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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 vast

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.
  - kwonkicker 3y ago
    I what way does an average consumer/user get value from crypto?
    - __loam 3y ago
      Crypto is still one of the best ways to do foreign exchange even if the ecosystem is run by morally bankrupt hucksters.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      The ability to transact with people that card processors do not like. The ability to self custody.
      - mminer237 3y ago
        The average person has no need to transact with people that card processors do not like. The most common scenario where that is the case is people "needing" to pay "Microsoft support".
        jrockway 3y ago
        Yeah. I have to say, I've never needed to give money to someone my bank doesn't want me to give money to. As someone spending money, I don't want guarantees like "this transaction cannot be revoked". I want to revoke transactions sometimes! Thus, crypto is anti-value-add for me. (Some would argue, merchants would charge lower prices if all sales were final. That's probably true! But it would depend on them never making a mistake, and everyone makes mistakes.)
        charcircuit 3y ago
        Expand card processors to payment processors. There is constantly sites that get unjustly restricted or banned from payment processor like PayPal and Stripe. Even Minecraft, one of the most popular games of all time, had issues with PayPal.
        atrus 3y ago
        Porn and sexual stuff is always on shaky ground with card processors.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    ChatGPT has something like 40x the weekly users as Bitcoin. There are other AIs and other Bitcoin, but I'm not sure e.g. Bitcoin (or other crypto used by folks) has the penetration to really be average to use. Crypto has a mostly niche use case at this point, exchanging money when it would be illegal, across borders, or in an area with a failing local currency.
    - jejeyyy77 3y ago
      I'm not taking sides, but are we going to ignore the fact that crypto users are probably more valuable in the sense that they are paying users in a way? A chatGPT user could just be someone who popped onto the website and submitted the chat form.
      - npunt 3y ago
        Not to be too cheeky here but paying with what? Cryptocurrencies are mostly hot potatoes everyone is throwing back and forth and occasionally dropping to catastrophic effect, and don't seem to be tied to actual value add. Meanwhile millions of people pay for tools that are now integrating AI to enhance their value add. Free ChatGPT is just a loss leader for API and paid acct and a way to better train the model.
        jejeyyy77 3y ago
        not really, crypto has value as determined by the markets. Most people who own crypto exchanged dollars for it.
        kubiton 3y ago
        True but in comparison to every other value crypto is the only one which doesn't have any alternative use. Gold, shares etc. I believe the criticism is correct as the current driver of crypto is either a 'i put that much money in I'm not selling until it increases again' or gambled los. After all the miners want to get paid. But hey binance and others struggle let's see if there is a collapse soon
  - networkchad 3y ago
    [dead]
  - epolanski 3y ago
    The only value I got out of crypto are the suckers that gave me many many thousands of euros for farming ethereum in 2017 with my RX 580s.
  - gotimo 3y ago
    most of what average every day people got out of crypto was a whole lot of lost money.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hipadev23 3y ago
GPTs have had immediate tangible benefits without needing to spend an hour preaching or explaining things. Crypto's sole usefulness remains in providing money transfers/liquidity in parts of the world where the local systems are failing or off-limits to the users.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  Crypto's main value to a LOT of people is purely speculation that you could be rich by buying it cheap and then watching the value explode. No one expected DogeCoin to provide any utility at all, but tons of people bought it.
  - nickpp 3y ago
    Countless people play the at the casinos, online poker games, bets - even the stock market is viewed by a lots of people as something of a gamble. Personally I don't partake - but they get a value in it, I guess. Who am I to judge?
    - Yoric 3y ago
      Out of curiosity, does your argument also work for drugs?
      - nickpp 3y ago
        Isn't that pretty much settled already? It seems to me our society is becoming more and more permissive while giving up the previous "war on drugs" failed approach which did an incredible amount of damage.
        walr000s 3y ago
        It also created and continues to create a lot of cheap labor, which the United States is in short supply of and likely will be for the foreseeable future.
      - 3y ago
epx 3y ago
+1. I have security cameras at home, and my "DVR" is a collection of shell scripts plus a Python script that uses YOLO to find the interesting parts of the footage. The thing works, helps a lot to review daily footage, was damn easy to put to work, and didn't cost me a cent (not even hardware; I run it in a Mini-PC w/o GPU). I knew nothing about ML before writing this script. So yeah, the value is there.
- dpcx 3y ago
  Any information you'd be willing to share around this would be great! I'm looking to do something similar.
  - epx 3y ago
    https://epxx.co/artigos/camera2_en.html https://epxx.co/artigos/camera2_en.html
- demondemidi 3y ago
  Funny, I built a security camera setup with PoE CCTV cameras, GStreamer and the NVIDIA CUDA element using a Xavier platform. I tried SSDMobileNet and YOLO and found them to be absolutely horrible. The camera that was pointing down at an angle was the worst. Both models would only identify a dog and a person correctly about 15% of the time (missing me or my partner as I walked by and waved), with an actual object detection about 80% of the time even when there was nothing in its ground truths in-frame!! (usually as desks, beds or chairs, i don't recall exactly but it was furniture - and it was pointed at my empty back lot). It had just as many shadow/sunspot/tree failures as Motion. The other camera at eye level did a great job with cars, but not so much with people's side profiles, only head-on. It was laughably bad. And I have no intention of training my own models on my datasets because I don't have time to label. I did this in 2018-2019 so I don't know what the state of the art object detection models are like today, maybe they got their shit together for non-canonical angles. I eventually switched back to full-time recording on a 2 TB HDD and if I need to scan back i can jog the livestream because it saves weeks of data.
