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143 points by cpach 4y ago

potatoman22 4y ago
Machine learning has a decade-long track record of adding value to consumers and companies in various sectors. Crypto does not. There's probably too much hype, but it's not completely unfounded.
magic_hamster 4y ago
While the author's prediction may or may not come true, this text has a weird conspiracy vibe in my opinion. Especially parts trying to imply that by some mysterious way NN are trained on GPUs and manufacturers are pushing AI to sell more cards, not unlike the rush to get GPUs for crypto. It's almost as if GPUs have been specifically built to handle massive parallelism with specialized models offering machine learning optimizations! However, the cards used for these vocations are different: while you used to be able to mine cryptocurrencies with consumer GPUs, training AI models is done on professional hardware with more emphasis on VRAM. Training something serious like ChatGPT is far from easy (if at all possible) for a startup. And AI projects have arguably become more useful to the everyday consumer than crypto currency ever was. Either way, AI is certainly a huge buzzword, but for now, it's living up to the hype. Who knows what'll happen three years into the future.
paulpauper 4y ago
Crypto is still way bigger. I don't think the comparison holds. ChatGPT is mostly jsut a tool, whereas crypto is hyped as somehow replacing the current financial system or even 'world order'. There is considerable hype, but not on the level seen with crypto.
ctoth 4y ago
The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about the current article is that Charley is a cracking good writer who has just found that a machine might be able to take his job. Now, of course, AI is all a giant scam. It's been steadily progressing in a way that connected people could see since GPT-2[0]. But only now, with the clouds on the horizon is it clearly and obviously some conspiracy. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." [0]: GPT-2 As Step Toward General Intelligence: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-general-intelligence/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-g...
Karellen 4y ago
> If you're thinking about investing in AI startups now? My advice is to avoid them like the plague [...] it's too late, and you'll wake up one morning only to discover you've had your pockets picked. > I give it about 1-3 years until the crash. (Although I tend towards optimism: the cryptocurrency bubble took a bit over a decade to implode, but back in 2011 I prediced its demise within, yeah, 1-3 years.) What I'm reading is, I should invest in AI startups now, and cash out 90% of my investment in 3 years time while things are still going well. Maybe cash out 30% of whatever remains each year after that, until the crash.
- jsnell 4y ago
  Investments in startups aren't very liquid. You're unlikely to be able to cash out at will, and definitely not at a regular schedule like that.
braindead_in 4y ago
The hype around ChatGPT is massive! I haven't seen this much buzz since the iPhone launch. Back in 2008, I remember having debates with my friends about the future of Nokia just a few days after it launched. Since then, I've witnessed the rise and fall of several tech waves, including mobile apps, cloud, SaaS, and crypto. It's been exciting to see so many people ride these waves and create wealth in the process. Will I be one of the lucky ones this time around is the only question.
aaron695 4y ago
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tfehring 4y ago
I agree with many of the top-level comments about the relative utility of AI applications and blockchain applications as they exist today. But I'll add another point that no one else seems to have made yet. The reason for the widespread grift in the crypto space is not just that blockchain applications are a relatively new and overhyped technology. Another huge factor is that many blockchain applications, by their very nature, are designed to circumvent securities regulation in order to raise money from unsophisticated retail speculators. I'm sure some shitty AI startups will raise capital from retail speculators on crowdfunding platforms and the like. But I expect it to be a lot less widespread compared to the crypto space, and it will happen within the confines of (mostly) US securities regulation, which will mean much better disclosure and much less outright fraud and misappropriation. The main "victims" this time around will be, like, the LPs of second-rate VC funds, and in many cases those fund managers are well aware of all of this but are incentivized to follow the trend anyway.
- noman-land 4y ago
  Just wait til the AI grifters are using blockchain for crowdfunding and using AI to program their smart contracts.
Stevenjobss 4y ago
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GRACE44 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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brucethemoose2 4y ago
I really hope one of the AI startups (stealth or already public) gets some more traction, especially among smaller scale hardware. Nvidia is an AI tyrant. But I guess we are probably stuck with Intel/AMD/Apple... because who else is going to make affordable PCIe desktop cards, much less squeeze into laptops?
- ilaksh 4y ago
  Within the next five years or so there will be a completely new hardware paradigm based on something like "crossbar arrays" or memristors that is orders of magnitude more efficient for ML tasks. This provides an opportunity for new startups. They will eventually probably be acquired by Nvidia, Intel or AMD though.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    This is my take on it too. Any technology that significantly reduces the cost of running AI is of immediate value to any company performing a lot of AI simulations currently.
    - brucethemoose2 4y ago
      But not if its finicky to use. I nearly pulled my hair out trying to get a Stable Diffusion UI running on Graphcore's free POD4 instances, and... gave up after I couldnt even download their SDK to update it. Even though its theoretically extremely fast.
jstx1 4y ago
Just because a bunch of crypto grifters are finding a new field to dip into doesn't mean that there hasn't been a lot of genuine progress in AI in the past 6 months.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Aside from dumping a very large amount of compute and human-supervised learning into existing technology, what major progress has been made in the past six months?
  - pixl97 4y ago
    You mean things like GPT showing theory of mind at the level of a 9 year old, something that many people were arguing may not ever happen and/or if it did we were still a long way away from it just a few years ago?
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      Is that because it actually has a theory of mind, or because it fakes it really well based on human training data, or because the test is flawed?
  - edanm 4y ago
    I think that's an interesting question that you won't be able to get an answer for, because most new things are still not accessible to the average HN reader. I mean, you can look up ML research papers to see what's new, but none of that is going to seem anywhere near as impactful as ChatGPT because it's at the level of research. It's not like when the first theoretical models that make up the basis for GPT came out, people were instantly sure where we'd end up in 5 years. I'm sure people within OpenAI or other AI companies would be able to tell you of very interesting advances, but they won't do so on HN until the things are public.
  - jstx1 4y ago
    You don't need to be dismissive - demonstrating what can be achieved with a lot of data/compute and additional human-supervised learning is progress.
bawolff 4y ago
