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The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

81 points by jrepinc 3y ago

jstx1 3y ago
It isn't. There's a fundamental difference between hype around something useful and hype around something that isn't useful.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Right. The blockchain at least has semi-novel ideas around hashing and distributed trust, AI is just spitting out the same words we've seen for years! I'm not a crypto or AI advocate, but it's easy to see how "technology with overestimated social consequences" could get tiring for everyone who isn't an investor. The "fundamental difference" between cryptocurrency and AI is that one is built on reproducible and accountable logging and the other is guesswork. Trying to champion one or the other feels like pointless virtue signalling really. I also have to admit I really don't like Cory Doctorow's other works (I especially despise the reductive theory of "enshittification") but his thesis is 100% the truth. People need new buzzwords to cling to, and AI is the one with the most popular demo. The usefulness is an accessory to the marketing and positioning of AI-powered products.
  - mxkopy 3y ago
    To most people the main use of crypto is to make money go up. This is a dubious use case. To most people the main use of AI is: Code suggestions Code analysis Document summarization Document creation Clipart generation Audio transcription Audio synthesis Realistic chat bots ... These are not dubious use cases. The number of people who have been defrauded by crypto number in the millions. The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero. Even if AI is wrong 90% of the time, 10% of the time it makes someone's job easier. Making someone's job easier is objectively more valuable than making someone's bank account number go up. One adds wealth to society. The other redistributes existing wealth. I can go on about the differences but I'll let you tell me about how Ethereum has a really good logging system first.
    - breakyerself 3y ago
      Also AI voice and image recognition and language translation are already ubiquitous.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      You're not refuting the point, though. Both technologies provide utility that is not all-encompassing. People promote it as a panacea, and investors get angry when their investments aren't reciprocated. That's a hype bubble, and AI perfectly aligns with all of it's criteria. > The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero. What's the number of people who have been murdered by AI? It's a much more dubious figure, but a larger one to be sure. If you want to move the goalpost to which one is more harmful, I still think you hamstring your attack on cryptocurrency.
      - mxkopy 3y ago
        > You're not refuting the point, though. Why do people keep saying their opinions as if they are fact? Whether or not I refuted your point is independent from your assertions of such. > Both technologies provide utility that is not all-encompassing. No. Crypto provides no utility. At all. AI provides a lot of utility, some of the time. And you know what, you're wrong. AI is a panacea. It's called general purpose transformer ffs. And not by marketers, but by actual engineers who developed the Transformer architecture. (Obviously I'm being a little facetious but AI is infinitely more of a cure-all than crypto) > What's the number of people who have been murdered by AI? The second most common use case of crypto is for anonymous transactions for illegal drugs and weapons. So that's all I'm going to say on that point.
        smoldesu 3y ago
        > No. Crypto provides no utility. That's just blatantly untrue. If there is anything you cannot do with normal money, cryptocurrency has utility. You can argue that it's overall negative utility or insignificant compared to the glory of AI (you may be right) but utility is inherent to any system of payment with more than 1 participant. > AI is a panacea. It's called general purpose transformer ffs. That's more than just a little facetious. Our AI generates text - it does nothing other than that. It's admittedly great at manipulating text, but that's where it's "general purpose transforming" stops. It encodes human concepts like emotions and spatial reasoning into words, which are incomplete analogs to how they work in the real world. It has impressive results, but comparing the value of human labor to the work AI can do is startlingly parallel to comparing the value of a database to the work a blockchain can do. It almost provides the basis for reality-distortion to investors, which is where those "marginal utility" AI/crypto companies come from. > The second most common use case of crypto is for anonymous transactions for illegal drugs and weapons The first most common use case of AI is for military purposes.
  - jstx1 3y ago
    > Trying to champion one or the other feels like pointless virtue signalling really. No, I mean something very specific - I can do things at work with LLMs that I couldn't do a year ago without them. I can't say the same about anything crypto related. If you think that AI is just spitting our word we've seen or that it's guesswork, I don't know how you can even discuss it in good faith.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      Overall, I agree - the progress of AI has been breakneck over the past 12 months. But the difference in quality of Talk-to-Transformer and GPT-4 hasn't been that much in my experience. Both produce seemingly-correct text that crumbles under scrutiny and becomes useless for anything with a sub-80% acceptable failure rate. It's great stuff, and I'd be lying if I said I liked cryptocurrency and don't use AI. The parallels are starkly visible though, and the "overpromise/underdeliver" cycle is already much further along than cryptocurrency ever got. The bubble will eventually pop because people are dissatisfied with the pace of progress, and then everyone will look for a scapegoat. We're already halfway there, judging by the daily deluge of "Ask HN: Why Does It Feel Like OpenAI Nerfed ChatGPT?" posts.
