to the meaning of his headline.
  - rcme 4y ago
    `Everyone` refers to all people in a given subset of the population. E.g. "Everyone arrives to school by 7:30" Obviously you're talking about people at a specific school, not every human on Earth.
    - klelatti 4y ago
      By saying 'in AI' the use of 'everyone' implies everyone in AI. My point still stands.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        I wouldn't have written "everyone", but technically incorrect use of language is, ironically, one of the things people jump on GPT for when it gets things wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34292129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34292129
        klelatti 4y ago
        I almost wrote that he's hyping his own views on hype but that might be a little unfair.

password54321 4y ago

The comparison is between the level of hype not the technology itself. If you take the time to read the thread he is more than well aware of the practical aspects of AI.

klelatti 4y ago
I know that - I read the thread - and I respect Chollet and the fact that he knows an awful lot more about AI than I do. I personally don't think though that the comparison to Web3 is helpful even with the clarification deep in the thread.

loveparade 4y ago

> The difference for me is that Web3 was never shown to be at all useful. Because nobody agrees what web3 even means, it's a totally useless term, not that dissimilar to AGI or consciousness, which nobody can properly define. People who hate crypto define web3 in terms of all the negative stuff, while people who have a vested interested in pumping token prices (like VCs) will define web3 in terms of all the potentially positive stuff. I believe that the that fundamentals of crypto are incredibly useful and will eventually be adopted, and have been in meany places, but all the web3/NFT/etc stuff (whatever that means) is just useless hype and ponzi schemes. Crypto has a much more negative image because it's full of scams, but that doesn't mean anything. It's just significantly easier to create scams with crypto because money is at the very base layer, than it is to create scams with AI. But that doesn't imply anything about the usefulness of these technologies.

CipherThrowaway 4y ago
>I believe that the that fundamentals of crypto are incredibly useful and will eventually be adopted, and have been in meany places, but all the web3/NFT/etc stuff (whatever that means) is just useless hype and ponzi schemes. Could you elaborate? It's been 15 years since the bitcoin paper and I still don't see where the game changing commercial applications of crypto are beyond the black/grey market uses for which it has already been adopted.
- welshwelsh 4y ago
  One big use case is decentralized cloud computing. The advantage over centralized services is low prices due to market pressures. For example, Filecoin lets you store data for $2.33 per TB per year. If you used S3 that would be $150. The Golem network let's you run compute jobs for $0.003 per CPU core per hour. The only barrier here is software. There just aren't enough developers to build anything useful. There could be a user-friendly web service like the AWS console that enables normal developers to use this stuff, but nobody has built one yet. Golem could support GPU compute so that people can use it to train AI models cheaply, but they are short on devs so that feature is still in the backlog. Give it time. Encrypted email has been possible since at least the 90s, but many hospitals still haven't adopted it and are using fax machines. Before people can adopt crypto, they first need to understand it, and that's not going to happen for a long time.
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    It's so strange to me that what you describe genuinely sounds useful and fairly straightforward, millions of person hours have gone into "web3" and it's all grifter stuff translating one shit coin into another and giving cheap credit or farming coins. Yet, something as obviously useful as you describe doesn't take off. Where does the discrepancy come from?
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    Both your Filecoin and Golem examples might be inexpensive but they have no sort of SLA for end users. They can also evaporate tomorrow taking your data and compute resources down with them. Both systems are only viable if the cost to run the systems is below the money made from running it. If the whole reason users pick Filecoin is the price, they'll abandon the platform if the price ever increases (to make running nodes profitable) which creates a feedback loop that will collapse the network. While Amazon might cost more, they're unlikely to go out of business tomorrow or in ten years. They also have an SLA and predictable prices and predictable capacity. if you build something on AWS that works today it'll likely work tomorrow.

ht85 4y ago

Web3 outs grifters like no other thing before, so there's that.

dustymcp 4y ago
This made me chuckle abit, not that you are wrong i dont know. But it reminds me of how my parents generation understood the internet, full of scams and grifters :)
- garbagecoder 4y ago
  I might be in your parents generation and yes, there were a lot of scams. The difference is, there were some useful things. We still use the web and email for example.

littlestymaar 4y ago

François Chollet already have a response[1] for you in his thread: > One last thought -- don't overindex on the web3 <> LLMs comparison. Of course web3 was pure hot air while LLMs is real tech with actual applications -- that's not the parallel I'm making. The parallel is in the bubble formation social dynamics, especially in the VC crowd. [1]: https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/fchollet/status/1612178630494523392#m https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/fchollet/status/1612178630494...

klelatti 4y ago
The first tweet says ‘the current climate in AI’ and ‘everyone’. But actually it’s just social bubbles especially in VCs. It’s not a response or a clarification it’s a change to the meaning of his headline.
- rcme 4y ago
  `Everyone` refers to all people in a given subset of the population. E.g. "Everyone arrives to school by 7:30" Obviously you're talking about people at a specific school, not every human on Earth.
  - klelatti 4y ago
    By saying 'in AI' the use of 'everyone' implies everyone in AI. My point still stands.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      I wouldn't have written "everyone", but technically incorrect use of language is, ironically, one of the things people jump on GPT for when it gets things wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34292129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34292129
      - klelatti 4y ago
        I almost wrote that he's hyping his own views on hype but that might be a little unfair.