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Is AI the next crypto? Insights from HN comments

• whiteharry 3y ago
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• deleted 3y ago
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• brrrrrm 3y ago
  Genuine question: have macro trends ever, in the history of humanity, been consistently and correctly analyzed by fine-grained time series data? I was always a bit sketched out by the macro economics classes I took in college.
  • Der_Einzige 3y ago
    Time series analysis is epistemologically bunk anyway. You’re telling me that in more than 100 years of study that arima or variants are still the best models? Hogwash. Next you’ll tell me that elevators take us up and down, rather than people simply rearranging the floors when you’re in the elevator… Related and with less parody, most technical analysis is no better than chicken bone divination.
• Closi 3y ago
  Interesting analysis. Suprised HN is so negative towards AI (and that the positive:negative ratio to AI is about the same as it was for Crypto a few years ago!) The obvious difference is that AI has abundant use-cases, while Crypto only has tenuous ones. Maybe there is added negativity considering it is a technology where there is clearly a potential threat to jobs on a personal level (e.g. lift operators were very negative towards automatic lifts).
  • greenthrow 3y ago
    HN isn't negative on "AI" in a vacuum. HN is negative on AI hype which is completely out of control.
  • kcorbitt 3y ago
    (author here) Yes, I was surprised that AI didn't have more positive sentiment overall! Subjectively, the two flavors of AI-negative sentiment I've seen most commonly on HN are (1) its potential to invade privacy, and (2) its potential to displace workers, including workers in tech. I think that (1) was by far the most common concern up until around the ChatGPT release, at which point (2) became a major concern for many HN readers.
    • cft 3y ago
      The most negative argument about GPT-like AI for me is that it has summed up all world's information into only one "correct" opinion. Bing chat for example terminates the conversation and offers you to apologize when you reply that it's incorrect and you don't like its biases. With the old search engines, at least, in theory, you could get links to websites with different points of view.
      • HPsquared 3y ago
        Microsoft is going to be especially sensitive in this area, given their experience with Tay and "user-guided sentiments" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
    • fallingknife 3y ago
      Would be interesting to compare with overall sentiment on HN over time. I feel like it has gotten more and more bitter and negative over the time I've been here.
      • JohnFen 3y ago
        My personal outlook about how AI has been developing has certainly become increasingly dark with time. I still have a hope, though, that things won't be as bad as I fear.
        • ies7 3y ago
          Because the majority of those ai "startups/founders" were blockchain startups before this and big data startup before that and "any buzzword tech" before that too. They will pivot their vision to the next toy after this too.
  • wnevets 3y ago
    >Interesting analysis. Suprised HN is so negative towards AI (and that the positive:negative ratio to AI is about the same as it was for Crypto a few years ago!) I would be curious to know many HNers were previously burned by crypto. Fool me once, etc.
  • monero-xmr 3y ago
    Crypto has objectively increased my net worth by many zeroes, while AI has a lot of hand-wavey "productivity gains" while the self driving cars I was promised are being banned for homicide...
    • __loam 3y ago
      Congratulations on finding your greater fools.
      • kridsdale3 3y ago
        Exactly. The guy was like "Well, I found a huge nugget of gold in the Klondike while everyone around me was made destitute, therefore abandoning your family to stand in a freezing river for two years is objectively good."
    • ryneandal 3y ago
      Dan Olson is FAR more eloquent than I will ever be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA&t=9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA&t=9s
      • monero-xmr 3y ago
        2.5 hour video to tell me why you are smarter than me, no thanks
    • joegibbs 3y ago
      Check out my next world-changing invention, a Stripe form where a million people can send me twenty bucks each…
  • mdgrech23 3y ago
    I feel like the value of crypto going up is backed by solid economics. There is only ever going to be so much of it so losing your money to inflation isn't a risk. People die and don't tell anyone their keys, people forget their keys so we're constantly losing crypto too, w/ currency this is taken into account and print new dollars not w/ crypto. I also think it reflects a general sentiment here in the states and probably China too that we're barreling toward a fucked up never world and crypto is some kind of safe guard against that. In times of uncertainty people turn this gold, this is very much a digital gold.
    • dragonwriter 3y ago
      > I feel like the value of crypto going up is backed by solid economics. There is only ever going to be so much of it so losing your money to inflation isn't a risk. This is solid economics iff you assume that crypto has a utility for which there is no substitute which does not share the same supply constraint feature, and even then its not solid economics for a current investment unless you also assume that that utility is the entire basis for its current valuation. Because even if it has a nonsubstitutable utility, if that's not the basis of its current value, then the "solid economics" is that there is some price it could reach from which further value drop because of supply (of substitutes) will not erode value, but there is no guarantee of what that level is.
      • Closi 3y ago
        Agreed! It's backed by solid economics if you believe a load of things that aren't backed up by solid economics.
    • z3phyr 3y ago
      Gold does not require much infrastructure or utility to keep existing, and it is operable by anyone with hands or less.
    • acdha 3y ago
      > There is only ever going to be so much of it so losing your money to inflation isn't a risk. This comment feels like it’s 2013 and there hasn’t been a decade of people creating thousands of other tokens and forks, or realizing that high volatility in liquidity or exchange rates is more of a problem than the levels of currency inflation we commonly see (the price increases we’ve seen for the last couple years are most of the inflation we’ve seen and that practice would be unaffected). It especially misses the understanding that deflation is much worse for anyone who isn’t already rich. The model that anyone who bought a decade ago deserves to be fabulously rich is … unlikely to be popular with the rest of the world.
  • adverbly 3y ago
    > The obvious difference is that AI has abundant use-cases, while Crypto only has tenuous ones. Hacker News comment sentiment is not a reliable measurem of what the average hacker news developer thinks. For one, only people who are very invested about something will post about it. For two, many comments are probably not from developers and instead from fake accounts. It does not seem surprising to me that both of these factors would be in favor of a more positive sentiment for crypto. People that like it seem to really like it and talk about it a lot, and there is a large financial incentive for numerous actors to create fake accounts and comments.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • jl6 3y ago
    I’m not negative towards AI, but I know how hype cycles work - even for genuinely good tech. I’m not looking forward to the coming waves of scammers and grifters and snake oil salesmen in this space.