      - efrank3 3y ago
        Crypto promised to replace the dollar, mortgages, ID systems, etc... It's had ten years to do so and still has little to show. ChatGPT was released a few months ago and has hundreds of millions of users. I use it every day for work.
  - amitrip 3y ago
    [dead]
- rvz 3y ago
  Whilst one has an efficient greener method of achieving consensus which one blockchain (Ethereum) switched from the wasteful proof-of-work to the greener proof-of-stake making that possible. On the another hand after years of deep learning, there is still no viable efficient methods of training, fine tuning or inference without needing more data centers as the data and the AI model scales and its hype is currently contributing to the increased wastage of water and resources all for the sake of incinerating the planet to produce broken and hallucinating black-box AI models. Being ‘useful’ isn’t an excuse for not finding greener efficient alternatives that significantly lower emissions rather than continuing to burn the planet over the new ‘hype’.
  - zerbinxx 3y ago
    I agree with your point on AI - the hallucinating black box isn’t going to change the world in any meaningful, fundamental way. But positioning crypto as the antithesis of wasteful, useless tech (esp. Ethereum) is truly laughable, as no one uses it for anything either.
    - rvz 3y ago
      > But positioning crypto as the antithesis of wasteful, useless tech (esp. Ethereum) is truly laughable, as no one uses it for anything either. You're telling me right here that absolutely 'no-one' is using Ethereum? Surely you are not at all serious about what you said. There are many companies like Moneygram, Stripe, Ticketmaster, Checkout.com, etc that are using crypto currencies like Ethereum which are on greener consensus models. Ethereum made it possible to switch from a wasteful consensus model like proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and it significantly reduced its emissions by 99.992% [0]. Even if your ludicrous claim of absolutely 'no one uses it for anything either', it is not incinerating the planet or wasting as much resources and energy unlike AI (deep learning) that is currently doing today. After a decade of deep learning there have been no efficient alternatives to their existing operations and it brings in more resource waste and continues incinerates the planet. Being 'useful' is not a great excuse to justify burning the planet. [0] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain-eliminates-99-99-of-its-carbon-footprint-overnight-after-a-successful-merge-according-to-new-report/ https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain...
graypegg 3y ago
I do think “AI” is a hype-bubble, but machine learning and specifically the sort of LLMs we’re seeing now are definitively not a hype-bubble. We don’t really need general AI, nor are we going to be able to make a true flawless general AI anytime soon. AI was always a really vague marketing term, and can be applied to anything for instant relevancy boost. Bubble territory. The LLMs we have now are extremely effective though. There’s real use case here for automating writing, and some menial tasks that human beings were unfairly burdened with, but were impossible to automate till now. That’ll stick around. (Considering that ML concepts have been around for decades, you could even say they already have!)
- jstx1 3y ago
  > I do think “AI” is a hype-bubble, but machine learning and specifically the sort of LLMs we’re seeing now are definitively not a hype-bubble. There isn't any kind of distinction - when people say AI in 2023 they mean ML, LLMs, image models etc.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    No, I know, the distinction I’m making is that “AI on everything” marketing is going to be the hype bubble. There’s a lot of knee jerk products out there from businesses that were scared of being left behind on the wave of AI that don’t actually add much. “AI powered” could mean an in-house trained deep learning network. Or an api call to ChatGPT. Or single function someone made by tweaking sliders in Desmos calculator till the curve had the right vibe. It’s the slapping “AI” over “black box magic process” that’s going to implode. But there’s obviously massive work being done in ML that will change the world. Something actually worth the hype.
- worrycue 3y ago
  > The LLMs we have now are extremely effective though. There’s real use case here for automating writing, and some menial tasks that human beings were unfairly burdened with, but were impossible to automate till now. Some people take issue with that assertion. The biggest problem with LLMs is you can’t trust them and have to verify everything they output - and often writing it yourself and verifying is easier than verifying someone/something else’s work. Right now no sane corporation will even let a LLM run their helplines that they out sourced to India. Imagine a LLM hallucinating a dangerous “solution” to a customer problem resulting in loss of property, injuries, or even death. It’s a massive lawsuit waiting to happen.
BinRoo 3y ago
Over-hyped at times? Yes. A bursting bubble? Not in my opinion. I'm already able to capture value in ways that were thought too difficult just 6 months ago. That's not vaporware.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  WeWork also captured unique value for thousands of people before their company collapsed and everything fell apart. Your product doesn't need to be vaporware to be a bubble.