I think its both. AI stuff has made some legit impressive advances recently. A bunch of people interested in getting rich quick smell the gold rush.
- diydsp 4y ago
  Exactly. That's the eigenrhythm of present day capitalism. Throw money to likely candidates, see what sticks. Speculators always capture headlines. Crytpo is chugging quietly along.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  You've just summed up the core of the Gartner Hype Cycle in a nutshell.
derbOac 4y ago
I think this sort of skepticism is healthy — I think explainability and overfitting doesn't get enough attention for example — but AI strikes me as a bit different from crypto in that it's creeping into our everyday lives. Instructors are wrestling with assignment submissions, you wrestle with the uncanny valley in customer support lines, and people are posting about their troubled relationships with Bing in various places. If crypto had been showing up everywhere to the same extent, I think these discussions would be a bit different. That's not to say there isn't rampant hype in AI but I do think there's a continuum from blatant fraud to truly life-changing tech with plenty of grey, and AI is closer to the genuine end of the spectrum. My guess is AI isn't monolithic either, just as I don't think crypto was. Some areas of AI will probably end up having been overhyped more than others. I agree with the sentiment of the post that sometimes I think semi-fraudulent to outright fraudulent overhype is a defining feature of our time. I wish the institutions responsible for public discourse would approach things accordingly.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > but AI strikes me as a bit different from crypto in that it's creeping into our everyday lives. Taking this further: Crypto was creeping into our lives, but only in the FOMO sense; People thought they needed to invest in crypto because other people were going to invest in crypto and they didn’t want to miss out. The actual use cases of crypto aren’t attractive to most people, aside from ideological or law-evading circumstances. AI is different because people are rushing to actually use it for their own benefit. Investors are rushing to place their bets, but we already see big companies deploying AI in the real world in ways that are being used by the general public.
hanniabu 4y ago
GPUs aren't need for blockchain. Bitcoin is stuck in the past and is a shame it's what everyone looks at, along with the misnomer "cryptocurrency". Ethereum is the leader in the space and the only one innovation and uses PoS which can run a validator on very little hardware, such as a raspberry pi.
rhn_mk1 4y ago
Disapppointing summary from someone whose imagination should allow them to see more. Generative text models might spit out "garbage", but this "garbage" has been more interesting than the garbage we have seen before in how it breezes through the Turing test. It's telling that not a word was said about image generation, which is benefitting from the same GPU usage, has not stopped progressing, and produces stuff that creates economic value. Like in this example: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/us-copyright-office-withdraws-copyright-for-ai-generated-comic-artwork/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/us-co... The author seems to identify with VCs too much, if all the AI hype means is more grift. Sure, that might be a factor, but the general condemnation of the sector is too much.
HL33tibCe7 4y ago
If you think cryptocurrencies are in any way comparable to the recent progress in artificial intelligence, I’m sorry but you’re a Luddite. If you’d have presented anybody reading this with ChatGPT two years ago, they simply would not have believed it was possible. This kind of step change in AI ability is interesting enough in itself without having some kind of insidious and completely unsubstantiated conspiracy theory behind it. > This is not a coincidence. I despise this kind of writing — writing with 100% confidence and then providing zero evidence. It reminds me very much of my reading of writing from “the election was rigged!!!” conspiracy morons. 10 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  > If you’d have presented anybody reading this with ChatGPT two years ago, they simply would not have believed it was possible. I'm having a hard time believing it now, it's just an amazing amount of progress in a short amount of time. > I despise this kind of writing Me too. It's suggesting that there's some kind of cabal that somehow decided it was time to crash crypto and get everyone to go after AI. Are there bandwagons? Definitely and they eventually go too far as with crypto - and quite possibly AI will experience something similar if it doesn't deliver on it's promises. But it's not like there's a bunch of guys in a smoke filled room somewhere who are driving this. Crypto was largely driven by cheap money (0% interest rates for several years) and artificially low electricity prices. Investment in AI now with much higher interest rates means that some people think they're going to get a better return on their money. It seems less bubbly in this kind of monetary environment.
- deleted 4y ago
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- nine_k 4y ago
  Cryprocurrencies are juxtaposed in the article to ChatGPT-like AI in two ways. * 3 years ago, BTS / ETH / a whole slew of other coins were all the rage, the centerpiece of popular speculation. Now AI takes their place, even though without the get-rich-quick overtones. * Many cryprocurrencies and AI both massively benefit from the use of GPUs, so once the crypro bubble burst and a lot of GPU compute power was freed, it can now conveniently be used for AI. Otherwise, they are not comparable indeed.
rjsw 4y ago
There are a lot of "bullshit jobs". Not needing people to do those jobs anymore will be a benefit to anyone paying for them, less so for those previously getting paid.
legrande 4y ago
If you need to know where we are in the hype cycle, check out this curated list of every AI project currently active: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hwBf_TnSxwhkfnJTVpUNAJWS-t_XzooxzBYbpXiTqpE/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hwBf_TnSxwhkfnJTVpUNAJWS... It's mind blowing that we have something blossoming out of nowhere that has real-world use-cases and is genuinely improving people's lives. I have tools to write the perfect e-mail, remove the background from photos, write copy for my clients' websites, and tools to help me code faster. It's all very brilliant stuff.
skwirl 4y ago
I am puzzled by all the hot takes stating that ChatGPT (and other similar tools) outputs garbage and is being "discredited" when I have personally found it to be an incredibly useful tool that I have been using daily pretty much since it was first released. The only thing being discredited, in my mind, are the people who rush to be contrarian about something they don't actually seem to understand or have taken any time to use.
- indymike 4y ago
  The question is, what are you using it for and how much is required to automate you out of the loop?
- charles_f 4y ago
  It's useful, it's incredible, but everyone wants it to be a revolution, similarly as crypto currency was supposed to be, which it's not.
- rnk 4y ago
  So enlighten us with some examples of useful things you found.
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    My partner is looking for a new job, and ChatGPT has been an amazing help in writing the cover letters that recruiters can't stop asking for. Previously, she would spend hours molding her previous cover letter to the job description. Now she can just give the job description and a bullet point list of her relevant experiences, and spend 15 minutes on the ChatGPT output to polish it a little bit and correct any potential misstatements.
    - lemmiwinks 4y ago