  - 3y ago
kfk 3y ago
You are not seeing maybe the numerous consultants and self proclaimed AI experts charging for very dubious solutions. Money is definitely being “stolen”, it’s just a more sophisticated type of stealing. I have yet to see an AI solution that delivers x times the value of simpler rule based models.
- themanmaran 3y ago
  Consultants have always stolen money. Accenture brings in $64 billion a year overcharging for dubious solutions. Marketing terms vary, before it was "big data", now it's "AI".
- mediaman 3y ago
  You don't see value in retrieval augmented generation? It seems like one of the major use cases in knowledge management in larger organizations that is hard to replicate without an LLM. They also seem to work very well for summarizing large amounts of data, for automating the generation of basic legal texts, for extracting key data points from paperwork (invoices, mortgage applications, bank statements, etc). It's useful to separate whether there is a lot of dubious hype (true of any new foundational technology) from whether useful things are being done. Both can be true at the same time. Lots of fraud and stupidity, but also lots of valuable work happening. With crypto, there was none of the latter, other than criminal applications. The internet also attracted lots of hype and poor ROI consulting projects...but here we are.
  - enjo 3y ago
    As an interface layer GPT is amazing. In some industries things still require humans to pick up a phone or send a text to make things happen. I’ve seen very promising results with pure LLM solutions that replace web forms people often never really understand. The ability to provide deep reporting insights from a question is huge. I don’t think AI as a general computing platform or as a replacement for coders is particularly close but there are lots of game changing incremental things LLMs do extremely well today. Something I could never find with crypto.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
klntsky 3y ago
> Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has had their funds stolen or lost using ML products Most of "AI startups" are close to scams, i.e. they are oftentimes just interfaces to proprietary APIs that monetize on impressiveness of LLMs.
- themanmaran 3y ago
  Is this a scam if they still provide value? I get that most apps are a thin wrapper around GPT, but that doesn't mean they're stealing money, just offering a non differentiated product.
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    It’s a scam on the investors. The users might see some value, but the business is worthless.
    - fooker 3y ago
      I’m surprised people don’t see this. There is no moat. Anything even moderately profitable will be implemented in 4 hours by the whales.
      - johnthewise 3y ago
        there doesn't have to be moat to provide some value to some people. These are mostly indie hackers trying to build a nice UI/UX on ai workflows to actually make them usable by general population. Even with retrieval integration of OpenAI, some people will prefer askpdf or likes, or even won't know about openai integration in the first place to consider switching. Or maybe you can build a better UX than openAI since maybe they are too bloated to know what the user actually wants? This point of view is too simplistic, not everything needs to be a billion dollar idea or differentiated. You can make an absolute good living with no moat and good product senses. Even if you get outgunned, you move on to the next opportunity.
    - alexb_ 3y ago
nerdjon 3y ago
Crypto was being adopted by consumers though, there was a boom at one point that it was incredibly common to see bitcoin ATM's or signs that stores would accept bitcoin. I even remember a bitcoin credit card or something that lets you use your bitcoin anywhere. That stuff wouldn't have been done if it wasn't being used. The problem with AI is that it is being shoved into places without any thought of what the benefit actually is or wether or not its actually works. As someone else said, I feel like much of what is coming out of this AI boom is basically a scam. For example I was looking at task management app and I was intrigued by some "AI" powered ones. All it really was, was being able to make a task and it asks chatgpt to generate subtasks. The subtasks it generated were basically useless. No "AI" to help manage my schedule or any other benefits. We are automating the easiest parts of the task with unhelpful content. This is because chatgpt is limited, it doesn't have api hooks into your application so it can't really provide any real benefit. Some of the uses if AI are real and beneficial (like Amazon using AI to summarize reviews). But the vast majority are just shoving AI somewhere it doesn't need to be (or at least chatgpt doesn't need to be since its just a LLM at the end of the day). This bubble is going to burst once people finally realize that ChatGPT is not an "AI" as science fiction has sold us, but it is being used as a general smart AI when its honestly dumb as nails except for certain use cases.
- xenospn 3y ago
  > That stuff wouldn't have been done if it wasn't being used. "VCs have entered the chat"
- Macha 3y ago
  > Crypto was being adopted by consumers though, there was a boom at one point that it was incredibly common to see bitcoin ATM's or signs that stores would accept bitcoin. I even remember a bitcoin credit card or something that lets you use your bitcoin anywhere. That stuff wouldn't have been done if it wasn't being used. The trail of broken crypto startups serve as counter evidence. There were plenty of merchants initially dragged in by the appeal of cutting out at least Visa/Mastercard's cut, and in many cases governments too. And then the consumer adoption wasn't there, and the prices for merchants were also too high, so many ripped them out again.
riku_iki 3y ago
> the tangible value they return. > AI/ML barrier to entry is far simpler and vastly user friendly compared to crypto. crypto was booming as investment vehicle, buying one was trivial, many people received very tangible value.
- ribosometronome 3y ago