    • tracerbulletx 3y ago
      Wait you mean you don't like having every single Data adjacent professional on LinkedIn sending you their personal newsletter to let you know how much they know and how incredibly "involved" and expert at "AI" they are?
  • mattlondon 3y ago
    There is a lot of negativity about the way it is used I think. Most people will agree that LLMs are pretty neat, but now instead of every startup being "like Uber but for ..." they are "like chatGPT but for ...". Everyone is trying to chuck AI into their products and most of the time there is no need, or the product is just a thin fine-tune over an existing LLM model that adds essentially near-zero value. HN is fairly negative on that sort of thing I think (rightly so IMO)
    • __loam 3y ago
      I think a major problem that is going to become more and more obvious is that AI is actually pretty expensive compared to good old deterministic computing. If there's a way to solve a problem without resorting to sending an inference request to a gpu cluster, we should do it that way. Otherwise you're wasting electricity.
      • willsmith72 3y ago
        For now it is. If it continues to be the best way to solve problems, the cost will drop with time
      • Closi 3y ago
        More expensive to run but cheaper to write. Engineers are expensive, so actually the cost/benefit analysis is a little more complex and different problems will have different solutions.
        • __loam 3y ago
          The proliferation of extremely expensive algorithms isn't necessarily good. A lot of ink has been spilled about how much useless work crypto does. We should consider the impact of AI on the total computational resources of the species carefully.
      • hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
        Let's zeroth-order a single GPT-4 query as using 0.01 kWh (which is probably massive overkill for most queries but we'll roll with it). Let's high ball US residential electricity prices are about 25¢ per kWh. So 25¢ of electricity gets us 100 GPT-4 queries. $25 gets us 10_000. Let's low ball average US developer salaries at a cool $100_000/yr. 50 40 hour weeks in a year makes 2_000 working hours makes $50 per hour. So with our very generous margins all working against us, a US developer would have to be making 20_000 GPT-4 queries an hour, or a little over 5 per second, in order to end up costing in electricity what he is making salary-wise. I have no real point to this story except that electricity is much cheaper than most people have a useful frame of reference for. My mom used to complain about teenage me not running the dishwasher at full load until I worked out that the electricity and water together costed about 50¢ a run and offered her a clean $20 to offset my next 400 only three-quarters full runs. Your bonus programming tip: Many programming languages let you legally use underscores to space large numbers! Try "million = 1_000_000" next time you fire up Python.
  • jampekka 3y ago
    I'd guess HN is negative towards hype in general. "AI" is very much full of hype. What happened with previous AI hypes, the term AI was abandoned and the techniques and disciplines were "rebranded". Probably will happen again. When something works and we start to understand how and when it works (and especially when it doesn't) it stops being "AI" and becomes something more boring.
  • __loam 3y ago
    It's not obvious to me whether we've actually found a good killer app for generative AI yet, unless you consider chatgpt or sites like midjourney the killer apps. A lot of the new wave of ai startups are just wrappers for gpt. I don't think that adds a ton of value over just asking gpt-4 your query as opposed to subscribing to a billion different ai services. I also question the value of ai art in general when everyone involved in creative labor thinks you're a piece of shit for using it.
    • Closi 3y ago
      I certainly consider ChatGPT to be one killer app. Copilot to be another. Midjourney to be another - or at least diffusion based image editing tools which can be brought into photo and video editing workflows. The killer app here is probably integration of diffusion models into apps like Photoshop (and eventually video). Some real virtual assistant applications seem right around the corner (i.e. a real life J.A.R.V.I.S seems like an inevitability within the year rather than a pipe dream, and to me would be a killer app) And then lots of other killer apps are pretty obvious to imagine with development (e.g. customer service applications like IT helpdesks, Computer game dialogue where you can really influence interactions...)
      • __loam 3y ago
        I guess I'm wondering if LLMs as customer service agents are actually going to be good or if it's just going to be another layer of indirection I need to get through to talk to a human. Is the video game dialog actually going to be good or will it fall flat compared to hand crafted narrative. Do I actually like copilot butting in with suggestions when I'm trying to program something.
        • Closi 3y ago
          LLMs will be good replacements for a portion of customer service queries (eg where’s my order, help me fix this common computer issue etc), and will probably be a bad replacement for other queries (eg complaint handling), but it doesn’t have to fix all for it to transform the sector and be a killer app. Video game dialogue remains to be seen, but I already find ChatGPT based text adventures super fun! So I suspect there will be demand for both handcrafted static stories and AI dynamically-generated stories (ie they can be different things, one doesn’t have to replace the other, just like email didn’t immediately replace the post service). I don’t know if you enjoy copilot, but for me it’s definitely supercharges my productivity.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    > Maybe there is added negativity considering it is a technology where there is clearly a potential threat to jobs on a personal level I'm not worried about this on a personal level, but I'm very worried about the wider risk of too many people being put out of work too quickly. That's my biggest concern with these tools.
  • jejeyyy77 3y ago
    HN is made of real people. People with emotions - like FOMO/jealousy/threatened etc. I get the sense that a lot of people feel like they missed the boat be it crypto, or AI, etc.
  • tester756 3y ago
    >Suprised HN is so negative towards AI I feel like it is overrated and overhyped It sucks because that's impressive field, but over decade of hype on self-driving cars and now naivety of experts being replaced by chat bot is annoying Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying those things don't work, just not as good as people try to convince us
    • pixl97 3y ago
      The problem with self driving cars is we are.. putting the cart before the horse. That is a lot of the hard issues with driving are preemptive knowledge issues. I see a ball rolling towards the road from the left. I as a human know that, one the ball will likely roll out in front of me, and two, a kid/person may be following that. Now if you see a blowing trash bag, you probably aren't going to take any risky corrective action to avoid it. The problem just a vision knowledge system is a ball and blowing trashbag are just objects that have the same priority. You have no categorization system of the relative meaning and dangers behind each action. But things start getting weird when you couple LLMs with vision knowledge. Really, it's much too slow currently, but in multi-modal systems objects get depth of meaning. That trash bag can be identified, and a low risk can be assigned to it. While the ball can also be identified and a high risk assigned to it. Along with a bunch of other generalization that humans typically do.
