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>puts it in a similar tier as crypto Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO. Is AI overhyped? Sure. However - AI/ML is creating utili

>puts it in a similar tier as crypto Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO. Is AI overhyped? Sure. However - AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day. Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction, a vehicle for speculation, and a platform for creating financial scams.

blitz_skull 3y ago
This—100%. The AI revolution with LLMs is creating a new type of interface with computers—the AI interface. Will it kill us all? Eh, probably not. Will it completely change human civilization forever? Eh... maybe not? (But also maybe). But what it already has begun to do, and will continue to do is change the way we interact with computers. The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Siri and Alexa are going to look downright primitive compared to what we'll have in the next 2-5 years and that is going to be VERY mainstream, and VERY useful for huge swaths of the population. Crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in any way shape or form that isn't immediately over-shadowed by a different medium.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Intuitive to use? Or has intuition?
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    There might be sufficient overlap between all such concepts that a distinction hardly matters anyway: if the assistant says what's most likely to come next according to a LLM, or if a person says what they think should come next based on intuition, the listener would probably find each to be about equally intuitive to converse with due in large part to each of those qualities.
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      > There might be sufficient overlap between all such concepts that a distinction hardly matters “Intuitive to use” roughly means that it is easy for a human to interact with. “Intuition” is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
  - janoc 3y ago
    And that actually anyone wants? Google and Amazon have tried to sell theirs for a long time. And none were actually selling much. Amazon admitted to be selling theirs at a loss. Facebook has tried their own - and quickly cancelled them. Google's is in every Android device - and yet pretty much nobody uses them. Even Apple's Siri is more annoyance than help. That something can be built doesn't mean it will sell or that people will actually want to use it. If you create a solution looking for an imaginary problem that your marketing thinks is what people want instead of a solution that solves a real existing problem, you do get a solution looking for a problem ... Also, answering questions and communicating in natural language is the easy part of such assistant. For the thing to be useful it must be able to actually do something too. Which is incredibly difficult beyond the (closed) ecosystem of its vendor. Thirdparty integrations are usually driven by who pays the manufacturer for the SDK and partner contract (seen as a marketing opportunity), not by what the users actually want it to integrate with. Hoping for one of these with an open API that anyone could integrate whatever they want with, I am not holding my breath here.
    - pksebben 3y ago
      > Hoping for one of these with an open API that anyone could integrate whatever they want with, I am not holding my breath here. OpenAI is already on it. The latest gen of GPT-3 and -4 are finetuned to respond to "do this thing" commands with JSON structured to: - provide the name of a given function call - provide arguments to that function call it's "early stage", which in this case probably means "good enough to be useful within a month or two", given the rate at which these things have been developing. Anecdotally, I've been playing with giving the models instructions like: "When asked to perform a task that you need a tool to accomplish, you will call the tool according to its documentation by this format: TOOL_NAME(*args) Below you will find the documentation for your tools." ...and I've gotten it working pretty damn well (not even with the JSON-finetuned models, mind you). All you really need is python-style docstrings and a minimal parser and you're off to the races. I recommend anyone interested play with it a bit.
      - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
        Early stage might mean good enough to use in a month or two or it might mean “full self driving this year”. There isn’t any way to tell until it happens.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Intuitive to use? Or has intuition? I don't really see either of those things as a real possibility. Within my lifetime, anyway.
- MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
  This is a perfect example of an AI-hype comment. You’re treating it as a fact that LLM are going to replace existing products, at some unknown future date. “In 5 years, all code will be written by AI” “In 5 years, LLM will replace Siri and Alexa” “In 5 years, AI will replace [sector of jobs]” The thing that frustrates me about these statements is that you don’t know what AI technology is going to look like in 5 years, so stop treating it like a fact. It’s possible LLM are useful in all of these places, but we don’t know that yet.
  - rvz 3y ago
    Exactly. The AI bros here are doing the same thing as the crypto bros and almost all of them don't even know it. Pontificating their nonsense around the hype about LLMs to the point where they don't even trust it. The same thing they did with ConvNets and they still don't trust that either since they both hallucinate, frequently. I can guarantee you that people will not trust an AI to fly a plane without any human pilots on board end-to-end (auto-pilot does not count) and it is simply due to the fundamental black-box nature of these so-called 'AI' models being untrustworthy in high risk situations.
    - aenis 3y ago
      I'd like to point out that humans, too, are not trustworthy in high risk situations. For this we have procedures, deterministic automation and so on. I like to think of capable LLMs as pf gifted interns. I can expect decent results if I explain well enough, but I need processes around them to make sure they are doing what they are told. In my industry thats enough to produce a noticeable productivity gain, and likely some reduction of employment as its a low margin cut throat business relying on low grade knowledge workers. I see the hype and honestly cant stand it, but its measureably impacting my industry and the world around me.
      - deleted 3y ago
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      - rvz 3y ago
- afavour 3y ago
  > The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close Year of the voice assistant is getting close to year of Linux on desktop. What you’re promising has been promised time and time again, received endless hype cycles then collapsed once people realised the limits of the technology. Yes, this time the tech is much more capable than what came before but I’m inclined to believe we’ll yet again find a limit that means we’re using it for some things but our lives still aren’t drastically changed.
  - adriand 3y ago