      You know how many minutes I "spend molding [my] previous cover letter to the job description"? 15 minutes. If you spend more than that, you are clearly doing it wrong.
    - 4y ago
phillipcarter 4y ago
Can't speak for consumer applications, but in the niche of developer tools the recent advancements in AI are anything but garbage.
gizmo 4y ago
LLM based chatbots are already more useful than all of crypto combined. Whereas crypto wastes energy as "proof of work" AI models try to be as energy-efficient as possible. The energy needed to train these LLMs is also 10,000 times less, so let's not act like they're in the same universe. Moreover, training the base layer of a LLM has to be done only once (for each generation) and subsequent training for domain specific purposes can happen on top of the base layer. This means these AI startups are not going to require an unlimited number of GPUs. Another big difference is that fundamental AI insights are what drives these AI innovations. Throwing more training data at a neural network is not what makes ChatGPT different from older generations of chatbots (although ChatGPT certainly does benefit from its huge training data set). Transformers for example are a new development, first introduced in a 2017 paper "Attention is all you need". It's unclear if LLMs will turn out to be a big deal. Maybe this will turn out just to be another AI summer. Too early to tell. But cynicism is unwarranted here.
- gessha 4y ago
  > Another big difference is that fundamental AI insights are what drives these AI innovations. Bigger models, more compute, more data, better compute have driven a lot of the performance of ML post-2013. For ChatGPT specifically, the secret sauce is the addition of human-vetted conversations [1]. In general fundamental AI insights come when - (1) somebody does something that works incredibly well and others try to explain it. Transformers are arguably an example of this although there’s a ton of attention literature before that. - (2) a ton of people make incremental steps towards a goal and at some point it becomes actually useful. ChatGPT is an example of this one. The point I’m trying to make is fundamental AI is boring, slow, rarely drives AI innovations and that’s not a bad thing. What drives AI innovations is really good UI and good data both of which are hard to nail down. [1] https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/#methods https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/#methods
- incrudible 4y ago
  Written by an LLM.
icemelt8 4y ago
Only difference in this case is, AI has actual real positive use cases, compared to Crypto which just burned coal.
pototo666 4y ago
Before ChatGPT I spent around 200 usd per month to practice German with German native speakers for 2 months. Then I use ChatGPT to practice German and I am very happy about the experience. AI can't replace real human yet. But I'm already willing to practice with ChatGPT given my current use case and my budget. It's not 10x better, but 20x cheaper. From my experience, AI is not hype. Imagine integrating a more fine tuned AI and text-to-speech feature to make a better AI teacher. Such an app already exists, I believe. I'm waiting for a German and Japanese one.
- ginkoutest 4y ago
  Where did you find these German native speakers to practice with? And you said "such an app already exists", but not for German and Japanese. Do you know the name? I have a lot of experience building language learning services so am very curious to hear what you feel is currently missing in your current tools to learn German/Japanese.
  - pototo666 4y ago
    I use iTalki to find native speaker to practice with. I say such app exists because I just read about Speak: https://www.speak.com/blog/speak-announces-27m-series-b-led-by-openai-startup-fund https://www.speak.com/blog/speak-announces-27m-series-b-led-... It's for studying English. What I don't like about a real tutor is because it's expensive and I have to book in advance. ChaptGPT is free and I can practice with it whenever I want. Besides, ChaptGPT is not a real human so I don't feel embaraced when I made stupid mistake.
    - ginkoutest 4y ago
      How much does it currently cost you (per session) to book someone on iTalki? And which would you prefer: a cheaper, on-demand version of iTalki (you get matched with someone already online versus booking in advance), or an AI-based app/service that you can chat back-and-forth with whenever you want?
      - 4y ago
vasco 4y ago
I really have little respect for any opinions that shame the use of electricity for things like training AI models. Being mad at it for crypto I can at least understand. But this should be at about the millionth place in the list of things to complain about electricity waste. And if that's how you prioritize your worries, I'm not sure how to trust any other opinions.
- deleted 4y ago
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- dpflan 4y ago
  It makes me wonder, what is the energy consumption of a what it takes to nurture a human to be an expert in something? Discussions of the intelligence in the LLMs as an emergent property of differentiating the model on troves of quality data, raise the question of how a human gains its intelligence. Starting from scratch, a child and a LLM, how can you compare their intelligence when provided with the same training data? What happens? What is the comparable intelligence of the two? We sit here analyzing the energy cost of training a LLM, developing artificial intelligence. We have to compare that to the energy costs of human intelligence. One may argue we are here because of the previous energy use of civilizations prior.
  - jstx1 4y ago
    A child doesn't start from scratch, they have billions of years of evolution encoded in their DNA.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      An LLM doesn't start from scratch, it's ran on computer hardware... The particular problem with talking about humanity is our biological functions are deeply intertwined with our intelligence functions. Some things are programmed in, like cellular behavior, organ building, what to do with these systems after you eat food. The two bottom parts of the brain are rather well developed at birth that control these functions. The cerebrum is rather undeveloped in comparison, and that's where the "thinking" happens, at least in terms of what we call intelligence and consciousness. While it comes preprogrammed with any number of subroutines, the amount of what we would consider data is minimal, and in our young years a huge amount of energy is spent exercising the brain so it works properly in the reality it exists. In children that is deprived from stimulation and real world experience (think extreme abuse), the brain underdevelops and it can become impossible for them to learn some things or think in particular ways. Do not underestimate the amount of work that must be performed for an infant to become a thinking machine.
ReptileMan 4y ago
Both right and wrong. There will be bubble, grifters and there will be a lot of pets.ai , but I think that unlike crypto the technology is sound, impressive and promising. The advice to be cautious with investing is a sound one.
polygamous_bat 4y ago
I think people who seem overly eager to call chatGPT and stable diffusion and similar models "bullshit generators", and dismiss them because of that is missing something large. In Machine Learning itself, we consider two classes of models/algorithms, discriminative and generative. Up until six months ago, the best work we had in ML was all discriminative, and humans were irreplaceable when it came to content generation. All of a sudden we have good generative models and a way to cheaply generate vast amount of content and ideas, some of which are good and some of which are terrible. I predict this shift will also shift the associated humans' roles from "generator" to "discriminator", who will be cherry-picking and editing AI generated articles or images (much faster) rather than creating them from scratch (much slower). Yes, it will take a slighlty different set of skills in the human worker, but if you can't see how that productivity boost can help humanity, I ont know what to say.