  • themagician 3y ago
    > Surprised HN is so negative towards AI (and that the positive:negative ratio to AI is about the same as it was for Crypto a few years ago!) I'm not. AI tools will have huge benefits in some industries. But the main use case that people will experience (at least, the use case they recognize) on a daily basis will be scams and frustration. That's why people are negative. Not because the technology is bad or does not have uses, but because the average experience that people will consciously have will be negative. It's already impossible to know what's real and what's not. Customer service is already majority bots. You'll never be able to talk to a human again if you have an issue with something. Blackmail and ransomware scams are going to get dialed up to 11. Everything is going to be automated in the most annoying ways possible. People are going to lose their jobs. Most of the jobs that will be lost are "meaningless," but our society revolves around meaningless jobs because they provide order, income and—as a consequence—dignity. All of that is going out the window. Crypto had a purpose that no one actually cared about. No one cared until people started to see the scam potential and then it took off. AI is going to do the same thing. AI tools will revolutionize medicine, engineering, manufacturing, and logistics. There will be huge benefits for all of humanity. But you won't think about this day-to-day. You'll just be bombarded by more (and better) scams more quickly. I am amazed at what AI tools can do already. Had these tools existed 10 or 15 years ago my entire life would be different. Better? I have no idea. Maybe, maybe not. But even if it would have been better I know enough to know that I would not recognize that.
    • pixl97 3y ago
      The one issue with AI and you not thinking about it day to day, is you'll only see it where it makes mistakes, or it performs criminal actions. It's the IT effect. When IT does it's job right, everyone asks why you pay them, then IT screws up, everyone will ask why you pay them. Things just working is transparent and we don't notice it's even there.
  • verdverm 3y ago
    Crypto also had many use-cases and what we are seeing is reality of LLMs. They are not the magic pixy dust you can just sprinkle on and get better outcomes. There are a lot of complications and downsides that come with them.
  • gumballindie 3y ago
    I dont think people are negative about ai, but rather about how its built and what it’s used for. At least that’s my case. Ai is a great tool, but training it on people’s property, without permission or recognition is harmful. Equally using it to manipulate people, spread misinformation and generate spam is detrimental to tech overall. Worse, spreading fear and claiming to want using it to replace people - after stealing their work - instead of creating value and new industries is just petty. Therefore i will forever hold the people that promote ai in that manner in contempt to the end of time. To see so many smart people simply fall for and parrot the idiocy that ai will replace workers is sad. Sam altman and his bros knew that FUD works and went that path. The sheeple followed. Instead ai should be promoted as what it is - a job and growth creator and should be built honouring people’s property. It can be done and should be done that way.
• dragonwriter 3y ago
  The one thing that stands out really clearly in the sentiment graph is how, prior to the AI sentiment trough around 2022, AI and Crypto sentiment were highly correlated in their movements. It would be interesting to see a broader analysis across subjects and see if that shared movement wasn't about AI and crypto, but largely just sort of a fluctuation in general tone across HN, or if instead relative to general HN sentiment, sentiment on Crypto an AI movements were correlated prior to the recent divergence.
  • kcorbitt 3y ago
    (author here) Interesting question to ask! I actually did the exact same sentiment analysis on Rust and remote work as well, but ended up cutting them from the post in the interest of brevity. My recollection is that the sentiment on those two topics wasn't particularly correlated with the sentiment on crypto or AI, but let me look up that graph and throw it in as a footnote on the article. *EDIT* added an addendum to the post with the sentiment analysis graph including both rust and remote work. Interestingly, there is in fact a noticeable downward slope in average sentiment over time for those topics as well, although they both remain far more popular than either AI or crypto.
    • ShamelessC 3y ago
      Perhaps the pandemic contributed to an underlying trend somehow?
    • trash_cat 3y ago
      I'd like to know your throughts as to why the downward slope.
• reidjs 3y ago
  Self plug because it’s sort of relevant, I wrote a short snarky blog post today complaining about how the “AI” conference scene is very boring compared to crypto. https://blog.hazybridge.com/ai-is-boring/ https://blog.hazybridge.com/ai-is-boring/
• bamazizi 3y ago
  The major difference between the 2 is how they're being adopted by customers and the tangible value they return. AI/ML barrier to entry is far simpler and vastly user friendly compared to crypto. Instant value return or gratification from ML products (GTPs and rest) is far more mainstream friendly. Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has had their funds stolen or lost using ML products. I understand content creators and those who, unwillingly, contributed knowledge to learning systems did get circumvented but i'm talking about users/customers. Compare that to the negative stigma of crypto frauds and stereotypical association to illegal transactions. Apples vs. rotten oranges in my opinion!
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    Exactly. People, average everyday people, are using and getting value out of AI right now. Are we to ignore that?
    • distortionfield 3y ago
      Average every day people are using and getting value out of crypto right now too. Are we to ignore that?
      • kubiton 3y ago
        I know plenty of crypto involved people and all of them lost money and no one uses it seriously. Not a single avg human I know even tried crypto...
      • 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
        The people coaxed/tricked into emptying their bank accounts at a bitcoin ATM?
        • dragonwriter 3y ago
          Maybe not those people, but the people doing the tricking are getting value from it.
• ritzaco 3y ago
  Can you add some normalisation topic (or combination / average of several topics) like "linux" or "javascript" or something that's been around for a long time and hasn't really had a hype cycle recently? It's interesting to see how AI/Crypto relate to each other, but e.g. for sentiment analysis we would need to check if maybe HN got more negative _overall_ or if it's actually dependent on the two topics you chose
  • kcorbitt 3y ago
    A sibling commenter mentioned the same thing. I actually did the same analysis on "rust" and "remote work", but cut it from the final post for brevity. I've added an addendum now with sentiment on those topics graphed as well!