paxys 3y ago
The difference is that crypto as a sector is a dead end, while there will absolutely be multiple trillion+ dollar "AI" companies at some point in the future. It may not happen anytime soon, and it may not be any of the companies in existence today, but the overall bet (and its associated hype) is a valid - even necessary - one. In that sense the current state of AI is less like crypto and more like the dotcom bubble of the early 00s. No one really understands the underlying tech well enough, but everyone wants to be involved. There are companies surging in valuation just by adding AI to their name. While all of this will correct itself, the underlying tech (the web in 2000, AI today) will eventually prove to be world changing.
- elwebmaster 3y ago
  Now replace “crypto” with “social media” and “AI” with “crypto”, then read your comment again and tell me how this is not what a crypto fanboy would write two years ago?
  - civilitty 3y ago
    ChatGPT has helped more with my drug manufacturing empire in the last six months than crypto has in over a decade. It’s just useful.
    - wittycardio 3y ago
      [dead]
  - casey2 3y ago
    The difference is that social media as a sector is a dead end, while there will absolutely be multiple trillion+ dollar "crypto" companies at some point in the future. It may not happen anytime soon, and it may not be any of the companies in existence today, but the overall bet (and its associated hype) is a valid - even necessary - one. In that sense, the current state of crypto is less like social media and more like the dotcom bubble of the early 00s. No one really understands the underlying tech well enough, but everyone wants to be involved. There are companies surging in valuation just by adding "crypto" to their name. While all of this will correct itself, the underlying tech (the web in 2000, crypto today) will eventually prove to be world changing. It's important to note that this is a hypothetical scenario where we're replacing terms to compare different industries. The statements above are not a reflection of actual market conditions or predictions about the future success of specific sectors. No sed/shitcoin required.
jokoon 3y ago
The hype helps chip vendors sell gpu, crypto or AI.
bbstats 3y ago
No
elwebmaster 3y ago
People need to remember what year Bitcoin first became popular and what year it is today. Comparing crypto of today to AI of today is unfair. You need to compare crypto when it first came out: - “digital cash”, “buy anything with minimal fees” - “banking for the unbanked” - “digital gold”, “not subject to inflation” - “trade cash for crypto with anyone on the street” - “no merchant fees” All of these statements were true when Bitcoin first came out and all of them provided value to some albeit not everyone. Most of these statements are not true today. 6-7 years later and we can barely buy anything with crypto, the fees are most definitely not minimal and the “merchant fees” fade in comparison, the market is fragmented beyond imagination. Given taxation and KYC requirements crypto today is anything but “banking for the unbanked” or “digital cash”, you most definitely can’t trade it with random strangers on the street unless you want to get yourself arrested. Due to its volatility and correlation with the market crypto also does not appear to be a safe heaven today, despite what theory would have us believe. All that to say, there was great hope for crypto when it first came out but over time its utility diminished. I can draw some parallels with the AI of today but will the future turn out the same we can only guess.
- raykyri 3y ago
  Other criticisms aside, fees are <10 cents for many transactions on Eth rollups right now, and will drop another 10x in the next six months if not more. (Only true since around the last month.) USDC is nice for international money transfers, though still niche. I don’t think anyone cares if you trade crypto on the streets, just don’t get rubber hosed. The space has suffered a lot from adverse selection towards grifters. UST alone captured many of the earnest attempts towards payments and took them down with it.
awaythrow483 3y ago
No, I think AMD is really worth 500x earnings. No bubble here
rzazueta 3y ago
The crypto hype bubble was the new mobile hype bubble. The mobile hype bubble was the new portal hype bubble. The portal hype bubble was the new dot com hype bubble. I swear there's a pattern here... Maybe I'm not seeing it...
- Hatrix 3y ago
  Machine learning hype in there somewhere.
zerbinxx 3y ago
Mark my words, this week new data will come out showing an uptick in all things inflation related, and by a larger-than-expected margin, the Fed will raise rates, and a lot of the hopium that’s been filling balloons for the last six months will rapidly dissipate back into gloomy despair. AI companies and related stocks (NVDA) will be first in line when people realizes we’re not going back to the world of free money in 2018 that fueled a number of hilarious pump-and-dumps over the last 5 years. Other than that, OP is correct in just about everything in the article - AI isn’t “artificial” or “intelligent”, it’s just a hype word to put on top of a relatively simple ecosystem of applications that may someday prove valuable, but for today are comically bad at everything that isn’t strictly a language exercise (e.g. producing soundalike copy, translating bits of code between apps, etc.). It’s presently a tool that can be no smarter than the user whose hands it occupies, and in fact requires a significant amount of investment to actually “learn” or take direction to be good at some specific tasks. Textbook hype case as far as I can see.