    What you’re missing is that with LLMs the chief obstacle with voice assistants changed overnight from “how do we develop a system that can easily interact in natural language” (at the time, a very hard and possibly unsolvable problem) to “how do we expose our systems to API-driven input/output” (a solvable problem that just takes time). Case in point, I asked Siri to change my work address. She stated that I needed to use the Contacts app to do that. This is not very helpful. The issue here is not Siri’s inability to understand what I want, it is that the Contacts app does not support this method of data input. Siri is also probably not very good at extracting structured address information from me via natural language, but the new LLMs can do this easily.
    - afavour 3y ago
      > The issue here is not Siri’s inability to understand what I want, it is that the Contacts app does not support this method of data input …which is something an LLM won’t help with. “Just design an open ended API capable of doing absolutely anything someone might ask ChatGPT to do” is not the simple task you’re making it out to be! There's a reason why people describe ChatGPT as a "research tool": you often need to do a bunch of iterations to get it to do the correct thing. And that's fine because it's non-destructive. But it's very far from a world where you can let it loose on a production, writable database and trust that it's going to do the correct thing.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        I'm sure I've seen a headlock that someone connected their screen reader to GPT and it totally could do that kind of thing… No idea how well, so I assume "badly"; but the API is already there.
- rvz 3y ago
  > Crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in any way shape or form that isn't immediately over-shadowed by a different medium. Seems like it has proven very useful for Stripe [0], Moneygram [1], TicketMaster [2], etc. Unlike AI which continues to consume tons of resources to burn the entire world down to the ground without any viable efficient methods of training, inference or fine-tuning their AI models in the past decade with its chatbot hype and gimmickry [3], crypto does not need to consume tons of CO2 to operate, thanks to alternative and greener consensus algorithms available in production today. [4] Being 'useful' is not an excuse to destroy the planet around untrustworthy AI models getting themselves confused over a single pixel or hallucinating in the middle of the road. [0] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto [1] https://stellar.org/moneygram https://stellar.org/moneygram [2] https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-token-gated-sales/ https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-tok... [3] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training... [4] 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...
carlosjobim 3y ago
> Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction Do you understand what a massive impact that has been? It has disrupted one of the largest industries on the planet, which is drug trafficking.
- Traubenfuchs 3y ago
  Did it disrupt the whole industry? Only the payment part of it, no?
  - pier25 3y ago
    Well no because the dark markets enabled any small dealer to sell worldwide.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    With crypto people can buy drugs anonymously. You couldn't do that before.
- veidr 3y ago
  I mean... sure, it outcompeted Tide detergent. But the illegal drug trade has historically used all kinds of currencies. I'd say "disrupted" is hugely overstating the case.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  If you looked at Donald Trump Jr's runny nose and "impassioned" behavior, you wouldn't think that. "Cocaine News" with Donald Trump Jr. | The Daily Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47yFRXZqB0g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47yFRXZqB0g Don Jr. Swears He’s Not on Coke—He’s Just ‘Impassioned’: https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-jr-is-tired-of-cocaine-accusations-and-everyone-liking-hunter-biden-more https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-jr-is-tired-of-co...
- twic 3y ago
  So what fraction of all drugs are now paid for with cryptocurrency at retail? Over 50%? 25%? Presumably you must know the figure, if you're asserting the industry has been disrupted.
runlaszlorun 3y ago
Everywhere?? That’s exactly the hype talk that’s going to burst this bubble. Here’s tech’s dirty little secret. Despite all the screams about automation and universal basic income… the exact numbers where job replacement would show are in the labor productivity numbers. If GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced… bingo… you’d see that number climb. Productivity has actually stayed flat or gone down over the last 15 years. Despite the fact that we’ve had trillion dollar corporate behemoths now. Despite that fact that we’re enabling a surveillance state Orwell couldn’t imagines. Despite the polarization we see. And teen anxiety going through the roof along teen/pre-teen suicides. When you said AI (and in my view tech in general) are everywhere, I’m guessing this wasn’t what you meant…
- bnralt 3y ago
  > When you said AI (and in my view tech in general) are everywhere, I’m guessing this wasn’t what you meant… That person gave a list of tech they were talking about in their comment immediately afterwards: "speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day." I'm not sure it's worth quibbling over whether we should use the term "everywhere" or "in many places"; the general point stands that it's found many different uses, and has done what effective tech does - fade into the background in many cases, just becoming part of our daily lives. Sure, we're not seeing the off the wall predictions from the singularity crowd, but it seems to be tech that most people find broadly useful.
  - deleted 3y ago
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- evrydayhustling 3y ago
  The missing productivity paradox is something that should interest everyone in tech! Like any macroeconomic observation, there is plenty of uncertainty in both the measurements (GDP ain't perfect) and the context (2 financial crises and a pandemic). But even pro-status-quo institutions like Brookings agree that Something Is Up. Their 2021 review on the topic is both a decent summary and a good source of further refs [1]. My favorite explanation is that many new technologies end up redistributing wealth rather than creating it, which certainly tracks with both subjective and quantified growth in inequality on the same time period. However, a slightly more optimistic take is that tech is aligning production better with people's preferences, so that the same productivity enables people to live more distinct lifestyles that suit them. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-to-solve-the-puzzle-of-missing-productivity-growth/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-to-solve-the-puzzle-o...
kkfx 3y ago
> AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day. For most people that's a promise for the future, but beside some translation tools (who are far from perfect) there is not much. For instance: semantic search is and was a big topic, but so far even ChatGPT is not a real answer, Stable Diffusion is very nice if you want to produce some cartoon alike graphics or some porn deepfakes, but just not ready for simple common photo editing tasks. OCRs have gotten better, but still nothing that "by magic" makes a badly scanned piece of paper into an almost-native clean pdf and so one. Yes, there is much progress and potential, but not much for real world usages.
skepticATX 3y ago