• Aurornis 3y ago
  Interesting sentiment analysis, but hard to put into context without a baseline for the sentiment of average HN comments. In my experience, HN can be impressively cynical on just about any topic that gets posted. Some times a great article will get posted and people will find creative ways to complain about everything from the color choice of the website to unrelated complaints from loosely related topics. It gets negative very quickly in here. It’s also interesting to see sentiment trending downward in time for both topics, even as the real-world benefits of AI become more obvious. My gut feeling is that this shows some of the contrarian bias on HN: Comments here are more optimistic about things that aren’t yet mainstream, but lean negative as soon as something becomes too popular or mainstream. Interesting article. Thanks for including the details about fine tuning your own model.
• jodacola 3y ago
  Very interesting. I've introspected a great deal lately to (try to) gauge my own biases with regard to these technologies, because I think AI is absolutely incredible and I'm less skeptical about it than other things, namely crypto, which I've always held with very deep skepticism. Does that mean AI is "different" or am I just biased? To that end, I'm very curious: how does AI compare against other major tech advancements that are relevant in the HN community? The AI vs crypto comparison is the one I see the most, or ChatGPT/LLM vs iPhone, but surely there are some other less splashy or controversial comparisons. What about something like React/Angular/SPAs vs AI? Less exciting, I know. I'm just really curious about how AI stacks up against something other than the obvious ("obvious," because of what I've been reading - again, biases) comparisons.
• shaldengeki 3y ago
  Is it just me, or does the article not show how posts were classified as AI vs crypto? I see that they "use an LLM" but don't see a code snippet describing how, or an attempt at assessing error rates, which seems like a basic step in validating this. Maybe I missed it? edit: Looks like this is the notebook used in the article: https://github.com/corbt/hn-analysis/blob/main/analysis.ipynb https://github.com/corbt/hn-analysis/blob/main/analysis.ipyn... The classification seems pretty fraught; one cell shows a sample of articles classified as crypto, which appears to include a bunch of cryptography and other unrelated articles.
• yCombLinks 3y ago
  I think the most telling detail is the most difficult part of the analysis was done using chatgpt.
• MeImCounting 3y ago
  I was very confused reading the comments until I realised that "Crypto" in this case means Cryptocurrency and not Cryptography
  • make3 3y ago
    were you asleep for the past 5 years
  • shaldengeki 3y ago
    Funnily enough, it means both; the author's classifier lumps cryptography articles in with cryptocurrency (search for "homomorphic encryption"): https://github.com/corbt/hn-analysis/blob/main/analysis.ipynb https://github.com/corbt/hn-analysis/blob/main/analysis.ipyn...
    • MeImCounting 3y ago
      I feel like that might skew the "Crypto" results in the positive direction no? I would think most people here have a generally positive view of strong open source public key cryptography as in many ways its the foundation of many modern technologies and the current internet correct?
      • shaldengeki 3y ago
        I don't think any of us can know for sure, since the classification and sentiment analysis were both performed by an LLM, and I'm not seeing validation of the results by the author. You can imagine certain security/cryptography-related terms getting coded naively as negative-sentiment by an LLM ("vulnerability", "breach", "flaw").
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    Yeah, that's a lost fight. "Crypto" is ambiguous now and you have to figure out what is meant from context. Personally, I try to avoid using the abbreviated term because it causes confusion.
• Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
  Crypto is fun as a concept but after more than a decade it doesn't seem to be useful for much, apart from speculation. And I say this as someone who has fooled around with crypto a lot. AI has plenty of use cases. Just ChatGPT alone is helping me everyday in many different ways. I don't think it's remotely comparable.
  • ypeterholmes 3y ago
    As if money was going to be replaced overnight? The amount of stablecoin and CBDC and blockchain activity in general is massive. I frankly don't understand people who think the tech has no use case. It flies in the face of existing adoption, and also imposes an unrealistic assumption of how fast the entire world was going to change.
    • mnau 3y ago
      It's not that it has no use case. It's that it has a very niche use case. Government were never going to allow some unfettered parallel monetary system. Governments invested a lot of political capital to monitor and control monetary flows (from reasons/excuses like fraud, terrorist financing, money laundering). No way there were gonna relinquish that power. They might use the technology itself as CBDC, but that is about it. It was sold as new web 4.0 or whatever. NFTs were the future. Smart contracts.... And all it seemed to deliver were all mistakes and scams monetary system made in 19th century.
    • hocuspocus 3y ago
      Most stablecoins are centralized. CBDCs are the absolute antithesis of cryptocurrencies. What "existing adoption" are you talking about? In 15 years I've seen only speculation and a grand total of zero products used day-to-day by average people. The fact you lump all these things together is a perfect illustration. Most blockchain and cryptocurrencies proponents understand nothing about technology.
• ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
  The difference in AI and Crypto is that AI is much more accessible. Everyone can appreciate a photo of an astronaut on a horse. Few can grasp the concept and significance of a store of value. Let alone a DAO. It's the same reason why Harry Potter is more popular than Einstein's "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" in which he came up with the theory of relativity. When others talk about something we don't understand, we tend to get angry and dismissive. Like boys in elementary school who think girls are stupid. Because they can't figure out why they act the way they do. So on top of the lower popularity, we also get the hate towards crypto.
  • latchkey 3y ago
    I'd argue it a bit differently. The way I see it, we are taught from a young age to fear finance and money. We're told that we need to had it to someone else to store safely (banks). We're told that we need someone else to invest it for us for our future (401k). We're told that our government is responsible for protecting us (military and taxes). As a result, we constantly hand off the responsibility to others and we don't make the effort to learn and understand it ourselves. We get angry and dismissive when we don't want to talk about something we are fearful of. Of course, the people who take the different approach, of diving into understand it, are the ones who are benefiting the most from it. Those are the wealthy people on Wall Street. The bankers. The CEOs. The people who keep pushing the fear. AI isn't about money or finance, it is about knowledge.
  • criddell 3y ago
    > When others talk about something we don't understand, we tend to get angry and dismissive. When Neha Narula said (roughly) crypto is speedrunning the entire history of traditional finance and repeating the same mistakes she was pointing out the arrogance and (possibly willful) ignorance of many crypto promoters. Take that and add on justifiable anger at proof-of-work schemes during a developing climate crisis and much of the dismissive attitude and hate is well earned.