- rvz 3y ago
  Reading all the comments here tells me that we have not experienced a true crash in the market. AI has created a lot of euphoria pumped by VC money once again which can only result in disappointment of expectations since this is the 'pump' part of the hype cycle. Sooner or later we will see if any of these so-called AI companies are actually making any money or will survive at all. In 2010, almost everyone was a 'tech company'. Now almost everyone is a 'AI company'. This bullshit needs to stop.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    > In 2010, almost everyone was a 'tech company'. Now almost everyone is a 'AI company'. This bullshit needs to stop. Bingo. Good luck telling this crowd that, though - all they know is "black turtleneck" and pestering middle-aged Disney investors for cash. These AI companies provide marginal utility that will get swallowed by later iterations even if AI is a technical failure. The "industry" of AI is bound to fail whether the technology impresses us or not.
    - 3y ago
cjbprime 3y ago
I can be sympathetic to many folks who have publicly dismissed LLMs as vapid hype in past months -- tech has claimed many fundamental breakthroughs before, it was reasonable to expect this would be another illusory one too -- but come on, even science fiction authors can't tell the difference between GPT-4 and autocomplete? It just feels willfully unimaginative of them, and perhaps motivated by insecurity. Use some of the creativity we've all seen you exhibit to ask GPT-4 questions that require complex reasoning inside a world model, rather than regurgitating its training set. It's not going to get it right all of the time, but the fact that it can get it right any of the time is astonishing, and it's going to get quickly better, perhaps even purely through compute spend increase rather than algorithmic breakthrough.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Maybe it is important to ask if that creativity is truly unique? Or in those cases already encoded in the training data? Humans in general might not actually be that creative. Or variations are something that could be broken.
  - cjbprime 3y ago
    You should try web searching for your question before asking it. If it shows up, don't ask it. If it doesn't show up, and the complaint is that it's possible to solve the question by studying past answers to different questions and applying them to this new one, then that sounds like reasoning to me.
constantcrying 3y ago
I domewhat agree with the main statement that financial interests inflate technologies and create "hype" for monetary gain. But: >AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. Is just an insane thing to write.
Ekaros 3y ago
The current "AI" is probably somewhat useful in many cases. Mostly producing content that does not need to be perfect. Or even correct. And it can already do it. You could already get text from one model and then few images from an other. And spam the made content online. Now valuation hype is big question. Will there be moats? Or will it be commodity technology? And maybe server farms will make some money and everyone else marginal profit?
md2020 3y ago
This is a terribly ignorant take and disappointing to see coming from a science fiction author. > AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord. This is just argument by assertion. We have no good definition of intelligence, so I have no clue how he can be so confident. "Machine learning doesn't learn" is a crazy take, since "backprop + gradient descent does learn" is close to the most well-supported thing you can say about the past few years of algorithmic progress. > sophisticated autocomplete Aside from this being an incredibly reductive sneer that clearly isn't true if you've honestly tried using ChatGPT, etc., his citation for this is a podcast, which I'm positive Doctorow would not accept as sufficient for basically any other technical topic. I love Ted Chiang's stories, and some of his takes on AI progress are cited here. However, I also found his extensive conversation with the Financial Times (earlier this month, so published after this) disappointing along similar lines. The thread running through both of these is a complete lack of a positive vision for the future, replaced by an almost smug cynicism that asserts any more technological progress is simply hype, a grift, and bad. Are there any current science fiction authors with a positive vision of the future?
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  > This is just argument by assertion. We have no good definition of intelligence, so I have no clue how he can be so confident. Without concrete definitions your assertions are just as correct as theirs. But they have the evidence of absurd tech-bro hype of past technologies to draw on. > I love Ted Chiang's stories, and some of his takes on AI progress are cited here. However, I also found his extensive conversation with the Financial Times (earlier this month, so published after this) disappointing along similar lines. "I love Ted Chiang's stories because they jive with my preconceived notions, but I like him less when he says things that I don't believe" > The thread running through both of these is a complete lack of a positive vision for the future, replaced by an almost smug cynicism that asserts any more technological progress is simply hype, a grift, and bad. Are there any current science fiction authors with a positive vision of the future? Plenty. They talked about flying cars and living on the moon. Instead we got stagnant wages and a social-media skinner box. All of those wonderfully positive predictions didn't pan out.