  beanie babies were booming as an investment vehicle, buying one was trivial, many people received very tangible value. It'll be interesting when there is more distinction between the two in utility. LLMs already have a fair amount of utility in their relatively early stages and I've certainly seen meaningful adoption of diffusion model generated images to replace stock photo usage.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    > beanie babies were booming as an investment vehicle, buying one was trivial, many people received very tangible value. were volumes and convenience(e.g. liquidity, automation, etc) comparable to crypto? Investments is huge market, it is hard for me to track what are the current volumes of crypto tradings and holdings, but it still can be significant.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has had their funds stolen or lost using ML products. That is true however I'd say that for example the venezuelian and turkish people who managed to scoop Bitcoin (or Ethereum) didn't do too badly: Inflation in Venezuela 2022 and estimate for 2023: 210% and 51% Inflation in Turkey 2022 and estimate for 2023: 70% and 50% These aren't the only countries. I personally know a doctor from Iran who tried semi-recently to convert his savings into Bitcoin (and failed: bank didn't let him). And he basically lost all his savings (inflation and bank defaults: double whammy). From the comfort of countries using strong currencies it's easy to dismiss Bitcoin but there are many countries where shit did hit the fan really hard. Not it's not a panacea: for example many african countries are experiencing ultra high inflation but cannot use Bitcoin because fees are way too high for these people ($6 USD to move Bitcoin today: I just checked). > Compare that to the negative stigma of crypto frauds and stereotypical association to illegal transactions. Seen all the people and exchanges owners busted and going to jail and seen moves like the EU soon de-anonymizing every single wallet out there (as soon as a transaction is made), and seen the public ledger, I don't even know if that bad bad reputation is going to stay for long.
- hocuspocus 3y ago
  This is an incredibly weak argument for cryptocurrencies. I have coworkers with family in Turkey (and Lebanon, Iran, Argentina...): they want USD. They don't care about Bitcoin, they want stablecoins. Most stablecoins are inherently dangerous, because you need to trust sketchy (when not outright criminal) and centralized entities to issue quasi-dollars that can get shut down by the US DoJ at any time. If they don't collapse on their own before that. Venezuela is an exception because a few people manage to mine Bitcoin illegaly, given that electricity is virtually free. Other than that it seems the most practical currencies in Venezuela right now are contraband gasoline sold in Colombia, drugs, kidnapping, prostitution, ...
singleshot_ 3y ago
One other way to look at this is “only people who intentionally invested in crypto lost anything, while creators who were ignorant to or against the idea of ML training set-trawling were injured through no fault of their own.” Of course, this is not quite true because many people were harmed indirectly when criminal theft of their money was facilitated by the low barrier to entry that cryptocurrency presents to the would-be money launderer.
- yunwal 3y ago
  Also when pensions managed by Sequoia took the FTX hit. Also when the augmentation of FDIC coverage happened for SVB, taxpayers covered that. Pretty much impossible to avoid unintentionally contributing to the grifters
SkyMarshal 3y ago
There are many things to criticize crypto for, but at least it will never go all Skynet or paperclip maximizer on us and exterminate the human race. The worst case scenario of one is not like the other.
dylan604 3y ago
>Apples vs. rotten oranges in my opinion! Interesting turn of phrase as rotten apples vs oranges would be much more natural to my ear
nostrademons 3y ago
IMHO they're symbiotic. Generative AI destroys trust; crypto lets you function in a trust-less world. The killer app for generative AI is going to be propaganda. This hasn't entered the discourse yet because nobody wants to advertise that they're running a propaganda mill. I suspect they already exist though - there've been a number of news articles I've read recently where I'm like "I'm pretty sure somebody fed a tweet or police blotter into GPT-4 instead of writing this." This works now because people are accustomed to trusting what they read. Once the channel has been flooded and it becomes cheap to make it look like your views are echoed by 1000 mainstream news media outlets and millions of people online, people will just stop believing everything they read. Similarly once any idiot can have ChatGPT write a college-level term paper, the skill of writing at the college level won't be worth anything. When you can have ChatGPT write a recommendation letter with a 15-second prompt, it ceases to be a useful signal for how much you believe in the person you're recommending. When you have GMail expand your one-sentence e-mail into 4 paragraphs with generative AI and then the recipient summarizes the 4 paragraph e-mail back into one-sentence, maybe you should've just written the one sentence to begin with. The value in blockchain technologies is in unforgeability, scarcity, and forced consensus. In a world where forgery is trivially easy, content is trivially abundant, and nobody believes anybody else, a technology that ensures that mutually-distrusting computer systems all represent the same data gets quite valuable.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Eh, when that one sentence is "fuck you, pay me", I think the paragraphs are a necessity of modern polite society. Maybe some people would be encouraged by the 4 word sentence rather than the 4 paragraph version, but I remain unconvinced.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    Crypto is a more direct way of saying "fuck you, pay me". This is why it's currently less popular (although this will probably turn around when it becomes "fuck yeah, pay me!"), but the no-bullshit transaction going on is that something of value which can't be spoofed is changing hands. The benefit of that is that you're going to think very hard about what you exchange for that. (Well, eventually, once all the idiots have offered up their money for scams.)
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Another major difference between them is that their hype cycles are out of phase by 40 years. The first AI winter was in 1984 and the first crypto winter was in 2014. For an apples:apples comparison we need to compare the AI of today with the cryptocurrencies of 2063, or the cryptocurrencies of today with the AI of 1984.