I don't think the rub is with AI in general. Everyone working in tech knows how pervasive ML especially has become. I think the contention is with AI suddenly being redefined as only referring to language models, and the view that intelligence has been solved by these models. There has clearly been a massive marketing push to label these models as the "one true AI", both from companies and from AI influencers. This is where the echo chamber exists, and it's easy to get stuck in it. Maybe I am wrong and we have solved intelligence. But I seriously doubt it.
- oldandboring 3y ago
  I agree completely, and I think the 'tipping point' came because of ChatGPT. And I think it's for two primary reasons: 1. ChatGPT was released for general-purpose use. It's not a data science team at a FAANG company or healthcare or finance enterprise using ML for a specific business need. It's there for anyone to ask it anything. 2. A design decision was made to have ChatGPT output words in "real time" instead of all-at-once after a delay. To the user, that makes it look and feel like it's consciously and actively responding to you in a way that animated ellipses do not. I never knew what it would feel like talking to an AI, but when I first used ChatGPT, I thought: this must be it.
BowBun 3y ago
I'm not necessarily arguing that they're the same, but let's be honest with ourselves - crypto said the _same_ things as it was ramping up. Just replace all the applications of AI you listed with the many hypothetical use-cases crypto-pushers were listing out. As always, sounds cool. Actually do some of it and then let's talk more.
- zirgs 3y ago
  Crypto pushers pushed two contradictory messages: 1. hodl, don't sell, don't spend! 2. Try to replace fiat with crypto in your life! No wonder that its adoption for legal purposes didn't go anywhere.
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    Saving more than spending has also been popular advice for fiat, at times. More for medium/long-term personal purposes at the expense of immediate macro purposes, but I think that applies to both systems.
    - zirgs 3y ago
      Central banks inflate their currencies on purpose to discourage hodling. Short term savings for emergencies are good. But by hodling fiat long term - you are just losing money. Cryptobros thought that they are smarter than central banks and didn't bother to implement proper monetary policy in the Bitcoin protocol to prevent its volatility.
      - tome 3y ago
        > But by hodling fiat long term - you are just losing money. Real interest rates are typically positive, so no, you are not.
        hunter2_ 3y ago
        The concept of hodling fiat could mean cash under the mattress or could mean an interest-bearing account. It's ambiguous.
hagbarth 3y ago
I mean. We can compare the hype pattern between the two and still acknowledge that one has utility while the other doesn't. Both have resulted in a bunch of hopefuls starting companies, in order to attract mountains of venture capital. Companies that will only have a loose connection to the tech that drives the hype.
- one_level_deep 3y ago
  The same could be said about the microprocessor or any other tech innovation throughout history. They all lead to new companies chasing investment dollars. Is there any insight from this observation?
  - afavour 3y ago
    > Is there any insight from this observation? Yes: be deeply skeptical of anyone claiming tech they are personally invested in is revolutionary.
    - one_level_deep 3y ago
      If someone believes a technology is revolutionary, investing money in it is the most rational thing to do, right?
bloqs 3y ago
Agreed, and when people seem to simply correlate them on no other quality than being widely observed in popular culture they lose me entirely. The tech religious overhype train is here to stay. There has never been a more established need for calm honesty.
yieldcrv 3y ago
Financial services is the biggest industry on the planet but as soon as crypto is involved “a vehicle for speculation“ is invalid So speaking of echo chambers…
packetlost 3y ago
> speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision You know very well that that's not what GP is referring to. Speech to text, natural language translation, recommendation, and computer vision are all very useful things, but also were very much real and in consumer hands long before the current hype cycle. Generative AIs are in their hype cycle. IMO the tech is overhyped to hell and back, but it will still probably yield better results than Crypto, there are legitimate uses for it. But those uses need to be ok with an 80% correct solution, which is not sufficient for all the things LLM hypelords are saying they can be used for and there is no path forward for closing that 20% gap.
- eric_cc 3y ago
  Bitcoin still has the potential to become the worlds reserve currency. That’s pretty legit.
  - packetlost 3y ago
    No, it really doesn't.
    - eric_cc 3y ago
      It absolutely does. What leads you to believe that it doesn’t?
      - notahacker 3y ago
        Comically low transaction rate, obscenely high power consumption, extreme concentration of BTC holdings in the hands of a small number of people (and companies who have very little influence of global politics), arbitrary growth rate and cap with no correspondence to economic growth, extreme volatility , inconsequentially small use for legal trade, but above all the complete and utter disinterest in it as a reserve currency outside a small echo chamber that has far more BTC to sell than involvement in international trade. Fortnite Bucks, Mt Gox trading cards, skulls of adult humans and guano also "have the potential to become the world's reserve currency", but it seems unreasonable to put the burden on proof on the people arguing that they won't be.
hinkley 3y ago
So you aren’t infuriated by automated phone systems? Because let me tell you, the number of companies whose reputation has survived me having to deal with their fucking phone robot can be counted on my middle finger.
- jjgreen 3y ago
  ... can be counted on my middle finger Fabulous, I'll be stealing that ...
  - not_alexb 3y ago
    Probably an extremely large number of companies can be counted on something as ginormous as the average human middle finger; I could probably fit 20 if I write really tiny and could fit a lot more with access to other devices.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      Someday, cosmetic geneticists will offer to sell you extra middle fingers.
      - not_alexb 3y ago
        I would be grateful beyond even my wildest measure (two middle fingers).
      - jjgreen 3y ago
        Robotic extra thumbs available now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKSCmkCE5og https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKSCmkCE5og
        hinkley 3y ago
        It takes more muscles to frown than to smile, but it takes more parts to make a thumbs up than to flip someone off.
  - 3y ago
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
Crypto has been quite useful for me personally, from VPN payments to donating to locally forbidden causes. AI only does bad things to me so far: surveillance, spam, fakes, search results poisoned, twitter and reddit closed up because of it etc. Where is my automatic captcha solver? Where is a robot that will get me to a live person in a support call? Where is a spam filter that doesn't send all useful emails to spam? Where is a filter to hide fake reviews on Amazon? To fight against Amazon's crazy product ranking system? Such useful things are nowhere on the horizon.
- atonse 3y ago
  As soon as Amazon starts losing money in fake reviews, you bet they will miraculously have a solution in a weekend. Until then, you’ll get a lot of “it’s a really hard problem to solve!” Coupled with zero progress.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