81 points by jrepinc 3y ago

It isn't. There's a fundamental difference between hype around something useful and hype around something that isn't useful.

smoldesu 3y ago
Right. The blockchain at least has semi-novel ideas around hashing and distributed trust, AI is just spitting out the same words we've seen for years! I'm not a crypto or AI advocate, but it's easy to see how "technology with overestimated social consequences" could get tiring for everyone who isn't an investor. The "fundamental difference" between cryptocurrency and AI is that one is built on reproducible and accountable logging and the other is guesswork. Trying to champion one or the other feels like pointless virtue signalling really. I also have to admit I really don't like Cory Doctorow's other works (I especially despise the reductive theory of "enshittification") but his thesis is 100% the truth. People need new buzzwords to cling to, and AI is the one with the most popular demo. The usefulness is an accessory to the marketing and positioning of AI-powered products.
- mxkopy 3y ago
  To most people the main use of crypto is to make money go up. This is a dubious use case. To most people the main use of AI is: Code suggestions Code analysis Document summarization Document creation Clipart generation Audio transcription Audio synthesis Realistic chat bots ... These are not dubious use cases. The number of people who have been defrauded by crypto number in the millions. The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero. Even if AI is wrong 90% of the time, 10% of the time it makes someone's job easier. Making someone's job easier is objectively more valuable than making someone's bank account number go up. One adds wealth to society. The other redistributes existing wealth. I can go on about the differences but I'll let you tell me about how Ethereum has a really good logging system first.
  - breakyerself 3y ago
    Also AI voice and image recognition and language translation are already ubiquitous.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    You're not refuting the point, though. Both technologies provide utility that is not all-encompassing. People promote it as a panacea, and investors get angry when their investments aren't reciprocated. That's a hype bubble, and AI perfectly aligns with all of it's criteria. > The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero. What's the number of people who have been murdered by AI? It's a much more dubious figure, but a larger one to be sure. If you want to move the goalpost to which one is more harmful, I still think you hamstring your attack on cryptocurrency.
    - mxkopy 3y ago
      > You're not refuting the point, though. Why do people keep saying their opinions as if they are fact? Whether or not I refuted your point is independent from your assertions of such. > Both technologies provide utility that is not all-encompassing. No. Crypto provides no utility. At all. AI provides a lot of utility, some of the time. And you know what, you're wrong. AI is a panacea. It's called general purpose transformer ffs. And not by marketers, but by actual engineers who developed the Transformer architecture. (Obviously I'm being a little facetious but AI is infinitely more of a cure-all than crypto) > What's the number of people who have been murdered by AI? The second most common use case of crypto is for anonymous transactions for illegal drugs and weapons. So that's all I'm going to say on that point.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        > No. Crypto provides no utility. That's just blatantly untrue. If there is anything you cannot do with normal money, cryptocurrency has utility. You can argue that it's overall negative utility or insignificant compared to the glory of AI (you may be right) but utility is inherent to any system of payment with more than 1 participant. > AI is a panacea. It's called general purpose transformer ffs. That's more than just a little facetious. Our AI generates text - it does nothing other than that. It's admittedly great at manipulating text, but that's where it's "general purpose transforming" stops. It encodes human concepts like emotions and spatial reasoning into words, which are incomplete analogs to how they work in the real world. It has impressive results, but comparing the value of human labor to the work AI can do is startlingly parallel to comparing the value of a database to the work a blockchain can do. It almost provides the basis for reality-distortion to investors, which is where those "marginal utility" AI/crypto companies come from. > The second most common use case of crypto is for anonymous transactions for illegal drugs and weapons The first most common use case of AI is for military purposes.
- jstx1 3y ago
  > Trying to champion one or the other feels like pointless virtue signalling really. No, I mean something very specific - I can do things at work with LLMs that I couldn't do a year ago without them. I can't say the same about anything crypto related. If you think that AI is just spitting our word we've seen or that it's guesswork, I don't know how you can even discuss it in good faith.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Overall, I agree - the progress of AI has been breakneck over the past 12 months. But the difference in quality of Talk-to-Transformer and GPT-4 hasn't been that much in my experience. Both produce seemingly-correct text that crumbles under scrutiny and becomes useless for anything with a sub-80% acceptable failure rate. It's great stuff, and I'd be lying if I said I liked cryptocurrency and don't use AI. The parallels are starkly visible though, and the "overpromise/underdeliver" cycle is already much further along than cryptocurrency ever got. The bubble will eventually pop because people are dissatisfied with the pace of progress, and then everyone will look for a scapegoat. We're already halfway there, judging by the daily deluge of "Ask HN: Why Does It Feel Like OpenAI Nerfed ChatGPT?" posts.
    - efrank3 3y ago
      Crypto promised to replace the dollar, mortgages, ID systems, etc... It's had ten years to do so and still has little to show. ChatGPT was released a few months ago and has hundreds of millions of users. I use it every day for work.
- amitrip 3y ago
  [dead]
rvz 3y ago
Whilst one has an efficient greener method of achieving consensus which one blockchain (Ethereum) switched from the wasteful proof-of-work to the greener proof-of-stake making that possible. On the another hand after years of deep learning, there is still no viable efficient methods of training, fine tuning or inference without needing more data centers as the data and the AI model scales and its hype is currently contributing to the increased wastage of water and resources all for the sake of incinerating the planet to produce broken and hallucinating black-box AI models. Being ‘useful’ isn’t an excuse for not finding greener efficient alternatives that significantly lower emissions rather than continuing to burn the planet over the new ‘hype’.
- zerbinxx 3y ago
  I agree with your point on AI - the hallucinating black box isn’t going to change the world in any meaningful, fundamental way. But positioning crypto as the antithesis of wasteful, useless tech (esp. Ethereum) is truly laughable, as no one uses it for anything either.
  - rvz 3y ago
    > But positioning crypto as the antithesis of wasteful, useless tech (esp. Ethereum) is truly laughable, as no one uses it for anything either. You're telling me right here that absolutely 'no-one' is using Ethereum? Surely you are not at all serious about what you said. There are many companies like Moneygram, Stripe, Ticketmaster, Checkout.com, etc that are using crypto currencies like Ethereum which are on greener consensus models. Ethereum made it possible to switch from a wasteful consensus model like proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and it significantly reduced its emissions by 99.992% [0]. Even if your ludicrous claim of absolutely 'no one uses it for anything either', it is not incinerating the planet or wasting as much resources and energy unlike AI (deep learning) that is currently doing today. After a decade of deep learning there have been no efficient alternatives to their existing operations and it brings in more resource waste and continues incinerates the planet. Being 'useful' is not a great excuse to justify burning the planet. [0] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain-eliminates-99-99-of-its-carbon-footprint-overnight-after-a-successful-merge-according-to-new-report/ https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain...