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.
- kwonkicker 3y ago
  I what way does an average consumer/user get value from crypto?
  - __loam 3y ago
    Crypto is still one of the best ways to do foreign exchange even if the ecosystem is run by morally bankrupt hucksters.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    The ability to transact with people that card processors do not like. The ability to self custody.
    - mminer237 3y ago
      The average person has no need to transact with people that card processors do not like. The most common scenario where that is the case is people "needing" to pay "Microsoft support".
      - jrockway 3y ago
        Yeah. I have to say, I've never needed to give money to someone my bank doesn't want me to give money to. As someone spending money, I don't want guarantees like "this transaction cannot be revoked". I want to revoke transactions sometimes! Thus, crypto is anti-value-add for me. (Some would argue, merchants would charge lower prices if all sales were final. That's probably true! But it would depend on them never making a mistake, and everyone makes mistakes.)
      - charcircuit 3y ago
        Expand card processors to payment processors. There is constantly sites that get unjustly restricted or banned from payment processor like PayPal and Stripe. Even Minecraft, one of the most popular games of all time, had issues with PayPal.
      - atrus 3y ago
        Porn and sexual stuff is always on shaky ground with card processors.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  ChatGPT has something like 40x the weekly users as Bitcoin. There are other AIs and other Bitcoin, but I'm not sure e.g. Bitcoin (or other crypto used by folks) has the penetration to really be average to use. Crypto has a mostly niche use case at this point, exchanging money when it would be illegal, across borders, or in an area with a failing local currency.
  - jejeyyy77 3y ago
    I'm not taking sides, but are we going to ignore the fact that crypto users are probably more valuable in the sense that they are paying users in a way? A chatGPT user could just be someone who popped onto the website and submitted the chat form.
    - npunt 3y ago
      Not to be too cheeky here but paying with what? Cryptocurrencies are mostly hot potatoes everyone is throwing back and forth and occasionally dropping to catastrophic effect, and don't seem to be tied to actual value add. Meanwhile millions of people pay for tools that are now integrating AI to enhance their value add. Free ChatGPT is just a loss leader for API and paid acct and a way to better train the model.
      - jejeyyy77 3y ago
        not really, crypto has value as determined by the markets. Most people who own crypto exchanged dollars for it.
        kubiton 3y ago
        True but in comparison to every other value crypto is the only one which doesn't have any alternative use. Gold, shares etc. I believe the criticism is correct as the current driver of crypto is either a 'i put that much money in I'm not selling until it increases again' or gambled los. After all the miners want to get paid. But hey binance and others struggle let's see if there is a collapse soon
- networkchad 3y ago
  [dead]
- epolanski 3y ago
  The only value I got out of crypto are the suckers that gave me many many thousands of euros for farming ethereum in 2017 with my RX 580s.
- gotimo 3y ago
  most of what average every day people got out of crypto was a whole lot of lost money.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hipadev23 3y ago