screamingninja 4y ago
I disagree with Charlie Stross's comparison of the hype surrounding AI applications to the cryptocurrency bubble. He suggests that much of the AI hype is driven by the same grifters and hucksters that were previously involved in the cryptocurrency market. While both industries have seen a surge in investment, they are fundamentally different. Cryptocurrencies were based on speculative investments with little intrinsic value, whereas AI has the potential to revolutionize many industries and improve human lives. Charlie's skepticism and pessimism towards AI startups seems misplaced, as there are already many successful AI applications in use today. While caution is always advised when investing, writing off the entire AI industry based on comparisons to cryptocurrency seems shortsighted.
drdrey 4y ago
> the cryptocurrency bubble took a bit over a decade to implode, but back in 2011 I prediced its demise within, yeah, 1-3 years In 2011 crypto was only Bitcoin and the market cap was likely under $1B Today the market cap hovers around $1T after a 75% drawdown. OP points at the 75% drawdown and claims “I told you so”, while completely ignoring the rest of the graph.
golergka 4y ago
A lot of white collar professionals that I personally know, who didn't write a single line of code in their entire life's, use ChatGPT daily. Sure, when you just ask it questions, it hallucinates bullshit a lot. But when you ask it to process your input, for example, to write a professional sounding document based on your hectic bullet points, it's stellar. And a lot of white collar work is exactly this.
LelouBil 4y ago
The different thing this time is that non-technical people are using ChatGPT and Stable diffusion.
teaearlgraycold 4y ago
I know a number of people working with LLMsat startups. None of them have ever even considered working on a crypto product.
deleted 4y ago
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samdcbu 4y ago
While some of the recent hype around AI may be due to VCs and the industry looking for the next big thing, it’s a bit absurd to think that AI orgs like OpenAI and Stability were holding back research and then only released it once the crypto bubble popped. This article also misunderstands the differences between the various types of GPUs and seems to think they are fungible. Large models like GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion are trained using cloud compute, most likely clusters of Nvidia A100s. No one was ever using those for mining because it wouldn’t have been profitable. Similarly, no large models are being trained on second hand GPUs used for mining.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> Much of what passes for "journalism" these days is just stenographers feverishly copying the press-releases they're spoon-fed. Real journalism is a niche sector, and unless you subscribe to the exhorbitantly priced newsletters of the high-end analysts who are paid to work full-time studying the sector, what you're seeing on the news websites and in the newspapers is the product of PR firms paid to push AI. And you really need to ask who is paying them. That's the money shot, right there. I'm old enough to remember Walter Cronkite.
i_dont_know_ 4y ago
A huge difference between ChatGPT and crypto, though is that the latter literally offers to print money. The former, what, lets you make low-quality internet content a little more easily? It's harder to share the long-term 'get-rich-quick' benefits (though, of course many are trying right now). There's an initial bump right now as various content mediums try to cope with ChatGPT content, but once that stabilizes, I don't see the long-con grift that the author is mentioning being possible in the same way.
PaulHoule 4y ago
It is funny how NFTs and crypto fell off the radar so quickly. It happened so quickly that prices didn’t collapse because hardly anybody trades anymore. I think people like Eliezer Yudkowsky are worked up about ChatGPT because it bullshits so much better than them. That said, I look at this library https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/quicktour https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/quicktour which can do 13 different things and text generation is only one of them. Most of them involve setting up well defined problems (e.g. being smart) and building training sets (e.g. working hard) and aren’t the shortcut that people think ChatGPT is. As I see it things that I was struggling with just a few years ago are downright easy, there is no doubt “the new AI” will find useful uses but somehow ChatGPT strikes at a vulnerable place in many people’s psychology.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  If you have a real-world text-related task that is somewhat complex then you can use a custom prompt with OpenAI's API to achieve it within a few days. I can imagine someone hiring you for something like that and you charging them $20,000 for two weeks of completely wasted time due to whatever cognitive or philosophical hang up you have with using the more powerful pre-trained model.
noman-land 4y ago
I know this forum is full of businessy types but it's still amazing to me to hear so many people saying crypto has no use cases and AI is already proving useful. I have my own healthy skepticisms about both, and see some really interesting use cases in both. Obviously there are and will continue to be donothing hucksters with magic potions, like in any industry, especially new and misunderstood ones. They will do their ruinings with no concern for actual progress. However can we take stock of a few things here? Crypto: - opt-in, democratizing - privacy preserving, data protecting - open, transparent, auditable, provable - peer to peer - extremely cheap to participate AI: - trained and used without consent - massive data ingesting and processing - closed, blackbox, censored, inscrutable - centrally, corporately controlled - prohibitively expensive to participate So when I hear people saying that crypto is dead and has no use cases, and AI is useful already and is solving real world problems, I think I know what kinds of problems they are trying to solve. The examples I'm seeing so far of people getting "real world" uses out of AI are like downright grotesque to me. Writing cover letters? Making "content" for marketing websites? Writing emails? Who wants this? Only the makers of these things want them. Not the receivers. As if the corporate internet couldn't get any more boring and derivative, let's put it all in a big pile and then churn out infinite replicas of it in a vast grey fog.
- rnosov 4y ago
  There are plenty of LLMs that are completely open source that you can use (like BLOOM for example). There's also a massive original use case of machine translation for LLMs which is a real world problem. AI image generation seems WAY more useful thing to me than say NFTs.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Crypto has almost no use cases for the average person over the system the average person is already using. Crypto has a huge amount of risk over the average system the average person is already using. This dramatically reduces the perceived value of Crypto. Again, Crypto has uses, but not at the value put on individual tokens when compared to cash. When looking at your AI description, if used in the same light, Linux should have won the world and Windows and all other proprietary software shouldn't exist. And yet here we are with billions/trillions in market value around proprietary software.