    The thing is, if there was a real useful AI, it could filter stuff on my end, independent of Amazon.
- n_ary 3y ago
  Off-topic: > Where is a filter to hide fake reviews on Amazon? While it[1] doesn’t hide, it can generate some insightful information about fake reviews for me. Disclaimer: Not affiliated, only a happy person using FakeSpot since this year. [1] https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/
dgroshev 3y ago
It's not as clear cut really. Overall economic productivity didn't shoot up in the last decade despite the dramatic progress we had in software and hardware (e.g. [1]), and it's not clear that AI/ML will dramatically change that. Yes searching pictures on my iphone by text is convenient and Netflix recommendations might be more addictive, but the path from that to ubiquitous economic prosperity, safety, and comfort (the technoutopia many here are striving for) is not clear at all. It's also not very clear if those marginal improvements are worth the substantial share of total human brainpower thrown at them. [1] https://www.aei.org/economics/good-news-bad-news-on-us-productivity-growth/ https://www.aei.org/economics/good-news-bad-news-on-us-produ...
rvz 3y ago
> Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO. Nope. The hype around AI by the AI bros is totally similar with the crypto bros back then. > AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision... Yet I guarantee that you don't trust any of their outputs for any serious applications and you need to constantly check for it's reliability since its output is often wrong, inaccurate or even outright nonsense. You don't trust it yourself, which that is the problem of this entire hype cycle. On top that, it is all at the expense of the planet getting incinerated with no efficient alternatives to counter the amount of extreme waste of resources that these systems are consuming. [1] [2] > Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction, a vehicle for speculation, and a platform for creating financial scams. 'never' So Moneygram, Stripe, Checkout.com, etc using it is 'never amounted to anything'? If it was only for financial scams, all of them would have stopped using it a long time ago. They simply didn't because financial scams on a transparent public ledger is a scammers nightmare and sounds like a very poor platform for creating financial scams. But maybe you need to look outside of the AI bubble and see the trillions of dollars in which the banks have allowed in actual black market transactions by criminals in the FinCEN files [0] which is nothing compared to crypto. [0] https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/ai-chatgpt-water-usage-environment-study-b1073866.html https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/ai-chatgpt-water-usage-envir... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/fincen-banks-suspicious-activity-reports-buzzfeed.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/fincen-banks-sus... [2] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...
lisasays 3y ago
The thing is, it's perfectly possible for something to possess hybrid qualities. In the case of AI: both potentially quite useful (unlike crypto) and incredibly, toxically overhyped (just like crypto). Ironically, the fact that a lot of people think "You it's actually kind of useful sometimes, therefore you can't compare it crypto/web3" is part of the engine that drives the hype.
172023throw 3y ago
I can evade taxes and government surveillance using crypto. That's value added for me.
172023throw9 3y ago
I can evade taxes and government surveillance using crypto. That's value added for me.
croes 3y ago
>recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search Both don't seem to work.
squirtlebonflow 3y ago
And a tool to resist inflation and protect assets against theft, bank closures or government raids in countries where people are just barely surviving. You have a pretty Anglocentric viewpoint.
tuxracer 3y ago
> Is AI overhyped? no calling something "hype" should not be a stand-in for data
eric_cc 3y ago
Bitcoin has the potential to become the world’s reserve currency. Your smug dismissal of it is ignorant at best. Consider how power structures (eg nation states) may change in such a future.
mcguire 3y ago
I hate to point this out but as a regular user, recommendation engines and search have not gotten better in the last, say, 10 years. (Although that may not be true in terms of selling advertising and propaganda, both of which I tend not to pay a lot of attention to.) Likewise, speech to text and language translation are more available, but they're still pretty bad. And computer vision is much better than 10 years ago, but I wouldn't bet anyone's life on it. And yet, the hype train is still gaining momentum. Having been through more than my share of AI winters, I can feel another one coming and it's going to be bad.
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  I agree with you, but I started predicting an AI winter in like 2016. I thought the failure of self driving would kill it, but apparently not. I've predicted 9 of the last 1 AI winters.
nostrademons 3y ago
The thing is that the specific technologies behind all of those very practical improvements are not what's being hyped up this bubble. Speech recognition, for example, usually involves a lot of audio preprocessing, followed by some form of RNN/LSTM/Transformer to generate candidates, followed by beam search to score and choose from candidates. If you are a machine-learning practitioner, you should be familiar with all of those techniques and how they are used so that you can solve practical problems with them. But if you just read about AI in the news and figure you're going to found the next great startup and make a billion off it, you'll probably start by feeding a whole bunch of data into Tensorflow and then getting useless garbage out of it. This hype bubble is specifically about LLMs, extremely large-parameter transformers that are trained on all the data OpenAI or Google can get their hands on. And then supposedly if you ask them the right questions, you will get useful answers back. For people that put in the time and experimentation to actually find the right questions and the right applications, that will probably be true - but the hype is that this will change everything, and it most certainly will not, just in the same way that beam search is frequently useful but it definitely does not change everything. But slick promoters will nevertheless manage to use people's lack of knowledge to redirect billions of dollars in capital into their and their employees' pockets, the same way that slick promoters used crypto to redirect billions of dollars in capital into their and their employees' pockets.
- nerdyboi 3y ago
  You're so so so right! Things practical in AI is not hyped. OpenAI which is funded by Microsoft and promoted by Microsoft account executives creates hype as if it's open although nothing, including its so-called open-source Whisper, is open. People feeding Microsoft pretend that "they" are revolutionizing the world. NVIDIA and Microsoft are making money out of these large models and positioning the bigger as the better.
hmrtn 3y ago
What an asinine thing to say and it exhibits your lack of willingness or ability or willingness to understand both AI and cryptocurrency.
justinclift 3y ago
So, you're pretty much saying: AI is just like crypto, but better! Not sure that's reaaaaaaaaaally going to bring people around.
protocolture 3y ago
AI will end up as Clippy 2.0 just as Crypto ended up as an overly secure payment processing platform.