GPTs have had immediate tangible benefits without needing to spend an hour preaching or explaining things. Crypto's sole usefulness remains in providing money transfers/liquidity in parts of the world where the local systems are failing or off-limits to the users.

kenjackson 3y ago
Crypto's main value to a LOT of people is purely speculation that you could be rich by buying it cheap and then watching the value explode. No one expected DogeCoin to provide any utility at all, but tons of people bought it.
- nickpp 3y ago
  Countless people play the at the casinos, online poker games, bets - even the stock market is viewed by a lots of people as something of a gamble. Personally I don't partake - but they get a value in it, I guess. Who am I to judge?
  - Yoric 3y ago
    Out of curiosity, does your argument also work for drugs?
    - nickpp 3y ago
      Isn't that pretty much settled already? It seems to me our society is becoming more and more permissive while giving up the previous "war on drugs" failed approach which did an incredible amount of damage.
      - walr000s 3y ago
        It also created and continues to create a lot of cheap labor, which the United States is in short supply of and likely will be for the foreseeable future.
    - 3y ago

epx 3y ago

+1. I have security cameras at home, and my "DVR" is a collection of shell scripts plus a Python script that uses YOLO to find the interesting parts of the footage. The thing works, helps a lot to review daily footage, was damn easy to put to work, and didn't cost me a cent (not even hardware; I run it in a Mini-PC w/o GPU). I knew nothing about ML before writing this script. So yeah, the value is there.