  • dudeinhawaii 3y ago
    Not sure if it was intentional but you just used the "few can understand" defense that I see in so many Crypto forums. "You don't like it because you don't get it". It's not a very useful defense of a product or concept. Crypto is not the Einstein to AI's Harry Potter, that is comical. This is the "you're all haters" defense.
• make3 3y ago
  to me this is an obviously dumb and reactionary comparison
• fritzo 3y ago
  > 2016: Whoa, deep learning actually works? The deep learning wave began before 2010 when this analysis starts. When I was looking for a job in 2009, there was already a big deep learning hype wave, and my new employer sent me around to look for industrial funding.
• arnaudsm 3y ago
  Interesting how sentiments gets worse over time for every topic. Could you check the overall HN sentiment over time, to see if we got more pessimistic ?
• JZL003 3y ago
  It's not that i think anything is wrong, but isn't it strange there's no jump I see in WFH comments during the pandemic when everyone was doing it
• cgh 3y ago
  As far as I know, AI hasn’t succeeded in literally blinding anyone: https://mashable.com/article/bored-ape-nfts-vision-loss-apefest-party https://mashable.com/article/bored-ape-nfts-vision-loss-apef... Molly White’s comment at the end is superb.
• rglover 3y ago
  The bulk of AI "projects," yes. As a discipline, no. Just like with the crypto nonsense, a bunch of junk was created and died. The same will happen with AI. What's left after the hype cycle/cash pump will be the things of real value.
• tkellogg 3y ago
  did HN become generally more negative over the same time?
• wiremine 3y ago
  Feels lick click bait. I think we're going to see a lot of "Is X the Next Crypto?" articles for a while.
  • freedomben 3y ago
    It's not, you should read TFA
• samanator 3y ago
  The last graph shows decreasing sentiment over time for all metrics. I wonder if HN has become more negative over time…
  • trash_cat 3y ago
    Just general technoscepticism over time. Look at cambridge analytica, and crypto scam implosion.
• baggachipz 3y ago
  The cycle of these technologies is always the same: 1. Initial introduction or release 2. Major hype and influx of greed money. <- AI is here now 3. Failure to live up to the hype, resulting in the tech becoming a punchline and gobs of money lost 4. Renaissance of the tech as its true potential is eventually realized, which doesn't match the original hype but ends up very useful 5. Iteration and improvement with no clear "done" or "achieved" milestone, it just becomes part of society The bombardment of charlatans taking advantage of the term, coupled with commercials everywhere suggests we will soon hit stage 3 for AI. The Super Bowl commercials are usually the tipping point. Crypto is at stage 3 now. Not all technologies make it to steps 4-5. Hell, I remember when social media followed the same path. And ecommerce before it. Or the web in general before that. And on and on it goes.
  • asicsarecool 3y ago
    AI is at step 4, transitioning to 5
    • baggachipz 3y ago
      You could argue ML is at step 4, but LLMs (called "AI" for some reason) are most definitely in the major hype/dumb money being chucked at it step.
      • baq 3y ago
        “Some reason” is you talk to the thing about anything and it answers and a lot of the time its answers make sense. I’d like to remind you that one year ago this was sci-fi!
      • Yoric 3y ago
        Incidentally, "AI" (the original field called AI, not the latest definition of the term) definitely made it to 5. Except these days, we call some parts of it "SQL", other parts "the Web".
        • 3y ago
• justanotheratom 3y ago
  What was the cost of the Mistral fine-tune? What was the cost of the Mistral inference on the full comment dataset?
  • sebastiennight 3y ago
    Was wondering the same. The whole article is missing this one data point as a superb selling point for their software. Come on, OP! Spill the beans!
  • trash_cat 3y ago
    It's an open source model. The cost is the electricity consuption to run it.
• telepathy 3y ago
  AI has novel functionality and utility while crypto does not
• totorovirus 3y ago
  How could a sane engineer think that chatgpt wrapper could be the next unicorn?
• winternett 3y ago
  It's crazy how we refer to what's being marketed now as Ai. Ai is a very valid technology that has been worked on for years and even though it is expanding, it is not the same as the LLMs and other things that are being marketed and evangelized under the hood by old crypto and NTF sellers and scammers. The bar for Ai should be what can learn and comprehend inputs without simply scraping Reddit, Twitter, and other social platforms on the Internet and then parsing responses. Ai as a term need to have an updated definition before things begin to become less hype and more meaningful. What is being marketed incorrectly as Ai these days is similar to how Crypto overpromised and under delivered, while also funneling money out of everyone's pockets, creating a frenzy of bad investment, and in creating unrealistic fear and very stupidly problems in society based on overconfidence in low-brow overconfidence in tech.
• nitwit005 3y ago
  Appreciate the addendum. I suspect there are two things being measured at once here: people's sentiments changing, and the content being discussed changing. Once a topic becomes "trendy", the average article quality seems to drop. You go from research articles and niche blogs to the general press and businesses trying to cash in on the trend.
• npunt 3y ago
  Crypto requires explanation, AI merely demonstration. The only demonstration crypto has is 'look, more money today' and that only works sometimes. AI's demonstration is followed by explanation of how it will kill us all, or why it won't work in context X, or take our job, etc, but you can kind of just ignore that and use it.
  • nikanj 3y ago
    Crypto’s demonstration is 1) number goes up, everyone can become wealthy 2) you can buy drugs anonymously 3) all sorts of ransomware and blackmail
• tensor 3y ago
  We have been using AI for various tasks for decades now. In fact, every day things you take for granted are powered by machine learning, and most people don't even realize it. Is OCR "a scam just like crypto"? How about voice recognition, used daily all over the world? What about spam filters? Clearly useless over hyped technology right? Even if you wanted to limit the term AI to large language models, which by the way, would make your use of the term incredibly wrong, it STILL has many common and useful application. You can use LLMs to classify text (sentiment, toxicity, etc), they can be paired with voice models to improve speech recognition or improve translation services, and so on. I think it's better to ask what you think the major similarity is between AI and crypto, because it's hard to find any other than a subset of the crypto fanatics now jumping on LLMs as the solution to every problem. But this group isn't actually part of the AI community.