blitz_skull 3y ago

This—100%. The AI revolution with LLMs is creating a new type of interface with computers—the AI interface. Will it kill us all? Eh, probably not. Will it completely change human civilization forever? Eh... maybe not? (But also maybe). But what it already has begun to do, and will continue to do is change the way we interact with computers. The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Siri and Alexa are going to look downright primitive compared to what we'll have in the next 2-5 years and that is going to be VERY mainstream, and VERY useful for huge swaths of the population. Crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in any way shape or form that isn't immediately over-shadowed by a different medium.

andsoitis 3y ago
> The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Intuitive to use? Or has intuition?
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  There might be sufficient overlap between all such concepts that a distinction hardly matters anyway: if the assistant says what's most likely to come next according to a LLM, or if a person says what they think should come next based on intuition, the listener would probably find each to be about equally intuitive to converse with due in large part to each of those qualities.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    > There might be sufficient overlap between all such concepts that a distinction hardly matters “Intuitive to use” roughly means that it is easy for a human to interact with. “Intuition” is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
- janoc 3y ago
  And that actually anyone wants? Google and Amazon have tried to sell theirs for a long time. And none were actually selling much. Amazon admitted to be selling theirs at a loss. Facebook has tried their own - and quickly cancelled them. Google's is in every Android device - and yet pretty much nobody uses them. Even Apple's Siri is more annoyance than help. That something can be built doesn't mean it will sell or that people will actually want to use it. If you create a solution looking for an imaginary problem that your marketing thinks is what people want instead of a solution that solves a real existing problem, you do get a solution looking for a problem ... Also, answering questions and communicating in natural language is the easy part of such assistant. For the thing to be useful it must be able to actually do something too. Which is incredibly difficult beyond the (closed) ecosystem of its vendor. Thirdparty integrations are usually driven by who pays the manufacturer for the SDK and partner contract (seen as a marketing opportunity), not by what the users actually want it to integrate with. Hoping for one of these with an open API that anyone could integrate whatever they want with, I am not holding my breath here.
  - pksebben 3y ago
    > Hoping for one of these with an open API that anyone could integrate whatever they want with, I am not holding my breath here. OpenAI is already on it. The latest gen of GPT-3 and -4 are finetuned to respond to "do this thing" commands with JSON structured to: - provide the name of a given function call - provide arguments to that function call it's "early stage", which in this case probably means "good enough to be useful within a month or two", given the rate at which these things have been developing. Anecdotally, I've been playing with giving the models instructions like: "When asked to perform a task that you need a tool to accomplish, you will call the tool according to its documentation by this format: TOOL_NAME(*args) Below you will find the documentation for your tools." ...and I've gotten it working pretty damn well (not even with the JSON-finetuned models, mind you). All you really need is python-style docstrings and a minimal parser and you're off to the races. I recommend anyone interested play with it a bit.
    - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      Early stage might mean good enough to use in a month or two or it might mean “full self driving this year”. There isn’t any way to tell until it happens.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Intuitive to use? Or has intuition? I don't really see either of those things as a real possibility. Within my lifetime, anyway.
MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
This is a perfect example of an AI-hype comment. You’re treating it as a fact that LLM are going to replace existing products, at some unknown future date. “In 5 years, all code will be written by AI” “In 5 years, LLM will replace Siri and Alexa” “In 5 years, AI will replace [sector of jobs]” The thing that frustrates me about these statements is that you don’t know what AI technology is going to look like in 5 years, so stop treating it like a fact. It’s possible LLM are useful in all of these places, but we don’t know that yet.
- rvz 3y ago
  Exactly. The AI bros here are doing the same thing as the crypto bros and almost all of them don't even know it. Pontificating their nonsense around the hype about LLMs to the point where they don't even trust it. The same thing they did with ConvNets and they still don't trust that either since they both hallucinate, frequently. I can guarantee you that people will not trust an AI to fly a plane without any human pilots on board end-to-end (auto-pilot does not count) and it is simply due to the fundamental black-box nature of these so-called 'AI' models being untrustworthy in high risk situations.
  - aenis 3y ago
    I'd like to point out that humans, too, are not trustworthy in high risk situations. For this we have procedures, deterministic automation and so on. I like to think of capable LLMs as pf gifted interns. I can expect decent results if I explain well enough, but I need processes around them to make sure they are doing what they are told. In my industry thats enough to produce a noticeable productivity gain, and likely some reduction of employment as its a low margin cut throat business relying on low grade knowledge workers. I see the hype and honestly cant stand it, but its measureably impacting my industry and the world around me.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - rvz 3y ago
afavour 3y ago
> The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close Year of the voice assistant is getting close to year of Linux on desktop. What you’re promising has been promised time and time again, received endless hype cycles then collapsed once people realised the limits of the technology. Yes, this time the tech is much more capable than what came before but I’m inclined to believe we’ll yet again find a limit that means we’re using it for some things but our lives still aren’t drastically changed.
- adriand 3y ago
  What you’re missing is that with LLMs the chief obstacle with voice assistants changed overnight from “how do we develop a system that can easily interact in natural language” (at the time, a very hard and possibly unsolvable problem) to “how do we expose our systems to API-driven input/output” (a solvable problem that just takes time). Case in point, I asked Siri to change my work address. She stated that I needed to use the Contacts app to do that. This is not very helpful. The issue here is not Siri’s inability to understand what I want, it is that the Contacts app does not support this method of data input. Siri is also probably not very good at extracting structured address information from me via natural language, but the new LLMs can do this easily.
  - afavour 3y ago
    > The issue here is not Siri’s inability to understand what I want, it is that the Contacts app does not support this method of data input …which is something an LLM won’t help with. “Just design an open ended API capable of doing absolutely anything someone might ask ChatGPT to do” is not the simple task you’re making it out to be! There's a reason why people describe ChatGPT as a "research tool": you often need to do a bunch of iterations to get it to do the correct thing. And that's fine because it's non-destructive. But it's very far from a world where you can let it loose on a production, writable database and trust that it's going to do the correct thing.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      I'm sure I've seen a headlock that someone connected their screen reader to GPT and it totally could do that kind of thing… No idea how well, so I assume "badly"; but the API is already there.
rvz 3y ago
> Crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in any way shape or form that isn't immediately over-shadowed by a different medium. Seems like it has proven very useful for Stripe [0], Moneygram [1], TicketMaster [2], etc. Unlike AI which continues to consume tons of resources to burn the entire world down to the ground without any viable efficient methods of training, inference or fine-tuning their AI models in the past decade with its chatbot hype and gimmickry [3], crypto does not need to consume tons of CO2 to operate, thanks to alternative and greener consensus algorithms available in production today. [4] Being 'useful' is not an excuse to destroy the planet around untrustworthy AI models getting themselves confused over a single pixel or hallucinating in the middle of the road. [0] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto [1] https://stellar.org/moneygram https://stellar.org/moneygram [2] https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-token-gated-sales/ https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-tok... [3] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training... [4] 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...

