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Right, every time I see the AI hype compared to crypto my brain breaks a little. As far as I'm aware crypto never saved me a minute of time, but even in a pret

Right, every time I see the AI hype compared to crypto my brain breaks a little. As far as I'm aware crypto never saved me a minute of time, but even in a pretty conservative accounting, ChatGPT has shaved a few hours of tedium off various coding tasks since it released for me. Not to mention just the sheer entertainment value I've gotten out of it. I definitely understand some of the concern and share some apprehension about certain aspects of this tech, but I can't understand how some folks can't seem to find even a _little_ to be excited about here.

yieldcrv 4y ago
> As far as I'm aware crypto never saved me a minute of time It's saved me days and weeks of international wires. Basically for the last half-decade, things that would have been international wires and subject to crazy scrutiny, missing deposits, "which institution has the funds" back and forth, and that's been reduced to domestic transfers. The international vendor would just receive crypto, or vice versa. And we would use our local methods to have local money in our bank account. Oh right, and at unlimited amounts. That's important, a lot of people are never moving enough to know this is a problem. Fees were not percentage based, and the commerce could work 24/7. this is very different from whatever arbitrary limitation is placed on the other method. This is funny to explain because it assumes we even wanted our state's currency after the fact to begin with (USD for me, I'm American), since we could buy goods and services and investments and entertainment with the crypto immediately. But going back and forth is fine. I want to pay fiat people or a credit card off? Its in the bank account same day. I want to stake in a crypto service? I can do that immediately. I don't think there is any metric on how large this use case is: curiosity inducing international wires replaced by low risk domestic transactions. I don't think it is possible to quantify because they just look like address to address transfers, and domestic withdrawals. I think its common enough.
- agentwiggles 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm aware there are some legitimate uses for crypto, apologies that I came off overly dismissive. My point is mainly that the use cases for GPT/LLMs are pretty glaringly obvious to anyone with an imagination and should be proportionally more difficult to dismiss as seems to be a somewhat popular minority opinion here on HN.
textninja 4y ago
Crypto has been equally revolutionary, but the value lies in a different stratum that’s harder to relate to than the immediate gratification of AI-enhanced chat. Things are going to get really interesting where these worlds collide. I look forward to truly open models built on blockchains. I know I’ll give off mad scientist vibes for saying this, but a highly distributed model that can’t be shut down, blocked, centrally programmed, or constrained is the future I’m excited to see.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > a highly distributed model that can’t be shut down, blocked, centrally programmed, or constrained is the future I’m excited to see Brushing over the idea that we’d run an ML model on a blockchain like it’s a general purpose computer… we already have a distributed model that can’t be shut down. LLaMA leaked over BitTorrent, and that was used to build Alpaca - and that’s a small model (~4gb) that basically anyone can download and run on any device. As long as people keep seeding it, then it’ll stay distributed and resistant to being blocked etc. as long as we distribute info like we do today, anyone will be able to train the model (like they did from LLaMA -> alpaca).
  - textninja 4y ago
    > Brushing over the idea that we’d run an ML model on a blockchain like it’s a general purpose computer Glad you were able to brush that straw man out of the way for us. > LLaMA leaked over BitTorrent . . . small model . . . anyone can download and run I’m aware of that, but I’m referring to models with parameter counts in the trillions; that is, the kinds of models that require super computers (or globally distributed commodity infrastructure and ASICs) to run. As the state of the art advances, what leaked years or even weeks ago will not matter; people want the latest and greatest, and they’ll demand that it serves their interests, not OpenAI’s.

yieldcrv 4y ago

> As far as I'm aware crypto never saved me a minute of time It's saved me days and weeks of international wires. Basically for the last half-decade, things that would have been international wires and subject to crazy scrutiny, missing deposits, "which institution has the funds" back and forth, and that's been reduced to domestic transfers. The international vendor would just receive crypto, or vice versa. And we would use our local methods to have local money in our bank account. Oh right, and at unlimited amounts. That's important, a lot of people are never moving enough to know this is a problem. Fees were not percentage based, and the commerce could work 24/7. this is very different from whatever arbitrary limitation is placed on the other method. This is funny to explain because it assumes we even wanted our state's currency after the fact to begin with (USD for me, I'm American), since we could buy goods and services and investments and entertainment with the crypto immediately. But going back and forth is fine. I want to pay fiat people or a credit card off? Its in the bank account same day. I want to stake in a crypto service? I can do that immediately. I don't think there is any metric on how large this use case is: curiosity inducing international wires replaced by low risk domestic transactions. I don't think it is possible to quantify because they just look like address to address transfers, and domestic withdrawals. I think its common enough.

agentwiggles 4y ago
Yeah, I'm aware there are some legitimate uses for crypto, apologies that I came off overly dismissive. My point is mainly that the use cases for GPT/LLMs are pretty glaringly obvious to anyone with an imagination and should be proportionally more difficult to dismiss as seems to be a somewhat popular minority opinion here on HN.

textninja 4y ago

Crypto has been equally revolutionary, but the value lies in a different stratum that’s harder to relate to than the immediate gratification of AI-enhanced chat. Things are going to get really interesting where these worlds collide. I look forward to truly open models built on blockchains. I know I’ll give off mad scientist vibes for saying this, but a highly distributed model that can’t be shut down, blocked, centrally programmed, or constrained is the future I’m excited to see.

vineyardmike 4y ago
> a highly distributed model that can’t be shut down, blocked, centrally programmed, or constrained is the future I’m excited to see Brushing over the idea that we’d run an ML model on a blockchain like it’s a general purpose computer… we already have a distributed model that can’t be shut down. LLaMA leaked over BitTorrent, and that was used to build Alpaca - and that’s a small model (~4gb) that basically anyone can download and run on any device. As long as people keep seeding it, then it’ll stay distributed and resistant to being blocked etc. as long as we distribute info like we do today, anyone will be able to train the model (like they did from LLaMA -> alpaca).
- textninja 4y ago
  > Brushing over the idea that we’d run an ML model on a blockchain like it’s a general purpose computer Glad you were able to brush that straw man out of the way for us. > LLaMA leaked over BitTorrent . . . small model . . . anyone can download and run I’m aware of that, but I’m referring to models with parameter counts in the trillions; that is, the kinds of models that require super computers (or globally distributed commodity infrastructure and ASICs) to run. As the state of the art advances, what leaked years or even weeks ago will not matter; people want the latest and greatest, and they’ll demand that it serves their interests, not OpenAI’s.