I wouldn’t compare GenAI to cryptocurrency because there’s no equivalent pyramid scheme mentality of “invest early in this asset and sell it later 100x” - it’s

I wouldn’t compare GenAI to cryptocurrency because there’s no equivalent pyramid scheme mentality of “invest early in this asset and sell it later 100x” - it’s much closer to a traditional tech hype bubble. The average user isn’t roped in by the promise of buying and reselling a token, but by using and possibly paying for a product that can theoretically be useful to them on its own. Like any tech bubble, you have crowds of investors pouncing on the “next big thing”, which will inevitably be overhyped and oversold, leading to the bubble popping when expectations outpace actual returns; but the core technology is still valid. The dotcom bubble popping didn’t mean the Internet was a fad, the video game crash of 1983 didn’t permanently doom the industry, the railway mania in the 1840s didn’t mean no one ever took a train after it crashed… any new and exciting development attracts grifters, but it eventually stabilises once people learn to separate the hype from the real applications of the tech. I remember when VR went through this - it was absolutely overhyped, but today there’s still a solid community around it even if it didn’t change the world. With open source models and fine-tunes being uploaded on Huggingface, there’s no fraud, they’re perfectly free, and you can test them out and see for yourself that some work better than others even if benchmarks only tell part of the story. There’s absolutely a glut of thin veneers over APIs and models offering questionable benefits, but there’s also real value in having a solid UI on top of a basic model; we’ll see the ecosystem stabilise eventually.