143 points by cpach 4y ago

Machine learning has a decade-long track record of adding value to consumers and companies in various sectors. Crypto does not. There's probably too much hype, but it's not completely unfounded.

magic_hamster 4y ago

While the author's prediction may or may not come true, this text has a weird conspiracy vibe in my opinion. Especially parts trying to imply that by some mysterious way NN are trained on GPUs and manufacturers are pushing AI to sell more cards, not unlike the rush to get GPUs for crypto. It's almost as if GPUs have been specifically built to handle massive parallelism with specialized models offering machine learning optimizations! However, the cards used for these vocations are different: while you used to be able to mine cryptocurrencies with consumer GPUs, training AI models is done on professional hardware with more emphasis on VRAM. Training something serious like ChatGPT is far from easy (if at all possible) for a startup. And AI projects have arguably become more useful to the everyday consumer than crypto currency ever was. Either way, AI is certainly a huge buzzword, but for now, it's living up to the hype. Who knows what'll happen three years into the future.

paulpauper 4y ago

Crypto is still way bigger. I don't think the comparison holds. ChatGPT is mostly jsut a tool, whereas crypto is hyped as somehow replacing the current financial system or even 'world order'. There is considerable hype, but not on the level seen with crypto.

ctoth 4y ago

The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about the current article is that Charley is a cracking good writer who has just found that a machine might be able to take his job. Now, of course, AI is all a giant scam. It's been steadily progressing in a way that connected people could see since GPT-2[0]. But only now, with the clouds on the horizon is it clearly and obviously some conspiracy. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." [0]: GPT-2 As Step Toward General Intelligence: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-general-intelligence/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-g...

Karellen 4y ago

> If you're thinking about investing in AI startups now? My advice is to avoid them like the plague [...] it's too late, and you'll wake up one morning only to discover you've had your pockets picked. > I give it about 1-3 years until the crash. (Although I tend towards optimism: the cryptocurrency bubble took a bit over a decade to implode, but back in 2011 I prediced its demise within, yeah, 1-3 years.) What I'm reading is, I should invest in AI startups now, and cash out 90% of my investment in 3 years time while things are still going well. Maybe cash out 30% of whatever remains each year after that, until the crash.

jsnell 4y ago
Investments in startups aren't very liquid. You're unlikely to be able to cash out at will, and definitely not at a regular schedule like that.

braindead_in 4y ago

The hype around ChatGPT is massive! I haven't seen this much buzz since the iPhone launch. Back in 2008, I remember having debates with my friends about the future of Nokia just a few days after it launched. Since then, I've witnessed the rise and fall of several tech waves, including mobile apps, cloud, SaaS, and crypto. It's been exciting to see so many people ride these waves and create wealth in the process. Will I be one of the lucky ones this time around is the only question.

aaron695 4y ago

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tfehring 4y ago

I agree with many of the top-level comments about the relative utility of AI applications and blockchain applications as they exist today. But I'll add another point that no one else seems to have made yet. The reason for the widespread grift in the crypto space is not just that blockchain applications are a relatively new and overhyped technology. Another huge factor is that many blockchain applications, by their very nature, are designed to circumvent securities regulation in order to raise money from unsophisticated retail speculators. I'm sure some shitty AI startups will raise capital from retail speculators on crowdfunding platforms and the like. But I expect it to be a lot less widespread compared to the crypto space, and it will happen within the confines of (mostly) US securities regulation, which will mean much better disclosure and much less outright fraud and misappropriation. The main "victims" this time around will be, like, the LPs of second-rate VC funds, and in many cases those fund managers are well aware of all of this but are incentivized to follow the trend anyway.

noman-land 4y ago
Just wait til the AI grifters are using blockchain for crowdfunding and using AI to program their smart contracts.

Stevenjobss 4y ago

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GRACE44 4y ago

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brucethemoose2 4y ago

I really hope one of the AI startups (stealth or already public) gets some more traction, especially among smaller scale hardware. Nvidia is an AI tyrant. But I guess we are probably stuck with Intel/AMD/Apple... because who else is going to make affordable PCIe desktop cards, much less squeeze into laptops?

ilaksh 4y ago
Within the next five years or so there will be a completely new hardware paradigm based on something like "crossbar arrays" or memristors that is orders of magnitude more efficient for ML tasks. This provides an opportunity for new startups. They will eventually probably be acquired by Nvidia, Intel or AMD though.
- pixl97 4y ago
  This is my take on it too. Any technology that significantly reduces the cost of running AI is of immediate value to any company performing a lot of AI simulations currently.
  - brucethemoose2 4y ago
    But not if its finicky to use. I nearly pulled my hair out trying to get a Stable Diffusion UI running on Graphcore's free POD4 instances, and... gave up after I couldnt even download their SDK to update it. Even though its theoretically extremely fast.

jstx1 4y ago

Just because a bunch of crypto grifters are finding a new field to dip into doesn't mean that there hasn't been a lot of genuine progress in AI in the past 6 months.

rootusrootus 4y ago
Aside from dumping a very large amount of compute and human-supervised learning into existing technology, what major progress has been made in the past six months?
- pixl97 4y ago
  You mean things like GPT showing theory of mind at the level of a 9 year old, something that many people were arguing may not ever happen and/or if it did we were still a long way away from it just a few years ago?
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Is that because it actually has a theory of mind, or because it fakes it really well based on human training data, or because the test is flawed?
- edanm 4y ago
  I think that's an interesting question that you won't be able to get an answer for, because most new things are still not accessible to the average HN reader. I mean, you can look up ML research papers to see what's new, but none of that is going to seem anywhere near as impactful as ChatGPT because it's at the level of research. It's not like when the first theoretical models that make up the basis for GPT came out, people were instantly sure where we'd end up in 5 years. I'm sure people within OpenAI or other AI companies would be able to tell you of very interesting advances, but they won't do so on HN until the things are public.
- jstx1 4y ago
  You don't need to be dismissive - demonstrating what can be achieved with a lot of data/compute and additional human-supervised learning is progress.

bawolff 4y ago

I think its both. AI stuff has made some legit impressive advances recently. A bunch of people interested in getting rich quick smell the gold rush.