dpcx 3y ago
Any information you'd be willing to share around this would be great! I'm looking to do something similar.
- epx 3y ago
  https://epxx.co/artigos/camera2_en.html https://epxx.co/artigos/camera2_en.html
demondemidi 3y ago
Funny, I built a security camera setup with PoE CCTV cameras, GStreamer and the NVIDIA CUDA element using a Xavier platform. I tried SSDMobileNet and YOLO and found them to be absolutely horrible. The camera that was pointing down at an angle was the worst. Both models would only identify a dog and a person correctly about 15% of the time (missing me or my partner as I walked by and waved), with an actual object detection about 80% of the time even when there was nothing in its ground truths in-frame!! (usually as desks, beds or chairs, i don't recall exactly but it was furniture - and it was pointed at my empty back lot). It had just as many shadow/sunspot/tree failures as Motion. The other camera at eye level did a great job with cars, but not so much with people's side profiles, only head-on. It was laughably bad. And I have no intention of training my own models on my datasets because I don't have time to label. I did this in 2018-2019 so I don't know what the state of the art object detection models are like today, maybe they got their shit together for non-canonical angles. I eventually switched back to full-time recording on a 2 TB HDD and if I need to scan back i can jog the livestream because it saves weeks of data.
- 3y ago

kfk 3y ago

You are not seeing maybe the numerous consultants and self proclaimed AI experts charging for very dubious solutions. Money is definitely being “stolen”, it’s just a more sophisticated type of stealing. I have yet to see an AI solution that delivers x times the value of simpler rule based models.

themanmaran 3y ago
Consultants have always stolen money. Accenture brings in $64 billion a year overcharging for dubious solutions. Marketing terms vary, before it was "big data", now it's "AI".
mediaman 3y ago
You don't see value in retrieval augmented generation? It seems like one of the major use cases in knowledge management in larger organizations that is hard to replicate without an LLM. They also seem to work very well for summarizing large amounts of data, for automating the generation of basic legal texts, for extracting key data points from paperwork (invoices, mortgage applications, bank statements, etc). It's useful to separate whether there is a lot of dubious hype (true of any new foundational technology) from whether useful things are being done. Both can be true at the same time. Lots of fraud and stupidity, but also lots of valuable work happening. With crypto, there was none of the latter, other than criminal applications. The internet also attracted lots of hype and poor ROI consulting projects...but here we are.
- enjo 3y ago
  As an interface layer GPT is amazing. In some industries things still require humans to pick up a phone or send a text to make things happen. I’ve seen very promising results with pure LLM solutions that replace web forms people often never really understand. The ability to provide deep reporting insights from a question is huge. I don’t think AI as a general computing platform or as a replacement for coders is particularly close but there are lots of game changing incremental things LLMs do extremely well today. Something I could never find with crypto.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

klntsky 3y ago

> Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has had their funds stolen or lost using ML products Most of "AI startups" are close to scams, i.e. they are oftentimes just interfaces to proprietary APIs that monetize on impressiveness of LLMs.

themanmaran 3y ago
Is this a scam if they still provide value? I get that most apps are a thin wrapper around GPT, but that doesn't mean they're stealing money, just offering a non differentiated product.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  It’s a scam on the investors. The users might see some value, but the business is worthless.
  - fooker 3y ago
    I’m surprised people don’t see this. There is no moat. Anything even moderately profitable will be implemented in 4 hours by the whales.
    - johnthewise 3y ago
      there doesn't have to be moat to provide some value to some people. These are mostly indie hackers trying to build a nice UI/UX on ai workflows to actually make them usable by general population. Even with retrieval integration of OpenAI, some people will prefer askpdf or likes, or even won't know about openai integration in the first place to consider switching. Or maybe you can build a better UX than openAI since maybe they are too bloated to know what the user actually wants? This point of view is too simplistic, not everything needs to be a billion dollar idea or differentiated. You can make an absolute good living with no moat and good product senses. Even if you get outgunned, you move on to the next opportunity.
  - alexb_ 3y ago

