4 ms·

Imagine comparing blockchain and AI.

by voz_ 3y ago

aerhardt 3y ago
LLMs and GenAI are already useful at scale but the current hype that they will lead to infinitely generalizable models, myriad groundbreaking applications in all fields and industries, or even AGI could be overblown - let's at least admit that as a possibility.
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  If AGI reached "human level" capabilities and took off from there how in the world could that possibly be overblown? That would change everything, comparing it to discovering fire would probably be apt, and maybe the first time in recorded history that making that statement isn't overly dramatic.
sanderjd 3y ago
I would submit that we don't yet have enough evidence to say whether the comparison is apt or inapt. I personally think what's going on with these "generative" models seems like a bigger deal than blockchain, but it's fiendishly difficult to know what is or isn't hype while embedded within a hype cycle.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Seriously? The only comparison you can make is that both were hyped. Digging even a millimeter under the surface reveals they’re completely different. Blockchain was and still is rife with scams and “you just don’t understand the technology bro” hype men. Just check out Dirty Bubble Media. Blockchain was rarely if ever a product that solved a problem, the whole point is The Line Goes Up. That’s why no one uses blockchain in industry, and crypto bros were constantly finding themselves proposing silly use cases like ticket sales and property deeds. These are people who have apparently never heard of a relational database. The hype around AI is due to increased attention on things that have already existed and have already been studied, used, and improved for decades now. There was never much R&D into blockchain tech because the tech isn’t the point. For ML, there are researchers who have worked on these problems for decades. It doesn’t need to justify its own existence, the justification is that it can solve real problems.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Again, I do tend to agree that there is a lot more "there" there with generative AI. But I think it's also true that it's too early to be sure. You're comparing the two technologies at totally different points in their hype cycles. The comparison point to where AI is right now is to Bitcoin / very early Ethereum in the late 2000s to early 2010s. Nobody knew where it was all going, some people saw endless potential, other people saw nonsense and scams. The explosion of bitcoin into mainstream consciousness in the early 2010s is akin to the explosion of ChatGPT over the past 6 to 9 months. But what's next? That's what matters. The early 2010s bitcoin boom now pretty clearly looks like a fad, in hindsight. Was ChatGPT also mostly a fad, or is it going to be a lasting fixture of productivity and/or entertainment moving forward? I think it's the latter - it has already changed my habits at work in ways that I think will be permanent - but I just think it's too early to say for sure. (And to be clear, I'm not talking about machine learning as an academic discipline; I totally agree with you that there is definitely enough evidence to say there is a lot more "there" there than research into chained hashing to solve double-spend-like problems.)
    - janalsncm 3y ago
      Well if you narrowly define AI to be ChatGPT and other generative LLMs, I think I agree so some extent. Unlike blockchain they do have use cases but it remains to be seen if those use cases can justify the money being thrown at them. How much is code completion really worth? However, I disagree insofar as the outcome truly depends on an unknown technology. Blockchain was never going to revolutionize finance or any of its other grand claims. At best (and that’s if it worked), it would be a new database type that all of the existing financial systems would plug into. It was a libertarian pipe dream, naive about how the world actually works. For any AI application, the world is different. If we simply replace AI with “automated system” we can see why. Pretty much every company would like to replace their workers with machines. And maybe machines can do things that humans would never be able to do (for example, search the entire internet for a very specific topic).
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        Yes that's what I'm talking about because that's what the article is talking about! The article is explicitly not about the ML / AI academic research. I agree that's well established. What the article is about is the current hype cycle of people trying to take the newest generation of "AI" tools, of which GPT-4 is the leading edge and most widely known, and make useful products with them. And whether that is going to be a big deal or a fad is, as yet, unproven. It is super easy to say, in 2023, that "blockchain was never going to revolutionize finance". But in 2013, that was an unknown. For what it's worth, you could go back to my commenting history in that period of time to find me saying "bitcoin is never going to revolutionize finance"; I was a skeptic then. But that doesn't mean I was definitely going to be right, I was just educated-guessing, just like the people on the other side of the conversation. That guess looks to have been prescient with the benefit of hindsight, but I've been wrong about lots of stuff too - I thought the iPad was stupid, I hated "Web 2.0", I thought the Facebook IPO was doomed, the list goes on and on. My best guess is that building products on top of "generative AI" is going to prove to be a big deal, but I don't know that, and it's hard not to be influenced by an ongoing hype cycle, is all I'm saying. > For any AI application, the world is different. If we simply replace AI with “automated system” we can see why. Pretty much every company would like to replace their workers with machines. And maybe machines can do things that humans would never be able to do (for example, search the entire internet for a very specific topic). Sure, but again, we just don't know yet if the "AI Engineering" thing this article is talking about is going to, in any way, turn into any of that, or if it's going to be more of a bust.
minimaxir 3y ago
Unfortunately, web3 bros pivoted to AI, which just adds even more noise to the space.
- wpietri 3y ago
  For me that's absolutely the strongest ground for comparison. In recent decades, we've had two big waves of tech advance: the Web and mobile. A lot of people have lived through them both, giving them an expectation that another such wave should be along soon. You could see that in the decade of blockchain/ICO/DAO/NFT/web3 hype, where people, many with shaky credentials, touted the transformation soon to come, taking in a lot of cash. In retrospect, from Mt Gox to FTX we can see that it was all horseshit. The main real advance was decentralizing not finance or property or computing, but the Ponzi scheme. Despite this failure, and echoing The Great Disappointment [1], we see a lot of the same hype and even the same people. Is it possible that this is different, that there's more substance here? Or is this going to be another Groupon or Metaverse? That does not matter to the hypesters. They're going to run the same routine that worked before. They're going to take in a lot of money, which is the primary goal. It's possible that some of them will, by luck or accident, latch on to something that isn't a total fraud. Surely most of them won't. But we should never forget that is basically irrelevant to a lot of people in the early stages of a cycle. And not just for the fraudsters, but for anybody who makes their living on the upswing of the the hype cycle, including a notable fraction of investors, "experts", and journalists. how ever it turns out, they'll get paid just fine. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment
  - minimaxir 3y ago
    Web3 / Metaverse was a solution in search of a problem. AI is solving problems today.
    - wpietri 3y ago
      You're responding as if I said they were the same, but I was pretty careful to say the opposite. My point is explicitly setting the utility of "AI" aside.
_ea1k 3y ago
It'll be fun to look back on these comments in a few years. It will be like looking back on the internet skeptics of the 90s. Most people have forgotten about those. Of course, there was a big boom and bust cycle back then too, but just like then, this cycle is nowhere near its peak.
- ResearchCode 3y ago
  That's what they said about the coins and the tokens too.