diydsp 4y ago
Exactly. That's the eigenrhythm of present day capitalism. Throw money to likely candidates, see what sticks. Speculators always capture headlines. Crytpo is chugging quietly along.
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
You've just summed up the core of the Gartner Hype Cycle in a nutshell.

derbOac 4y ago

I think this sort of skepticism is healthy — I think explainability and overfitting doesn't get enough attention for example — but AI strikes me as a bit different from crypto in that it's creeping into our everyday lives. Instructors are wrestling with assignment submissions, you wrestle with the uncanny valley in customer support lines, and people are posting about their troubled relationships with Bing in various places. If crypto had been showing up everywhere to the same extent, I think these discussions would be a bit different. That's not to say there isn't rampant hype in AI but I do think there's a continuum from blatant fraud to truly life-changing tech with plenty of grey, and AI is closer to the genuine end of the spectrum. My guess is AI isn't monolithic either, just as I don't think crypto was. Some areas of AI will probably end up having been overhyped more than others. I agree with the sentiment of the post that sometimes I think semi-fraudulent to outright fraudulent overhype is a defining feature of our time. I wish the institutions responsible for public discourse would approach things accordingly.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> but AI strikes me as a bit different from crypto in that it's creeping into our everyday lives. Taking this further: Crypto was creeping into our lives, but only in the FOMO sense; People thought they needed to invest in crypto because other people were going to invest in crypto and they didn’t want to miss out. The actual use cases of crypto aren’t attractive to most people, aside from ideological or law-evading circumstances. AI is different because people are rushing to actually use it for their own benefit. Investors are rushing to place their bets, but we already see big companies deploying AI in the real world in ways that are being used by the general public.

hanniabu 4y ago

GPUs aren't need for blockchain. Bitcoin is stuck in the past and is a shame it's what everyone looks at, along with the misnomer "cryptocurrency". Ethereum is the leader in the space and the only one innovation and uses PoS which can run a validator on very little hardware, such as a raspberry pi.

rhn_mk1 4y ago

Disapppointing summary from someone whose imagination should allow them to see more. Generative text models might spit out "garbage", but this "garbage" has been more interesting than the garbage we have seen before in how it breezes through the Turing test. It's telling that not a word was said about image generation, which is benefitting from the same GPU usage, has not stopped progressing, and produces stuff that creates economic value. Like in this example: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/us-copyright-office-withdraws-copyright-for-ai-generated-comic-artwork/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/us-co... The author seems to identify with VCs too much, if all the AI hype means is more grift. Sure, that might be a factor, but the general condemnation of the sector is too much.

HL33tibCe7 4y ago

If you think cryptocurrencies are in any way comparable to the recent progress in artificial intelligence, I’m sorry but you’re a Luddite. If you’d have presented anybody reading this with ChatGPT two years ago, they simply would not have believed it was possible. This kind of step change in AI ability is interesting enough in itself without having some kind of insidious and completely unsubstantiated conspiracy theory behind it. > This is not a coincidence. I despise this kind of writing — writing with 100% confidence and then providing zero evidence. It reminds me very much of my reading of writing from “the election was rigged!!!” conspiracy morons. 10 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

UncleOxidant 4y ago
> If you’d have presented anybody reading this with ChatGPT two years ago, they simply would not have believed it was possible. I'm having a hard time believing it now, it's just an amazing amount of progress in a short amount of time. > I despise this kind of writing Me too. It's suggesting that there's some kind of cabal that somehow decided it was time to crash crypto and get everyone to go after AI. Are there bandwagons? Definitely and they eventually go too far as with crypto - and quite possibly AI will experience something similar if it doesn't deliver on it's promises. But it's not like there's a bunch of guys in a smoke filled room somewhere who are driving this. Crypto was largely driven by cheap money (0% interest rates for several years) and artificially low electricity prices. Investment in AI now with much higher interest rates means that some people think they're going to get a better return on their money. It seems less bubbly in this kind of monetary environment.
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nine_k 4y ago
Cryprocurrencies are juxtaposed in the article to ChatGPT-like AI in two ways. * 3 years ago, BTS / ETH / a whole slew of other coins were all the rage, the centerpiece of popular speculation. Now AI takes their place, even though without the get-rich-quick overtones. * Many cryprocurrencies and AI both massively benefit from the use of GPUs, so once the crypro bubble burst and a lot of GPU compute power was freed, it can now conveniently be used for AI. Otherwise, they are not comparable indeed.

rjsw 4y ago

There are a lot of "bullshit jobs". Not needing people to do those jobs anymore will be a benefit to anyone paying for them, less so for those previously getting paid.

legrande 4y ago

If you need to know where we are in the hype cycle, check out this curated list of every AI project currently active: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hwBf_TnSxwhkfnJTVpUNAJWS-t_XzooxzBYbpXiTqpE/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hwBf_TnSxwhkfnJTVpUNAJWS... It's mind blowing that we have something blossoming out of nowhere that has real-world use-cases and is genuinely improving people's lives. I have tools to write the perfect e-mail, remove the background from photos, write copy for my clients' websites, and tools to help me code faster. It's all very brilliant stuff.

skwirl 4y ago

I am puzzled by all the hot takes stating that ChatGPT (and other similar tools) outputs garbage and is being "discredited" when I have personally found it to be an incredibly useful tool that I have been using daily pretty much since it was first released. The only thing being discredited, in my mind, are the people who rush to be contrarian about something they don't actually seem to understand or have taken any time to use.

indymike 4y ago
The question is, what are you using it for and how much is required to automate you out of the loop?
charles_f 4y ago
It's useful, it's incredible, but everyone wants it to be a revolution, similarly as crypto currency was supposed to be, which it's not.
rnk 4y ago
So enlighten us with some examples of useful things you found.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  My partner is looking for a new job, and ChatGPT has been an amazing help in writing the cover letters that recruiters can't stop asking for. Previously, she would spend hours molding her previous cover letter to the job description. Now she can just give the job description and a bullet point list of her relevant experiences, and spend 15 minutes on the ChatGPT output to polish it a little bit and correct any potential misstatements.
  - lemmiwinks 4y ago
    You know how many minutes I "spend molding [my] previous cover letter to the job description"? 15 minutes. If you spend more than that, you are clearly doing it wrong.
  - 4y ago

phillipcarter 4y ago

Can't speak for consumer applications, but in the niche of developer tools the recent advancements in AI are anything but garbage.