nerdjon 3y ago

Crypto was being adopted by consumers though, there was a boom at one point that it was incredibly common to see bitcoin ATM's or signs that stores would accept bitcoin. I even remember a bitcoin credit card or something that lets you use your bitcoin anywhere. That stuff wouldn't have been done if it wasn't being used. The problem with AI is that it is being shoved into places without any thought of what the benefit actually is or wether or not its actually works. As someone else said, I feel like much of what is coming out of this AI boom is basically a scam. For example I was looking at task management app and I was intrigued by some "AI" powered ones. All it really was, was being able to make a task and it asks chatgpt to generate subtasks. The subtasks it generated were basically useless. No "AI" to help manage my schedule or any other benefits. We are automating the easiest parts of the task with unhelpful content. This is because chatgpt is limited, it doesn't have api hooks into your application so it can't really provide any real benefit. Some of the uses if AI are real and beneficial (like Amazon using AI to summarize reviews). But the vast majority are just shoving AI somewhere it doesn't need to be (or at least chatgpt doesn't need to be since its just a LLM at the end of the day). This bubble is going to burst once people finally realize that ChatGPT is not an "AI" as science fiction has sold us, but it is being used as a general smart AI when its honestly dumb as nails except for certain use cases.

xenospn 3y ago
> That stuff wouldn't have been done if it wasn't being used. "VCs have entered the chat"
Macha 3y ago
> Crypto was being adopted by consumers though, there was a boom at one point that it was incredibly common to see bitcoin ATM's or signs that stores would accept bitcoin. I even remember a bitcoin credit card or something that lets you use your bitcoin anywhere. That stuff wouldn't have been done if it wasn't being used. The trail of broken crypto startups serve as counter evidence. There were plenty of merchants initially dragged in by the appeal of cutting out at least Visa/Mastercard's cut, and in many cases governments too. And then the consumer adoption wasn't there, and the prices for merchants were also too high, so many ripped them out again.

riku_iki 3y ago

> the tangible value they return. > AI/ML barrier to entry is far simpler and vastly user friendly compared to crypto. crypto was booming as investment vehicle, buying one was trivial, many people received very tangible value.

ribosometronome 3y ago
beanie babies were booming as an investment vehicle, buying one was trivial, many people received very tangible value. It'll be interesting when there is more distinction between the two in utility. LLMs already have a fair amount of utility in their relatively early stages and I've certainly seen meaningful adoption of diffusion model generated images to replace stock photo usage.
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > beanie babies were booming as an investment vehicle, buying one was trivial, many people received very tangible value. were volumes and convenience(e.g. liquidity, automation, etc) comparable to crypto? Investments is huge market, it is hard for me to track what are the current volumes of crypto tradings and holdings, but it still can be significant.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has had their funds stolen or lost using ML products. That is true however I'd say that for example the venezuelian and turkish people who managed to scoop Bitcoin (or Ethereum) didn't do too badly: Inflation in Venezuela 2022 and estimate for 2023: 210% and 51% Inflation in Turkey 2022 and estimate for 2023: 70% and 50% These aren't the only countries. I personally know a doctor from Iran who tried semi-recently to convert his savings into Bitcoin (and failed: bank didn't let him). And he basically lost all his savings (inflation and bank defaults: double whammy). From the comfort of countries using strong currencies it's easy to dismiss Bitcoin but there are many countries where shit did hit the fan really hard. Not it's not a panacea: for example many african countries are experiencing ultra high inflation but cannot use Bitcoin because fees are way too high for these people ($6 USD to move Bitcoin today: I just checked). > Compare that to the negative stigma of crypto frauds and stereotypical association to illegal transactions. Seen all the people and exchanges owners busted and going to jail and seen moves like the EU soon de-anonymizing every single wallet out there (as soon as a transaction is made), and seen the public ledger, I don't even know if that bad bad reputation is going to stay for long.