carlosjobim 3y ago

> Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction Do you understand what a massive impact that has been? It has disrupted one of the largest industries on the planet, which is drug trafficking.

Traubenfuchs 3y ago
Did it disrupt the whole industry? Only the payment part of it, no?
- pier25 3y ago
  Well no because the dark markets enabled any small dealer to sell worldwide.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  With crypto people can buy drugs anonymously. You couldn't do that before.
veidr 3y ago
I mean... sure, it outcompeted Tide detergent. But the illegal drug trade has historically used all kinds of currencies. I'd say "disrupted" is hugely overstating the case.
DonHopkins 3y ago
If you looked at Donald Trump Jr's runny nose and "impassioned" behavior, you wouldn't think that. "Cocaine News" with Donald Trump Jr. | The Daily Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47yFRXZqB0g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47yFRXZqB0g Don Jr. Swears He’s Not on Coke—He’s Just ‘Impassioned’: https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-jr-is-tired-of-cocaine-accusations-and-everyone-liking-hunter-biden-more https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-jr-is-tired-of-co...
twic 3y ago
So what fraction of all drugs are now paid for with cryptocurrency at retail? Over 50%? 25%? Presumably you must know the figure, if you're asserting the industry has been disrupted.

runlaszlorun 3y ago

Everywhere?? That’s exactly the hype talk that’s going to burst this bubble. Here’s tech’s dirty little secret. Despite all the screams about automation and universal basic income… the exact numbers where job replacement would show are in the labor productivity numbers. If GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced… bingo… you’d see that number climb. Productivity has actually stayed flat or gone down over the last 15 years. Despite the fact that we’ve had trillion dollar corporate behemoths now. Despite that fact that we’re enabling a surveillance state Orwell couldn’t imagines. Despite the polarization we see. And teen anxiety going through the roof along teen/pre-teen suicides. When you said AI (and in my view tech in general) are everywhere, I’m guessing this wasn’t what you meant…

bnralt 3y ago
> When you said AI (and in my view tech in general) are everywhere, I’m guessing this wasn’t what you meant… That person gave a list of tech they were talking about in their comment immediately afterwards: "speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day." I'm not sure it's worth quibbling over whether we should use the term "everywhere" or "in many places"; the general point stands that it's found many different uses, and has done what effective tech does - fade into the background in many cases, just becoming part of our daily lives. Sure, we're not seeing the off the wall predictions from the singularity crowd, but it seems to be tech that most people find broadly useful.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
evrydayhustling 3y ago
The missing productivity paradox is something that should interest everyone in tech! Like any macroeconomic observation, there is plenty of uncertainty in both the measurements (GDP ain't perfect) and the context (2 financial crises and a pandemic). But even pro-status-quo institutions like Brookings agree that Something Is Up. Their 2021 review on the topic is both a decent summary and a good source of further refs [1]. My favorite explanation is that many new technologies end up redistributing wealth rather than creating it, which certainly tracks with both subjective and quantified growth in inequality on the same time period. However, a slightly more optimistic take is that tech is aligning production better with people's preferences, so that the same productivity enables people to live more distinct lifestyles that suit them. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-to-solve-the-puzzle-of-missing-productivity-growth/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-to-solve-the-puzzle-o...

kkfx 3y ago

> AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day. For most people that's a promise for the future, but beside some translation tools (who are far from perfect) there is not much. For instance: semantic search is and was a big topic, but so far even ChatGPT is not a real answer, Stable Diffusion is very nice if you want to produce some cartoon alike graphics or some porn deepfakes, but just not ready for simple common photo editing tasks. OCRs have gotten better, but still nothing that "by magic" makes a badly scanned piece of paper into an almost-native clean pdf and so one. Yes, there is much progress and potential, but not much for real world usages.

skepticATX 3y ago

I don't think the rub is with AI in general. Everyone working in tech knows how pervasive ML especially has become. I think the contention is with AI suddenly being redefined as only referring to language models, and the view that intelligence has been solved by these models. There has clearly been a massive marketing push to label these models as the "one true AI", both from companies and from AI influencers. This is where the echo chamber exists, and it's easy to get stuck in it. Maybe I am wrong and we have solved intelligence. But I seriously doubt it.

oldandboring 3y ago
I agree completely, and I think the 'tipping point' came because of ChatGPT. And I think it's for two primary reasons: 1. ChatGPT was released for general-purpose use. It's not a data science team at a FAANG company or healthcare or finance enterprise using ML for a specific business need. It's there for anyone to ask it anything. 2. A design decision was made to have ChatGPT output words in "real time" instead of all-at-once after a delay. To the user, that makes it look and feel like it's consciously and actively responding to you in a way that animated ellipses do not. I never knew what it would feel like talking to an AI, but when I first used ChatGPT, I thought: this must be it.