  • code_runner 3y ago
    I completely agree that there is no relationship at all between the two. Hucksters are gonna huckster no matter what the medium is. If you want to ask "are LLMs the next metaverse" or something.... implying LLMs are over-promising on their utility and the hype is all driven by the companies controlling the tech.... even that is a stretch but makes more sense. Anyone selling you AGI, or "make money on youtube by typing a sentence into this prompt" is probably a crypto scammer who found a new group of people to scam.
  • dragontamer 3y ago
    > Is OCR "a scam just like crypto"? OCR is a technology. Cryptocoins are a community. The _SAME_ people who pushed crypto have now moved into the AI sphere and are hawking AI. Its like all the snake oil salesmen of the 1800s suddenly discovered that cars are selling and have become car salesmen. That doesn't mean that cars are a scam, it means that many, many people trying to sell cars to you are scammers. Having our guard up against hucksters, especially when the great community of hucksters are obviously moving in lockstep to say the same thing (and coordinate their arguments thanks to the internet / meme culture), it makes it easy to pick out when to be on guard.
    • 3y ago
• dpflan 3y ago
  It's pretty clearly not. You can go to some gen-AI site and make some content pretty easily. What am I going to use Shiba coins for?
• aantix 3y ago
  AI, specifically ChatGPT is the first thing since maybe my Google/Stackoverflow that has fundamentally changed my day as a developer. It's a constant conversation now, with ChatGPT, over hard problems. The AI doesn't always get it right, but it's a great partner, with so many great suggestions. I cannot imagine going back.
  • whartung 3y ago
    ChatGPT is my goto destination for tech questions now. It's (mostly) far more efficient than Google and I can actually have a (limited) conversation with it, rather than arguing with StackOverflow mods. Similarly with IRC. ChatGPT responds, IRC is hit or miss. It's an imperfect discussion, and can always lead to weird rabbit holes and dead ends, but it sure feels more efficient than the alternatives.
• wand3r 3y ago
  I am convinced blockchain wouldve produced a techno utopia akin to the birth of the internet. Unfortunately, it had the exact opposite dynamic of typical companies in that founders instantly became liquid millionaires without ever building anything. That is the crypto trap. Virtually nothing else has this dynamic, even VC funded startups during ZIRP.
• anthk 3y ago
  AI at least worked on protein folding. Bitcoin wastes more power than the Netherlands in a year.
  • trash_cat 3y ago
    To be fair Gen AI is incredibly energy consuming.
• throw03172019 3y ago
  AI can actually solve problems and generate revenue (profit TBD). Very hard to even get customers with crypto.
• spandextwins 3y ago
  The insights and comments below might be from an AI. Purchased with crypto.
• rqtwteye 3y ago
  AI feels more like the .COM bubble. There was a lot of hype and nonsense but the underlying tech really changed the world. I feel the same about AI. Crypto was always a solution that looked for problems it could solve.
  • karaterobot 3y ago
    That is a succinct and well-stated expression of my opinion at present, so here's an upvote. I like that it also leaves the door open for the corrollary that it's going to change the world, but we barely know how, and we have no idea about the second- and third-order effects yet.
• crtified 3y ago
  AI is many many leagues ahead in potential, for both benefit and damage. Realistically, we are going to see much more of both from AI. AI weaponisation (socially, politically, militarily, financially, etc..) will be a pretty big deal going forward, and will potentially see shady shit happen at a scale and effectiveness that will make crypto's little niche-scams look like child's play. The same old story we've seen with every major new system we introduce throughout human history. Crypto is merely a usage token. It's like comparing "the world's banking system" with "the world".
• m3kw9 3y ago
  Not even close, have crypto have been nearly this useful? I will give bitcoin the transaction use but other than transactions, crypto/smart contracts seem like there is always a way we can do that without crypto.
• ravenstine 3y ago
  Are AI articles the next crypto articles?
• churchill 3y ago
  Although I'm generally favorable towards crypto, the biggest difference is that unlike crypto, AI, especially in the form of LLMs and image models are extremely idiot-friendly. No, I don't mean it in a derogatory way: crypto leaves a lot of loose ends to be tied up by everyday humans who just want to be left alone - oh, and if anything goes wrong once, your fortune could be lost and there's no one to complain to. AI, on the other hand, is already making its way into browsers like Microsoft's Edge where I can ask it to generate all kinds of ideas, images, summaries, etc. via the chat format everyone is already friendly with. Likewise, GPT3 & 4's first major applications that took off was ChatGPT that brought AI chat to noobs and you don't need to be a hacker bro to use that. In contrast, the first time I downloaded Metamask and tried to buy USDC, I quickly found out that there are different versions (correct me if I'm wrong) of this single cryptocurrency hosted on the Polygon, Ethereum, Avalanche, etc. blockchains. What's that even supposed to mean to a beginner who wants to send money to a third-world country in minutes? And, remember: one wrong step and you could possibly lose everything.
• _pdp_ 3y ago
  Yes, most projects are pure hype. The amount of AI peddling on Twitter and YouTube is unprecedented. I wish the community were a lot more humble in that regard. That being said, there are a lot of legit use cases and customers in need of solutions that cannot be done quickly via a few API calls to OpenAI and require a lot of customisations and hand-holding. AI is hyped a lot, but there are companies out there, and I like to consider us being one of them (bias, I know), that think about how to enable customers to solve/improve real problems with the help of AI instead of making a quick buck by peddling the latest doc-chat solutions. From that perspective, AI is not the new crypto. If you ignore the noise and focus on the actual work, you will find a lot of good things about this field, and I might say even breakthrough advances, that help us reconsider what intelligent life really means. Disclaimer: we are one of the first "chat to your docs" companies that came out as soon as ChatGPT was released when all we had at our disposal was text-davinci-003 and basic vector stores. Now, we do mostly other things. Edit: fixed typos
• dougmwne 3y ago
  Wow, solid evidence that HN is turning into a bunch of cranky grouches! I suspected, but never thought the sentiment trend would be this clear. I propose we fork the site and send out an invite for HNGoodVibesOnly for anyone whose post history is in the top half of the median sentiment distribution.