graypegg 3y ago

I do think “AI” is a hype-bubble, but machine learning and specifically the sort of LLMs we’re seeing now are definitively not a hype-bubble. We don’t really need general AI, nor are we going to be able to make a true flawless general AI anytime soon. AI was always a really vague marketing term, and can be applied to anything for instant relevancy boost. Bubble territory. The LLMs we have now are extremely effective though. There’s real use case here for automating writing, and some menial tasks that human beings were unfairly burdened with, but were impossible to automate till now. That’ll stick around. (Considering that ML concepts have been around for decades, you could even say they already have!)

jstx1 3y ago
> I do think “AI” is a hype-bubble, but machine learning and specifically the sort of LLMs we’re seeing now are definitively not a hype-bubble. There isn't any kind of distinction - when people say AI in 2023 they mean ML, LLMs, image models etc.
- graypegg 3y ago
  No, I know, the distinction I’m making is that “AI on everything” marketing is going to be the hype bubble. There’s a lot of knee jerk products out there from businesses that were scared of being left behind on the wave of AI that don’t actually add much. “AI powered” could mean an in-house trained deep learning network. Or an api call to ChatGPT. Or single function someone made by tweaking sliders in Desmos calculator till the curve had the right vibe. It’s the slapping “AI” over “black box magic process” that’s going to implode. But there’s obviously massive work being done in ML that will change the world. Something actually worth the hype.
worrycue 3y ago
> The LLMs we have now are extremely effective though. There’s real use case here for automating writing, and some menial tasks that human beings were unfairly burdened with, but were impossible to automate till now. Some people take issue with that assertion. The biggest problem with LLMs is you can’t trust them and have to verify everything they output - and often writing it yourself and verifying is easier than verifying someone/something else’s work. Right now no sane corporation will even let a LLM run their helplines that they out sourced to India. Imagine a LLM hallucinating a dangerous “solution” to a customer problem resulting in loss of property, injuries, or even death. It’s a massive lawsuit waiting to happen.