BowBun 3y ago

I'm not necessarily arguing that they're the same, but let's be honest with ourselves - crypto said the _same_ things as it was ramping up. Just replace all the applications of AI you listed with the many hypothetical use-cases crypto-pushers were listing out. As always, sounds cool. Actually do some of it and then let's talk more.

zirgs 3y ago
Crypto pushers pushed two contradictory messages: 1. hodl, don't sell, don't spend! 2. Try to replace fiat with crypto in your life! No wonder that its adoption for legal purposes didn't go anywhere.
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  Saving more than spending has also been popular advice for fiat, at times. More for medium/long-term personal purposes at the expense of immediate macro purposes, but I think that applies to both systems.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    Central banks inflate their currencies on purpose to discourage hodling. Short term savings for emergencies are good. But by hodling fiat long term - you are just losing money. Cryptobros thought that they are smarter than central banks and didn't bother to implement proper monetary policy in the Bitcoin protocol to prevent its volatility.
    - tome 3y ago
      > But by hodling fiat long term - you are just losing money. Real interest rates are typically positive, so no, you are not.
      - hunter2_ 3y ago
        The concept of hodling fiat could mean cash under the mattress or could mean an interest-bearing account. It's ambiguous.

hagbarth 3y ago

I mean. We can compare the hype pattern between the two and still acknowledge that one has utility while the other doesn't. Both have resulted in a bunch of hopefuls starting companies, in order to attract mountains of venture capital. Companies that will only have a loose connection to the tech that drives the hype.

one_level_deep 3y ago
The same could be said about the microprocessor or any other tech innovation throughout history. They all lead to new companies chasing investment dollars. Is there any insight from this observation?
- afavour 3y ago
  > Is there any insight from this observation? Yes: be deeply skeptical of anyone claiming tech they are personally invested in is revolutionary.
  - one_level_deep 3y ago
    If someone believes a technology is revolutionary, investing money in it is the most rational thing to do, right?

bloqs 3y ago

Agreed, and when people seem to simply correlate them on no other quality than being widely observed in popular culture they lose me entirely. The tech religious overhype train is here to stay. There has never been a more established need for calm honesty.

yieldcrv 3y ago

Financial services is the biggest industry on the planet but as soon as crypto is involved “a vehicle for speculation“ is invalid So speaking of echo chambers…

packetlost 3y ago

> speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision You know very well that that's not what GP is referring to. Speech to text, natural language translation, recommendation, and computer vision are all very useful things, but also were very much real and in consumer hands long before the current hype cycle. Generative AIs are in their hype cycle. IMO the tech is overhyped to hell and back, but it will still probably yield better results than Crypto, there are legitimate uses for it. But those uses need to be ok with an 80% correct solution, which is not sufficient for all the things LLM hypelords are saying they can be used for and there is no path forward for closing that 20% gap.

eric_cc 3y ago
Bitcoin still has the potential to become the worlds reserve currency. That’s pretty legit.
- packetlost 3y ago
  No, it really doesn't.
  - eric_cc 3y ago
    It absolutely does. What leads you to believe that it doesn’t?
    - notahacker 3y ago
      Comically low transaction rate, obscenely high power consumption, extreme concentration of BTC holdings in the hands of a small number of people (and companies who have very little influence of global politics), arbitrary growth rate and cap with no correspondence to economic growth, extreme volatility , inconsequentially small use for legal trade, but above all the complete and utter disinterest in it as a reserve currency outside a small echo chamber that has far more BTC to sell than involvement in international trade. Fortnite Bucks, Mt Gox trading cards, skulls of adult humans and guano also "have the potential to become the world's reserve currency", but it seems unreasonable to put the burden on proof on the people arguing that they won't be.

hinkley 3y ago

So you aren’t infuriated by automated phone systems? Because let me tell you, the number of companies whose reputation has survived me having to deal with their fucking phone robot can be counted on my middle finger.

jjgreen 3y ago
... can be counted on my middle finger Fabulous, I'll be stealing that ...
- not_alexb 3y ago
  Probably an extremely large number of companies can be counted on something as ginormous as the average human middle finger; I could probably fit 20 if I write really tiny and could fit a lot more with access to other devices.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Someday, cosmetic geneticists will offer to sell you extra middle fingers.
    - not_alexb 3y ago
      I would be grateful beyond even my wildest measure (two middle fingers).
    - jjgreen 3y ago
      Robotic extra thumbs available now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKSCmkCE5og https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKSCmkCE5og
      - hinkley 3y ago
        It takes more muscles to frown than to smile, but it takes more parts to make a thumbs up than to flip someone off.
- 3y ago

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

Crypto has been quite useful for me personally, from VPN payments to donating to locally forbidden causes. AI only does bad things to me so far: surveillance, spam, fakes, search results poisoned, twitter and reddit closed up because of it etc. Where is my automatic captcha solver? Where is a robot that will get me to a live person in a support call? Where is a spam filter that doesn't send all useful emails to spam? Where is a filter to hide fake reviews on Amazon? To fight against Amazon's crazy product ranking system? Such useful things are nowhere on the horizon.