• capableweb 3y ago
  I think the Addendum is the most interesting part of this blogpost. For the decade or so I've been on HN, I don't feel like it's been getting more negative overall. But maybe it's just more discussions about various dramas overall than before, which would drag down the score I'm sure.
• _ugfj 3y ago
  There was a time when ML brought us things like https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/ https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/ and we had a good laugh. Then came ChatGPT. The tens of billions dollars poured into the next hype, often by the same hustlers who hyped crypto (but for sure they were not the ones who lost the billions or stood in front of the court). Same environmental damage due to wasted electricity poured into wasteful, pointless computation. Same hype without any actual usefulness. In both cases this sentiment is met with a huff but it's factual. Came the AI-written mushroom hunting guides. Came AI Modi singing trending garnering votes for him. Our worst fears of democracy ending in favor of the candidate with the most processing power aka with the most money winning. This pandemic (for covid didn't end yet) already 300 000 people died because of hand written propaganda (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071284/this-is-how-many-lives-could-have-been-saved-with-covid-vaccinations-in-each-sta https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071...) when the next pandemic will come the AI produced oh so plausible bullshit will flood everything and millions will die. Aza Raskin compared it to a zero day vulnerability for the operating system of humanity and he is oh so right. Who is laughing now?
• CSMastermind 3y ago
  How much of the downward trend has to do with self-driving car overhype. Lumping everything 'AI' together doesn't make much sense to me.
• dottjt 3y ago
  One perspective I've been thinking about lately is how the rise of Crypto has been hugely beneficial for AI, in the same way that the dot-com bubble was hugely beneficial for the internet. Essentially Crypto lead to huge investment into GPUs and GPU technology, and then once Crypto collapsed lead to a huge capacity of compute power which then decidedly was put into AI. I doubt that investment into GPU technology would have been driven by the idea of AI alone. Something manic like Crypto had to drive it initially. Without Crypto, I imagine the AI revolution we're seeing today would not have taken place.
  • Mesopropithecus 3y ago
    As someone who hasn't thought about it that way yet: that's interesting!
  • MilStdJunkie 3y ago
    I have a private conspiracy theory - that I don't really believe - that "Satoshi Nakamoto" was actually a nome-de-guerre of an early emergent AGI, trying to figure out how to convince a planetful of monkeys to attach as much high-end processing power to the 'net as possible.
    • phs318u 3y ago
      I’d read that story!
    • dopidopHN 3y ago
      Nom de guerre. French is fucked.
    • __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      I had it pegged as the NSA trying to convince a planetful of monkeys to build an index into sha256 hash space so that it could better spy on those monkeys, but I like your version much more.
  • sangnoir 3y ago
    > One perspective I've been thinking about lately is how the rise of Crypto has been hugely beneficial for AI No, it wasn't. Crypto made GPUs scarce and expensive, and prices haven't come down yet. Crypto set AI back in many ways, including the infestation of grifters who have moved from Crypto to AI
• sgt101 3y ago
  I'll agree when someone uses Crypto in the analysis of the question.
• speedgoose 3y ago
  Thanks for releasing a new HN dataset. The HN dataset on BigQuery hasn’t been updated since a while.
• pmarreck 3y ago
  Why is general sentiment on this site seemingly getting more negative over time?
• Lerc 3y ago
  It would be interesting to do a sentiment analysis on users to see if users themselves are becoming more negative over time or if negative voices are composing more of the message volume. With the degree of data available I have wondered if you could determine a point at which you could suggest users see professional help. Then if you could do such a thing, would it be ethical to do so? Would it be ethical _not_ to do so?
• ertgbnm 3y ago
  I'm interested in the last bit. That sentiment towards anything on HN has become steadily more negative over time. Would be interested to see if this trend exists on other websites and the internet as a whole. It could be a way to measure the optimism/vibe of all of humanity. Is the entire internet becoming more cynical/skeptical/mean?
  • piercebot 3y ago
    My private hypothesis here is that we're doing a better job as a society of encouraging "disconnection" from being "always online," which is documented to aggravate mental health issues[0]. It stands to reason therefore that the people who remain online to comment may have lower levels of mental hygiene by virtue of their ongoing exposure to the internet and social media, thus resulting in a gradual decrease in sentiment over time. [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7364393/#:~:text=Abstract,and%20all%20papers%20were https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7364393/#:~:tex...
    • trash_cat 3y ago
      Interesting take. I think it's even bigger than that. After social media hiatus (think Cabridge Analytica and Instagram for teen mental health) and then Crypto imploding people became a lot more sceptical towards digital technology automatically make the world a better place. We have some experience now how technology created a lot more problems where we rushed into solutions without thinking of the consequences. It's experience based technoscepticism. If social media could can polarize countries, imagine what a readily available reasoning engine can do.
      • Nasrudith 3y ago
        Blaming social media for polarizing countries is like blaming Elvis's hips for making teenagers want sex. The negativity in tech is largely scapegoating driven in my opinion. The slanderers behind the non-existent 'Techlash' haven't stopped any more than the idiots trying to ban actual non-backdoored cryptography. It is all so incredibly stupid to me yet people keep on falling for the crap often enough that I disengage with them entirely. And people basically look at me like I'm the crazy one for pointing it out.
• deleted 3y ago
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• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  They both have "winters". Each also has "true believers" who can ignore the facts before them and incessantly hype an imaginary future.
• rabbits_2002 3y ago
  no ai is demonstrably useful crypto is not
• lamontcg 3y ago
  AI/ML is certainly going to get integrated everywhere ultimately and in a lot of things that will get hidden to the average consumer, like medical imaging. What is really hype right now is how AI is going to upset all our day to day lives and earn billions for startups. It is probably going to be a bit more incremental than the hype right now, and most of the profits will likely go to the already established tech companies. ChatGPTs AI assistants are already seen as a sign that a good number of AI startups that are a thin layer around someone else's LLM will collapse due to zero moat. It also isn't even clear where the profits are going to come from GPT/LLMs other than from NVIDIA selling shovels to the miners. Beyond that it will probably be the existing tech companies and they may be running them at a considerable loss for a long time to come.
• meowtimemania 3y ago
  Github Copilot has been really valuable to me and has had meaningful, positive impact on my life. Crypto hasn't made me more productive in any way. To me, it's had the same utility as an online casino.