Imagine comparing blockchain and AI.

by voz_ 3y ago

Imagine comparing blockchain and AI.

LLMs and GenAI are already useful at scale but the current hype that they will lead to infinitely generalizable models, myriad groundbreaking applications in all fields and industries, or even AGI could be overblown - let's at least admit that as a possibility.

lost_tourist 3y ago
If AGI reached "human level" capabilities and took off from there how in the world could that possibly be overblown? That would change everything, comparing it to discovering fire would probably be apt, and maybe the first time in recorded history that making that statement isn't overly dramatic.

sanderjd 3y ago

I would submit that we don't yet have enough evidence to say whether the comparison is apt or inapt. I personally think what's going on with these "generative" models seems like a bigger deal than blockchain, but it's fiendishly difficult to know what is or isn't hype while embedded within a hype cycle.

janalsncm 3y ago
Seriously? The only comparison you can make is that both were hyped. Digging even a millimeter under the surface reveals they’re completely different. Blockchain was and still is rife with scams and “you just don’t understand the technology bro” hype men. Just check out Dirty Bubble Media. Blockchain was rarely if ever a product that solved a problem, the whole point is The Line Goes Up. That’s why no one uses blockchain in industry, and crypto bros were constantly finding themselves proposing silly use cases like ticket sales and property deeds. These are people who have apparently never heard of a relational database. The hype around AI is due to increased attention on things that have already existed and have already been studied, used, and improved for decades now. There was never much R&D into blockchain tech because the tech isn’t the point. For ML, there are researchers who have worked on these problems for decades. It doesn’t need to justify its own existence, the justification is that it can solve real problems.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Again, I do tend to agree that there is a lot more "there" there with generative AI. But I think it's also true that it's too early to be sure. You're comparing the two technologies at totally different points in their hype cycles. The comparison point to where AI is right now is to Bitcoin / very early Ethereum in the late 2000s to early 2010s. Nobody knew where it was all going, some people saw endless potential, other people saw nonsense and scams. The explosion of bitcoin into mainstream consciousness in the early 2010s is akin to the explosion of ChatGPT over the past 6 to 9 months. But what's next? That's what matters. The early 2010s bitcoin boom now pretty clearly looks like a fad, in hindsight. Was ChatGPT also mostly a fad, or is it going to be a lasting fixture of productivity and/or entertainment moving forward? I think it's the latter - it has already changed my habits at work in ways that I think will be permanent - but I just think it's too early to say for sure. (And to be clear, I'm not talking about machine learning as an academic discipline; I totally agree with you that there is definitely enough evidence to say there is a lot more "there" there than research into chained hashing to solve double-spend-like problems.)
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    Well if you narrowly define AI to be ChatGPT and other generative LLMs, I think I agree so some extent. Unlike blockchain they do have use cases but it remains to be seen if those use cases can justify the money being thrown at them. How much is code completion really worth? However, I disagree insofar as the outcome truly depends on an unknown technology. Blockchain was never going to revolutionize finance or any of its other grand claims. At best (and that’s if it worked), it would be a new database type that all of the existing financial systems would plug into. It was a libertarian pipe dream, naive about how the world actually works. For any AI application, the world is different. If we simply replace AI with “automated system” we can see why. Pretty much every company would like to replace their workers with machines. And maybe machines can do things that humans would never be able to do (for example, search the entire internet for a very specific topic).