gizmo 4y ago

LLM based chatbots are already more useful than all of crypto combined. Whereas crypto wastes energy as "proof of work" AI models try to be as energy-efficient as possible. The energy needed to train these LLMs is also 10,000 times less, so let's not act like they're in the same universe. Moreover, training the base layer of a LLM has to be done only once (for each generation) and subsequent training for domain specific purposes can happen on top of the base layer. This means these AI startups are not going to require an unlimited number of GPUs. Another big difference is that fundamental AI insights are what drives these AI innovations. Throwing more training data at a neural network is not what makes ChatGPT different from older generations of chatbots (although ChatGPT certainly does benefit from its huge training data set). Transformers for example are a new development, first introduced in a 2017 paper "Attention is all you need". It's unclear if LLMs will turn out to be a big deal. Maybe this will turn out just to be another AI summer. Too early to tell. But cynicism is unwarranted here.

gessha 4y ago
> Another big difference is that fundamental AI insights are what drives these AI innovations. Bigger models, more compute, more data, better compute have driven a lot of the performance of ML post-2013. For ChatGPT specifically, the secret sauce is the addition of human-vetted conversations [1]. In general fundamental AI insights come when - (1) somebody does something that works incredibly well and others try to explain it. Transformers are arguably an example of this although there’s a ton of attention literature before that. - (2) a ton of people make incremental steps towards a goal and at some point it becomes actually useful. ChatGPT is an example of this one. The point I’m trying to make is fundamental AI is boring, slow, rarely drives AI innovations and that’s not a bad thing. What drives AI innovations is really good UI and good data both of which are hard to nail down. [1] https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/#methods https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/#methods
incrudible 4y ago
Written by an LLM.

icemelt8 4y ago

Only difference in this case is, AI has actual real positive use cases, compared to Crypto which just burned coal.

pototo666 4y ago

Before ChatGPT I spent around 200 usd per month to practice German with German native speakers for 2 months. Then I use ChatGPT to practice German and I am very happy about the experience. AI can't replace real human yet. But I'm already willing to practice with ChatGPT given my current use case and my budget. It's not 10x better, but 20x cheaper. From my experience, AI is not hype. Imagine integrating a more fine tuned AI and text-to-speech feature to make a better AI teacher. Such an app already exists, I believe. I'm waiting for a German and Japanese one.

ginkoutest 4y ago
Where did you find these German native speakers to practice with? And you said "such an app already exists", but not for German and Japanese. Do you know the name? I have a lot of experience building language learning services so am very curious to hear what you feel is currently missing in your current tools to learn German/Japanese.
- pototo666 4y ago
  I use iTalki to find native speaker to practice with. I say such app exists because I just read about Speak: https://www.speak.com/blog/speak-announces-27m-series-b-led-by-openai-startup-fund https://www.speak.com/blog/speak-announces-27m-series-b-led-... It's for studying English. What I don't like about a real tutor is because it's expensive and I have to book in advance. ChaptGPT is free and I can practice with it whenever I want. Besides, ChaptGPT is not a real human so I don't feel embaraced when I made stupid mistake.
  - ginkoutest 4y ago
    How much does it currently cost you (per session) to book someone on iTalki? And which would you prefer: a cheaper, on-demand version of iTalki (you get matched with someone already online versus booking in advance), or an AI-based app/service that you can chat back-and-forth with whenever you want?
    - 4y ago

vasco 4y ago

I really have little respect for any opinions that shame the use of electricity for things like training AI models. Being mad at it for crypto I can at least understand. But this should be at about the millionth place in the list of things to complain about electricity waste. And if that's how you prioritize your worries, I'm not sure how to trust any other opinions.

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dpflan 4y ago
It makes me wonder, what is the energy consumption of a what it takes to nurture a human to be an expert in something? Discussions of the intelligence in the LLMs as an emergent property of differentiating the model on troves of quality data, raise the question of how a human gains its intelligence. Starting from scratch, a child and a LLM, how can you compare their intelligence when provided with the same training data? What happens? What is the comparable intelligence of the two? We sit here analyzing the energy cost of training a LLM, developing artificial intelligence. We have to compare that to the energy costs of human intelligence. One may argue we are here because of the previous energy use of civilizations prior.
- jstx1 4y ago
  A child doesn't start from scratch, they have billions of years of evolution encoded in their DNA.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    An LLM doesn't start from scratch, it's ran on computer hardware... The particular problem with talking about humanity is our biological functions are deeply intertwined with our intelligence functions. Some things are programmed in, like cellular behavior, organ building, what to do with these systems after you eat food. The two bottom parts of the brain are rather well developed at birth that control these functions. The cerebrum is rather undeveloped in comparison, and that's where the "thinking" happens, at least in terms of what we call intelligence and consciousness. While it comes preprogrammed with any number of subroutines, the amount of what we would consider data is minimal, and in our young years a huge amount of energy is spent exercising the brain so it works properly in the reality it exists. In children that is deprived from stimulation and real world experience (think extreme abuse), the brain underdevelops and it can become impossible for them to learn some things or think in particular ways. Do not underestimate the amount of work that must be performed for an infant to become a thinking machine.