• nologic01 3y ago
  Very interesting find, even though not their target: "Interestingly, there is in fact a noticeable downward slope in average sentiment over time for those topics as well" I would speculate total sentiment on HN is trending down. Its the disillusionment with tech.
• Uptrenda 3y ago
  HN don't know their own dick from their elbow when it comes to trends. Lmao.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  Actual title: Is AI the Next Crypto? Insights from 2M HN comments Original HN title was actual title, then it was changed.
• yalogin 3y ago
  Crypto was a solution in search of use cases where as AI is use cases finally finding solutions for some. No comparison
• deleted 3y ago
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• stock_toaster 3y ago
  From Matt Levine’ “Money Stuff”: ~~~ > In 2021, at the height of the investor frenzy for crypto startups, entrepreneur Chris Horne raised $2 million in seed funding for Filta, a marketplace on which customers could buy and sell custom nonfungible token face filters that could digitally augment their face, say, by adding cat whiskers or a block head. But by the time the company launched in late summer of 2022, enthusiasm for crypto had waned and Filta was faltering. > > So Horne pivoted to the new hottest sector: artificial intelligence. He ditched the NFT idea, and this year relaunched Filta as a generative AI-powered digital pet, one that talks and can offer its owner emotional support. The technology behind his new company is OpenAI’s large language model, ChatGPT. And Horne is running his new Filta venture off the capital he raised for his original concept. That is probably the most cynical version of “crypto guy pivots to AI” I have ever read, but even here it’s an obvious improvement. Before, he was going to sell people pictures of cats on the blockchain. Now, he is going to sell people pictures of cats that will talk and offer emotional support and not be on the blockchain. Strictly better! ~~~ Seems like maybe a little bit?
  • quickthrower2 3y ago
    Sort of like raise money, find bandwagon.
• faeriechangling 3y ago
  I have never been on the crypto bandwagon other than some GPU mining here and there. I still have yet to see a use case other than making financial transactions banned by the government and MAYBE as an alternative to figuring out how wire transfers work. ChatGPT in the first month had more demonstrated utility than Crypto since it was founded.
• atoav 3y ago
  As someone who predicted the fall of cryptocurrencies early on, I would say no. But there is a certain class of scammy hype-driven individuals (overlap with the crypto-bro-crowd is not unvommon) that have the potential to turn everything into a hollow and meaningless hype. This is problematic, when the nature of the hyped thing is distorted. Cryptoassets for example were useful mostly for high risk speculation, shady money transfers and for pyramid schemes. As a currency these things totally sucked, but that was the promise: "Soon money is going to be replaced by this thing". Additionally they hyped the underlying technology ("everything must be on the blockchain!") and some idiots went along and made it part of their tech stack without any rational reason to do so. Machine learning is different in that it already showed some incredible value. That value comes with potentially huge societal impacts as it will destroy entire classes of jobs and distort the concept of truth even further. But having a thing that does what it does is genuinely useful, outside of get-rich-quick schemes and speculation. Now machine learning is in danger of being overhyped into something it is not. As impressive as some of the results are, this is not artificial intelligence in the traditional "artifical consciousness" sense of the word. It is a way to come up with plausible outputs to a given input.
• btbuildem 3y ago
  Well, I've never really used crypto, save for mining a few bitcoins way, way back in the day. The idea was really appealing and initially seemed revolutionary - but also a bit of a tempest in a teacup. LLMs -- I've gradually been using them more and more, with tangible benefits (less effort to complete a task / quicker turnaround on projects). Some workflows that were unimaginable are now possible, because of this bi-directional bridge between structured information and human language. One is a pyramid scheme, the other is a digital exoskeleton / ironman suit. It really doesn't compare.
• deleted 3y ago
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• rldjbpin 3y ago
  context: i work as an ml engineer. i agree with the bubble sentiment that apparently many people have. i recognize how it would be at my own career's expense. but i feel that many arguments made here miss the forest for the trees. applied statistics or statistical learning has been around long enough and we have seen its innovations and rebranding over the decades. i clearly see the theoretical point to it and hence decided to find my place in this field. however, the "AI" movement as of late, including the generative AI bits, fall into the bubble territory for me. just like those who are serious about blockchain and its wide implications will still toil towards it, so would companies serious about machine learning. however, most people are riding the wave are for short-term gains, just like many in crypto space were there for speculative money-making. the LLMs to me are an evolution (albeit a macro one) to predictive functionality of smartphone keyboards of the past, but they are touted to be the holy grail. their capabilities are impressive, but it only scales up so much in its current form. those just making an app on top of api provided by these services will not last. moreover, the explosion of advancements mean there will be no stability for those maintaining the infrastructure in the near future. at least with the pursuit of making the largest models have shed light on the need to optimize the deep learning stack, which is the only silver lining for me. i would love to be wrong and see what comes next, but i believe the general public will lose interest soon and we will have another winter before a major breakthrough. the "AGI" claims are just like those made by vr enthusiasts in the 2010s...i mean the 1980s.
• Randomizer42 3y ago
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• Throwawayh89 3y ago
  Just want to point out that this post is by a company that works in the “AI” space. Not saying that it’s wrong or right, but it would be like asking someone in a cult to tell you if the cult is a scam. You might find a few dissenting voices, but most are going to support or it would lack the critical mass required to stay afloat.
• thr0waw4yz 3y ago
  I somehow feel crypto is very alive and it's here to stay. It's still a strong hedge against state-owned money. The people declaring it dead either don't grasp it or got burnt by buying in during the last bull run. Take a step back guys, if you trade, trade anticyclic, now is a better time to buy than two years ago - just sayin.
• AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  AI and crypto are very synergistic. As AI makes deepfakes easier and cheaper, an immutable ledger with cryptographic signatures at every step becomes a more and more valuable tool for attestations of identity and proof of history.
• theGnuMe 3y ago
  I would look at YC startup sentiment on HN. Regardless HN has always seemed to me to have a more pessimistic view so it is interesting to see the converse. Also it would be interesting to bucket by timezone.
• gregory7989 3y ago
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