BinRoo 3y ago

Over-hyped at times? Yes. A bursting bubble? Not in my opinion. I'm already able to capture value in ways that were thought too difficult just 6 months ago. That's not vaporware.

smoldesu 3y ago
WeWork also captured unique value for thousands of people before their company collapsed and everything fell apart. Your product doesn't need to be vaporware to be a bubble.

paxys 3y ago

The difference is that crypto as a sector is a dead end, while there will absolutely be multiple trillion+ dollar "AI" companies at some point in the future. It may not happen anytime soon, and it may not be any of the companies in existence today, but the overall bet (and its associated hype) is a valid - even necessary - one. In that sense the current state of AI is less like crypto and more like the dotcom bubble of the early 00s. No one really understands the underlying tech well enough, but everyone wants to be involved. There are companies surging in valuation just by adding AI to their name. While all of this will correct itself, the underlying tech (the web in 2000, AI today) will eventually prove to be world changing.

elwebmaster 3y ago
Now replace “crypto” with “social media” and “AI” with “crypto”, then read your comment again and tell me how this is not what a crypto fanboy would write two years ago?
- civilitty 3y ago
  ChatGPT has helped more with my drug manufacturing empire in the last six months than crypto has in over a decade. It’s just useful.
  - wittycardio 3y ago
    [dead]
- casey2 3y ago
  The difference is that social media as a sector is a dead end, while there will absolutely be multiple trillion+ dollar "crypto" companies at some point in the future. It may not happen anytime soon, and it may not be any of the companies in existence today, but the overall bet (and its associated hype) is a valid - even necessary - one. In that sense, the current state of crypto is less like social media and more like the dotcom bubble of the early 00s. No one really understands the underlying tech well enough, but everyone wants to be involved. There are companies surging in valuation just by adding "crypto" to their name. While all of this will correct itself, the underlying tech (the web in 2000, crypto today) will eventually prove to be world changing. It's important to note that this is a hypothetical scenario where we're replacing terms to compare different industries. The statements above are not a reflection of actual market conditions or predictions about the future success of specific sectors. No sed/shitcoin required.

jokoon 3y ago

The hype helps chip vendors sell gpu, crypto or AI.

bbstats 3y ago

elwebmaster 3y ago

People need to remember what year Bitcoin first became popular and what year it is today. Comparing crypto of today to AI of today is unfair. You need to compare crypto when it first came out: - “digital cash”, “buy anything with minimal fees” - “banking for the unbanked” - “digital gold”, “not subject to inflation” - “trade cash for crypto with anyone on the street” - “no merchant fees” All of these statements were true when Bitcoin first came out and all of them provided value to some albeit not everyone. Most of these statements are not true today. 6-7 years later and we can barely buy anything with crypto, the fees are most definitely not minimal and the “merchant fees” fade in comparison, the market is fragmented beyond imagination. Given taxation and KYC requirements crypto today is anything but “banking for the unbanked” or “digital cash”, you most definitely can’t trade it with random strangers on the street unless you want to get yourself arrested. Due to its volatility and correlation with the market crypto also does not appear to be a safe heaven today, despite what theory would have us believe. All that to say, there was great hope for crypto when it first came out but over time its utility diminished. I can draw some parallels with the AI of today but will the future turn out the same we can only guess.

raykyri 3y ago
Other criticisms aside, fees are <10 cents for many transactions on Eth rollups right now, and will drop another 10x in the next six months if not more. (Only true since around the last month.) USDC is nice for international money transfers, though still niche. I don’t think anyone cares if you trade crypto on the streets, just don’t get rubber hosed. The space has suffered a lot from adverse selection towards grifters. UST alone captured many of the earnest attempts towards payments and took them down with it.

awaythrow483 3y ago

No, I think AMD is really worth 500x earnings. No bubble here

rzazueta 3y ago

The crypto hype bubble was the new mobile hype bubble. The mobile hype bubble was the new portal hype bubble. The portal hype bubble was the new dot com hype bubble. I swear there's a pattern here... Maybe I'm not seeing it...

Hatrix 3y ago
Machine learning hype in there somewhere.

zerbinxx 3y ago

Mark my words, this week new data will come out showing an uptick in all things inflation related, and by a larger-than-expected margin, the Fed will raise rates, and a lot of the hopium that’s been filling balloons for the last six months will rapidly dissipate back into gloomy despair. AI companies and related stocks (NVDA) will be first in line when people realizes we’re not going back to the world of free money in 2018 that fueled a number of hilarious pump-and-dumps over the last 5 years. Other than that, OP is correct in just about everything in the article - AI isn’t “artificial” or “intelligent”, it’s just a hype word to put on top of a relatively simple ecosystem of applications that may someday prove valuable, but for today are comically bad at everything that isn’t strictly a language exercise (e.g. producing soundalike copy, translating bits of code between apps, etc.). It’s presently a tool that can be no smarter than the user whose hands it occupies, and in fact requires a significant amount of investment to actually “learn” or take direction to be good at some specific tasks. Textbook hype case as far as I can see.