ReptileMan 4y ago

Both right and wrong. There will be bubble, grifters and there will be a lot of pets.ai , but I think that unlike crypto the technology is sound, impressive and promising. The advice to be cautious with investing is a sound one.

polygamous_bat 4y ago

I think people who seem overly eager to call chatGPT and stable diffusion and similar models "bullshit generators", and dismiss them because of that is missing something large. In Machine Learning itself, we consider two classes of models/algorithms, discriminative and generative. Up until six months ago, the best work we had in ML was all discriminative, and humans were irreplaceable when it came to content generation. All of a sudden we have good generative models and a way to cheaply generate vast amount of content and ideas, some of which are good and some of which are terrible. I predict this shift will also shift the associated humans' roles from "generator" to "discriminator", who will be cherry-picking and editing AI generated articles or images (much faster) rather than creating them from scratch (much slower). Yes, it will take a slighlty different set of skills in the human worker, but if you can't see how that productivity boost can help humanity, I ont know what to say.

screamingninja 4y ago

I disagree with Charlie Stross's comparison of the hype surrounding AI applications to the cryptocurrency bubble. He suggests that much of the AI hype is driven by the same grifters and hucksters that were previously involved in the cryptocurrency market. While both industries have seen a surge in investment, they are fundamentally different. Cryptocurrencies were based on speculative investments with little intrinsic value, whereas AI has the potential to revolutionize many industries and improve human lives. Charlie's skepticism and pessimism towards AI startups seems misplaced, as there are already many successful AI applications in use today. While caution is always advised when investing, writing off the entire AI industry based on comparisons to cryptocurrency seems shortsighted.

drdrey 4y ago

> the cryptocurrency bubble took a bit over a decade to implode, but back in 2011 I prediced its demise within, yeah, 1-3 years In 2011 crypto was only Bitcoin and the market cap was likely under $1B Today the market cap hovers around $1T after a 75% drawdown. OP points at the 75% drawdown and claims “I told you so”, while completely ignoring the rest of the graph.

golergka 4y ago

A lot of white collar professionals that I personally know, who didn't write a single line of code in their entire life's, use ChatGPT daily. Sure, when you just ask it questions, it hallucinates bullshit a lot. But when you ask it to process your input, for example, to write a professional sounding document based on your hectic bullet points, it's stellar. And a lot of white collar work is exactly this.

LelouBil 4y ago

The different thing this time is that non-technical people are using ChatGPT and Stable diffusion.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago

I know a number of people working with LLMsat startups. None of them have ever even considered working on a crypto product.

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samdcbu 4y ago

While some of the recent hype around AI may be due to VCs and the industry looking for the next big thing, it’s a bit absurd to think that AI orgs like OpenAI and Stability were holding back research and then only released it once the crypto bubble popped. This article also misunderstands the differences between the various types of GPUs and seems to think they are fungible. Large models like GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion are trained using cloud compute, most likely clusters of Nvidia A100s. No one was ever using those for mining because it wouldn’t have been profitable. Similarly, no large models are being trained on second hand GPUs used for mining.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

> Much of what passes for "journalism" these days is just stenographers feverishly copying the press-releases they're spoon-fed. Real journalism is a niche sector, and unless you subscribe to the exhorbitantly priced newsletters of the high-end analysts who are paid to work full-time studying the sector, what you're seeing on the news websites and in the newspapers is the product of PR firms paid to push AI. And you really need to ask who is paying them. That's the money shot, right there. I'm old enough to remember Walter Cronkite.

i_dont_know_ 4y ago

A huge difference between ChatGPT and crypto, though is that the latter literally offers to print money. The former, what, lets you make low-quality internet content a little more easily? It's harder to share the long-term 'get-rich-quick' benefits (though, of course many are trying right now). There's an initial bump right now as various content mediums try to cope with ChatGPT content, but once that stabilizes, I don't see the long-con grift that the author is mentioning being possible in the same way.

PaulHoule 4y ago

It is funny how NFTs and crypto fell off the radar so quickly. It happened so quickly that prices didn’t collapse because hardly anybody trades anymore. I think people like Eliezer Yudkowsky are worked up about ChatGPT because it bullshits so much better than them. That said, I look at this library https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/quicktour https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/quicktour which can do 13 different things and text generation is only one of them. Most of them involve setting up well defined problems (e.g. being smart) and building training sets (e.g. working hard) and aren’t the shortcut that people think ChatGPT is. As I see it things that I was struggling with just a few years ago are downright easy, there is no doubt “the new AI” will find useful uses but somehow ChatGPT strikes at a vulnerable place in many people’s psychology.

ilaksh 4y ago
If you have a real-world text-related task that is somewhat complex then you can use a custom prompt with OpenAI's API to achieve it within a few days. I can imagine someone hiring you for something like that and you charging them $20,000 for two weeks of completely wasted time due to whatever cognitive or philosophical hang up you have with using the more powerful pre-trained model.

noman-land 4y ago

I know this forum is full of businessy types but it's still amazing to me to hear so many people saying crypto has no use cases and AI is already proving useful. I have my own healthy skepticisms about both, and see some really interesting use cases in both. Obviously there are and will continue to be donothing hucksters with magic potions, like in any industry, especially new and misunderstood ones. They will do their ruinings with no concern for actual progress. However can we take stock of a few things here? Crypto: - opt-in, democratizing - privacy preserving, data protecting - open, transparent, auditable, provable - peer to peer - extremely cheap to participate AI: - trained and used without consent - massive data ingesting and processing - closed, blackbox, censored, inscrutable - centrally, corporately controlled - prohibitively expensive to participate So when I hear people saying that crypto is dead and has no use cases, and AI is useful already and is solving real world problems, I think I know what kinds of problems they are trying to solve. The examples I'm seeing so far of people getting "real world" uses out of AI are like downright grotesque to me. Writing cover letters? Making "content" for marketing websites? Writing emails? Who wants this? Only the makers of these things want them. Not the receivers. As if the corporate internet couldn't get any more boring and derivative, let's put it all in a big pile and then churn out infinite replicas of it in a vast grey fog.

rnosov 4y ago
There are plenty of LLMs that are completely open source that you can use (like BLOOM for example). There's also a massive original use case of machine translation for LLMs which is a real world problem. AI image generation seems WAY more useful thing to me than say NFTs.
pixl97 4y ago
Crypto has almost no use cases for the average person over the system the average person is already using. Crypto has a huge amount of risk over the average system the average person is already using. This dramatically reduces the perceived value of Crypto. Again, Crypto has uses, but not at the value put on individual tokens when compared to cash. When looking at your AI description, if used in the same light, Linux should have won the world and Windows and all other proprietary software shouldn't exist. And yet here we are with billions/trillions in market value around proprietary software.