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Yes that's what I'm talking about because that's what the article is talking about! The article is explicitly not about the ML / AI academic research. I agree that's well established. What the article is about is the current hype cycle of people trying to take the newest generation of "AI" tools, of which GPT-4 is the leading edge and most widely known, and make useful products with them. And whether that is going to be a big deal or a fad is, as yet, unproven. It is super easy to say, in 2023, that "blockchain was never going to revolutionize finance". But in 2013, that was an unknown. For what it's worth, you could go back to my commenting history in that period of time to find me saying "bitcoin is never going to revolutionize finance"; I was a skeptic then. But that doesn't mean I was definitely going to be right, I was just educated-guessing, just like the people on the other side of the conversation. That guess looks to have been prescient with the benefit of hindsight, but I've been wrong about lots of stuff too - I thought the iPad was stupid, I hated "Web 2.0", I thought the Facebook IPO was doomed, the list goes on and on. My best guess is that building products on top of "generative AI" is going to prove to be a big deal, but I don't know that, and it's hard not to be influenced by an ongoing hype cycle, is all I'm saying. > For any AI application, the world is different. If we simply replace AI with “automated system” we can see why. Pretty much every company would like to replace their workers with machines. And maybe machines can do things that humans would never be able to do (for example, search the entire internet for a very specific topic). Sure, but again, we just don't know yet if the "AI Engineering" thing this article is talking about is going to, in any way, turn into any of that, or if it's going to be more of a bust.

minimaxir 3y ago

Unfortunately, web3 bros pivoted to AI, which just adds even more noise to the space.

wpietri 3y ago
For me that's absolutely the strongest ground for comparison. In recent decades, we've had two big waves of tech advance: the Web and mobile. A lot of people have lived through them both, giving them an expectation that another such wave should be along soon. You could see that in the decade of blockchain/ICO/DAO/NFT/web3 hype, where people, many with shaky credentials, touted the transformation soon to come, taking in a lot of cash. In retrospect, from Mt Gox to FTX we can see that it was all horseshit. The main real advance was decentralizing not finance or property or computing, but the Ponzi scheme. Despite this failure, and echoing The Great Disappointment [1], we see a lot of the same hype and even the same people. Is it possible that this is different, that there's more substance here? Or is this going to be another Groupon or Metaverse? That does not matter to the hypesters. They're going to run the same routine that worked before. They're going to take in a lot of money, which is the primary goal. It's possible that some of them will, by luck or accident, latch on to something that isn't a total fraud. Surely most of them won't. But we should never forget that is basically irrelevant to a lot of people in the early stages of a cycle. And not just for the fraudsters, but for anybody who makes their living on the upswing of the the hype cycle, including a notable fraction of investors, "experts", and journalists. how ever it turns out, they'll get paid just fine. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment
- minimaxir 3y ago
  Web3 / Metaverse was a solution in search of a problem. AI is solving problems today.
  - wpietri 3y ago
    You're responding as if I said they were the same, but I was pretty careful to say the opposite. My point is explicitly setting the utility of "AI" aside.

_ea1k 3y ago

It'll be fun to look back on these comments in a few years. It will be like looking back on the internet skeptics of the 90s. Most people have forgotten about those. Of course, there was a big boom and bust cycle back then too, but just like then, this cycle is nowhere near its peak.

ResearchCode 3y ago
That's what they said about the coins and the tokens too.