hocuspocus 3y ago
This is an incredibly weak argument for cryptocurrencies. I have coworkers with family in Turkey (and Lebanon, Iran, Argentina...): they want USD. They don't care about Bitcoin, they want stablecoins. Most stablecoins are inherently dangerous, because you need to trust sketchy (when not outright criminal) and centralized entities to issue quasi-dollars that can get shut down by the US DoJ at any time. If they don't collapse on their own before that. Venezuela is an exception because a few people manage to mine Bitcoin illegaly, given that electricity is virtually free. Other than that it seems the most practical currencies in Venezuela right now are contraband gasoline sold in Colombia, drugs, kidnapping, prostitution, ...

singleshot_ 3y ago

One other way to look at this is “only people who intentionally invested in crypto lost anything, while creators who were ignorant to or against the idea of ML training set-trawling were injured through no fault of their own.” Of course, this is not quite true because many people were harmed indirectly when criminal theft of their money was facilitated by the low barrier to entry that cryptocurrency presents to the would-be money launderer.

yunwal 3y ago
Also when pensions managed by Sequoia took the FTX hit. Also when the augmentation of FDIC coverage happened for SVB, taxpayers covered that. Pretty much impossible to avoid unintentionally contributing to the grifters

SkyMarshal 3y ago

There are many things to criticize crypto for, but at least it will never go all Skynet or paperclip maximizer on us and exterminate the human race. The worst case scenario of one is not like the other.

dylan604 3y ago

>Apples vs. rotten oranges in my opinion! Interesting turn of phrase as rotten apples vs oranges would be much more natural to my ear

nostrademons 3y ago

IMHO they're symbiotic. Generative AI destroys trust; crypto lets you function in a trust-less world. The killer app for generative AI is going to be propaganda. This hasn't entered the discourse yet because nobody wants to advertise that they're running a propaganda mill. I suspect they already exist though - there've been a number of news articles I've read recently where I'm like "I'm pretty sure somebody fed a tweet or police blotter into GPT-4 instead of writing this." This works now because people are accustomed to trusting what they read. Once the channel has been flooded and it becomes cheap to make it look like your views are echoed by 1000 mainstream news media outlets and millions of people online, people will just stop believing everything they read. Similarly once any idiot can have ChatGPT write a college-level term paper, the skill of writing at the college level won't be worth anything. When you can have ChatGPT write a recommendation letter with a 15-second prompt, it ceases to be a useful signal for how much you believe in the person you're recommending. When you have GMail expand your one-sentence e-mail into 4 paragraphs with generative AI and then the recipient summarizes the 4 paragraph e-mail back into one-sentence, maybe you should've just written the one sentence to begin with. The value in blockchain technologies is in unforgeability, scarcity, and forced consensus. In a world where forgery is trivially easy, content is trivially abundant, and nobody believes anybody else, a technology that ensures that mutually-distrusting computer systems all represent the same data gets quite valuable.

fragmede 3y ago
Eh, when that one sentence is "fuck you, pay me", I think the paragraphs are a necessity of modern polite society. Maybe some people would be encouraged by the 4 word sentence rather than the 4 paragraph version, but I remain unconvinced.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  Crypto is a more direct way of saying "fuck you, pay me". This is why it's currently less popular (although this will probably turn around when it becomes "fuck yeah, pay me!"), but the no-bullshit transaction going on is that something of value which can't be spoofed is changing hands. The benefit of that is that you're going to think very hard about what you exchange for that. (Well, eventually, once all the idiots have offered up their money for scams.)

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

Another major difference between them is that their hype cycles are out of phase by 40 years. The first AI winter was in 1984 and the first crypto winter was in 2014. For an apples:apples comparison we need to compare the AI of today with the cryptocurrencies of 2063, or the cryptocurrencies of today with the AI of 1984.