rvz 3y ago
Reading all the comments here tells me that we have not experienced a true crash in the market. AI has created a lot of euphoria pumped by VC money once again which can only result in disappointment of expectations since this is the 'pump' part of the hype cycle. Sooner or later we will see if any of these so-called AI companies are actually making any money or will survive at all. In 2010, almost everyone was a 'tech company'. Now almost everyone is a 'AI company'. This bullshit needs to stop.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > In 2010, almost everyone was a 'tech company'. Now almost everyone is a 'AI company'. This bullshit needs to stop. Bingo. Good luck telling this crowd that, though - all they know is "black turtleneck" and pestering middle-aged Disney investors for cash. These AI companies provide marginal utility that will get swallowed by later iterations even if AI is a technical failure. The "industry" of AI is bound to fail whether the technology impresses us or not.
  - 3y ago

cjbprime 3y ago

I can be sympathetic to many folks who have publicly dismissed LLMs as vapid hype in past months -- tech has claimed many fundamental breakthroughs before, it was reasonable to expect this would be another illusory one too -- but come on, even science fiction authors can't tell the difference between GPT-4 and autocomplete? It just feels willfully unimaginative of them, and perhaps motivated by insecurity. Use some of the creativity we've all seen you exhibit to ask GPT-4 questions that require complex reasoning inside a world model, rather than regurgitating its training set. It's not going to get it right all of the time, but the fact that it can get it right any of the time is astonishing, and it's going to get quickly better, perhaps even purely through compute spend increase rather than algorithmic breakthrough.

Ekaros 3y ago
Maybe it is important to ask if that creativity is truly unique? Or in those cases already encoded in the training data? Humans in general might not actually be that creative. Or variations are something that could be broken.
- cjbprime 3y ago
  You should try web searching for your question before asking it. If it shows up, don't ask it. If it doesn't show up, and the complaint is that it's possible to solve the question by studying past answers to different questions and applying them to this new one, then that sounds like reasoning to me.

constantcrying 3y ago

I domewhat agree with the main statement that financial interests inflate technologies and create "hype" for monetary gain. But: >AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. Is just an insane thing to write.

Ekaros 3y ago

The current "AI" is probably somewhat useful in many cases. Mostly producing content that does not need to be perfect. Or even correct. And it can already do it. You could already get text from one model and then few images from an other. And spam the made content online. Now valuation hype is big question. Will there be moats? Or will it be commodity technology? And maybe server farms will make some money and everyone else marginal profit?

md2020 3y ago

This is a terribly ignorant take and disappointing to see coming from a science fiction author. > AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord. This is just argument by assertion. We have no good definition of intelligence, so I have no clue how he can be so confident. "Machine learning doesn't learn" is a crazy take, since "backprop + gradient descent does learn" is close to the most well-supported thing you can say about the past few years of algorithmic progress. > sophisticated autocomplete Aside from this being an incredibly reductive sneer that clearly isn't true if you've honestly tried using ChatGPT, etc., his citation for this is a podcast, which I'm positive Doctorow would not accept as sufficient for basically any other technical topic. I love Ted Chiang's stories, and some of his takes on AI progress are cited here. However, I also found his extensive conversation with the Financial Times (earlier this month, so published after this) disappointing along similar lines. The thread running through both of these is a complete lack of a positive vision for the future, replaced by an almost smug cynicism that asserts any more technological progress is simply hype, a grift, and bad. Are there any current science fiction authors with a positive vision of the future?

red-iron-pine 3y ago
> This is just argument by assertion. We have no good definition of intelligence, so I have no clue how he can be so confident. Without concrete definitions your assertions are just as correct as theirs. But they have the evidence of absurd tech-bro hype of past technologies to draw on. > I love Ted Chiang's stories, and some of his takes on AI progress are cited here. However, I also found his extensive conversation with the Financial Times (earlier this month, so published after this) disappointing along similar lines. "I love Ted Chiang's stories because they jive with my preconceived notions, but I like him less when he says things that I don't believe" > The thread running through both of these is a complete lack of a positive vision for the future, replaced by an almost smug cynicism that asserts any more technological progress is simply hype, a grift, and bad. Are there any current science fiction authors with a positive vision of the future? Plenty. They talked about flying cars and living on the moon. Instead we got stagnant wages and a social-media skinner box. All of those wonderfully positive predictions didn't pan out.