atonse 3y ago
As soon as Amazon starts losing money in fake reviews, you bet they will miraculously have a solution in a weekend. Until then, you’ll get a lot of “it’s a really hard problem to solve!” Coupled with zero progress.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  The thing is, if there was a real useful AI, it could filter stuff on my end, independent of Amazon.
n_ary 3y ago
Off-topic: > Where is a filter to hide fake reviews on Amazon? While it[1] doesn’t hide, it can generate some insightful information about fake reviews for me. Disclaimer: Not affiliated, only a happy person using FakeSpot since this year. [1] https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/

dgroshev 3y ago

It's not as clear cut really. Overall economic productivity didn't shoot up in the last decade despite the dramatic progress we had in software and hardware (e.g. [1]), and it's not clear that AI/ML will dramatically change that. Yes searching pictures on my iphone by text is convenient and Netflix recommendations might be more addictive, but the path from that to ubiquitous economic prosperity, safety, and comfort (the technoutopia many here are striving for) is not clear at all. It's also not very clear if those marginal improvements are worth the substantial share of total human brainpower thrown at them. [1] https://www.aei.org/economics/good-news-bad-news-on-us-productivity-growth/ https://www.aei.org/economics/good-news-bad-news-on-us-produ...

rvz 3y ago

> Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO. Nope. The hype around AI by the AI bros is totally similar with the crypto bros back then. > AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision... Yet I guarantee that you don't trust any of their outputs for any serious applications and you need to constantly check for it's reliability since its output is often wrong, inaccurate or even outright nonsense. You don't trust it yourself, which that is the problem of this entire hype cycle. On top that, it is all at the expense of the planet getting incinerated with no efficient alternatives to counter the amount of extreme waste of resources that these systems are consuming. [1] [2] > Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction, a vehicle for speculation, and a platform for creating financial scams. 'never' So Moneygram, Stripe, Checkout.com, etc using it is 'never amounted to anything'? If it was only for financial scams, all of them would have stopped using it a long time ago. They simply didn't because financial scams on a transparent public ledger is a scammers nightmare and sounds like a very poor platform for creating financial scams. But maybe you need to look outside of the AI bubble and see the trillions of dollars in which the banks have allowed in actual black market transactions by criminals in the FinCEN files [0] which is nothing compared to crypto. [0] https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/ai-chatgpt-water-usage-environment-study-b1073866.html https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/ai-chatgpt-water-usage-envir... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/fincen-banks-suspicious-activity-reports-buzzfeed.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/fincen-banks-sus... [2] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...

lisasays 3y ago

The thing is, it's perfectly possible for something to possess hybrid qualities. In the case of AI: both potentially quite useful (unlike crypto) and incredibly, toxically overhyped (just like crypto). Ironically, the fact that a lot of people think "You it's actually kind of useful sometimes, therefore you can't compare it crypto/web3" is part of the engine that drives the hype.

172023throw 3y ago

I can evade taxes and government surveillance using crypto. That's value added for me.

172023throw9 3y ago

I can evade taxes and government surveillance using crypto. That's value added for me.

croes 3y ago

>recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search Both don't seem to work.

squirtlebonflow 3y ago

And a tool to resist inflation and protect assets against theft, bank closures or government raids in countries where people are just barely surviving. You have a pretty Anglocentric viewpoint.

tuxracer 3y ago

> Is AI overhyped? no calling something "hype" should not be a stand-in for data

eric_cc 3y ago

Bitcoin has the potential to become the world’s reserve currency. Your smug dismissal of it is ignorant at best. Consider how power structures (eg nation states) may change in such a future.

mcguire 3y ago

I hate to point this out but as a regular user, recommendation engines and search have not gotten better in the last, say, 10 years. (Although that may not be true in terms of selling advertising and propaganda, both of which I tend not to pay a lot of attention to.) Likewise, speech to text and language translation are more available, but they're still pretty bad. And computer vision is much better than 10 years ago, but I wouldn't bet anyone's life on it. And yet, the hype train is still gaining momentum. Having been through more than my share of AI winters, I can feel another one coming and it's going to be bad.

disgruntledphd2 3y ago
I agree with you, but I started predicting an AI winter in like 2016. I thought the failure of self driving would kill it, but apparently not. I've predicted 9 of the last 1 AI winters.

nostrademons 3y ago

The thing is that the specific technologies behind all of those very practical improvements are not what's being hyped up this bubble. Speech recognition, for example, usually involves a lot of audio preprocessing, followed by some form of RNN/LSTM/Transformer to generate candidates, followed by beam search to score and choose from candidates. If you are a machine-learning practitioner, you should be familiar with all of those techniques and how they are used so that you can solve practical problems with them. But if you just read about AI in the news and figure you're going to found the next great startup and make a billion off it, you'll probably start by feeding a whole bunch of data into Tensorflow and then getting useless garbage out of it. This hype bubble is specifically about LLMs, extremely large-parameter transformers that are trained on all the data OpenAI or Google can get their hands on. And then supposedly if you ask them the right questions, you will get useful answers back. For people that put in the time and experimentation to actually find the right questions and the right applications, that will probably be true - but the hype is that this will change everything, and it most certainly will not, just in the same way that beam search is frequently useful but it definitely does not change everything. But slick promoters will nevertheless manage to use people's lack of knowledge to redirect billions of dollars in capital into their and their employees' pockets, the same way that slick promoters used crypto to redirect billions of dollars in capital into their and their employees' pockets.

nerdyboi 3y ago
You're so so so right! Things practical in AI is not hyped. OpenAI which is funded by Microsoft and promoted by Microsoft account executives creates hype as if it's open although nothing, including its so-called open-source Whisper, is open. People feeding Microsoft pretend that "they" are revolutionizing the world. NVIDIA and Microsoft are making money out of these large models and positioning the bigger as the better.

hmrtn 3y ago

What an asinine thing to say and it exhibits your lack of willingness or ability or willingness to understand both AI and cryptocurrency.

justinclift 3y ago

So, you're pretty much saying: AI is just like crypto, but better! Not sure that's reaaaaaaaaaally going to bring people around.

protocolture 3y ago

AI will end up as Clippy 2.0 just as Crypto ended up as an overly secure payment processing platform.