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> useful to me. To you yes. Now go out in the real world in which most people don't work in an office and mostly use internet for entertainment Crypto seemed

> useful to me. To you yes. Now go out in the real world in which most people don't work in an office and mostly use internet for entertainment Crypto seemed very useful to many people, and they still do, you'll find thousand upon thousands of comments and this very website preaching cryptos as the next game changer

simonw 4y ago
Crypto looked useful as long as the price kept going up. Everyone likes free money.
- TillE 4y ago
  That was the crass money-making part of it, but a lot of nerds earnestly believe(d) that cryptocurrencies would have massive world-changing consequences. I think it's increasingly obvious that there's little rational or empirical basis for such belief. With AI, the biggest claims I see are overwhelmingly from people who are not doing cutting-edge work in the field, who have no real foundation for a belief that these AIs will continue to improve at a dramatic rate. Because to really change the world, they do need to get a lot better.
  - simonw 4y ago
    My personal excitement about language models is based on what they can do today. I'm a big believer in the "capability overhang" idea, which is that the existing language models still have a huge array of capabilities that we haven't discovered yet. That theory seems to be proved correct on a constant basis. Even the classic "let's think about this step by step" paper came out less than a year ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916 - May 2022.
    - iliane5 4y ago
      Couldn't agree more. This paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682) also touches on a pretty fascinating phenomenon - that when scaling up large language models they seem to "naturally" obtain new emergent abilities that do not exist on smaller models.
pixl97 4y ago
Eh, crypto is mostly useless I agree. But honestly you sound just like someone in 1996 going "Oh the internet isn't going to change anything and is just a fad", and here we are decades later and the internet has changed almost everything in our lives. Every person you know uses the internet every day on their cellphones in one way or another.
huijzer 4y ago
> Now go out in the real world in which most people don't work in an office and mostly use internet for entertainment I wanted to refute your point by giving some YouTube videos about practical uses and their views. Then I checked YouTube's trending videos and compared the view counter to that of a PewDiePie video of 2 days ago and now I agree. You are right.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
Except good luck explaining bitcoin to someone non technical, but sit that same person down in front of Midjourney and have them prompt up some images and they'll have a great time.

simonw 4y ago

Crypto looked useful as long as the price kept going up. Everyone likes free money.

TillE 4y ago
That was the crass money-making part of it, but a lot of nerds earnestly believe(d) that cryptocurrencies would have massive world-changing consequences. I think it's increasingly obvious that there's little rational or empirical basis for such belief. With AI, the biggest claims I see are overwhelmingly from people who are not doing cutting-edge work in the field, who have no real foundation for a belief that these AIs will continue to improve at a dramatic rate. Because to really change the world, they do need to get a lot better.
- simonw 4y ago
  My personal excitement about language models is based on what they can do today. I'm a big believer in the "capability overhang" idea, which is that the existing language models still have a huge array of capabilities that we haven't discovered yet. That theory seems to be proved correct on a constant basis. Even the classic "let's think about this step by step" paper came out less than a year ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916 - May 2022.
  - iliane5 4y ago
    Couldn't agree more. This paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682) also touches on a pretty fascinating phenomenon - that when scaling up large language models they seem to "naturally" obtain new emergent abilities that do not exist on smaller models.

pixl97 4y ago

Eh, crypto is mostly useless I agree. But honestly you sound just like someone in 1996 going "Oh the internet isn't going to change anything and is just a fad", and here we are decades later and the internet has changed almost everything in our lives. Every person you know uses the internet every day on their cellphones in one way or another.

huijzer 4y ago

> Now go out in the real world in which most people don't work in an office and mostly use internet for entertainment I wanted to refute your point by giving some YouTube videos about practical uses and their views. Then I checked YouTube's trending videos and compared the view counter to that of a PewDiePie video of 2 days ago and now I agree. You are right.

CuriouslyC 4y ago

Except good luck explaining bitcoin to someone non technical, but sit that same person down in front of Midjourney and have them prompt up some images and they'll have a great time.