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AI Mania: From Tulips to Tokens
- nekusar 2mo agoOr the 1990s Beanie Babies. Or hell, 2 years ago with "those fucking apes", aka NFTs. Or, the Meta-Verse. Yeah, that really took.... Off.
- jiggawatts 2mo agoTulips, NFTs, and the Metaverse all revolved around exclusivity and collectibles. Art with no real utilitarian value. I pay OpenAI $100/mo, twice what I pay for my mobile phone service. It’s a useful service that I use every day. I have never even heard of anyone in my social circle expressing even a mild interest in tulips, NFTs, or the metaverse. This bubble has much more in common with the rail road boom and the 2000 fibre build out bubble.
- gcgbarbosa 2mo agoHow did metaverse revolved around exclusivity or collectibles?
- simonjgreen 2mo agothe metaverse went from being about owning your identity and digital possessions to mostly being about buying jpegs. once collectibles and nft speculation became the headline, it was hard to explain why any of the underlying technology mattered. after that, most people just associated the whole thing with speculation rather than the original vision. which is a shame, I still feel like VR is full of untapped potential
- m4rtink 2mo agoYeah - they not just VRChat but many other VR projects are alive and very active, doing verz innovative and almost marvelous things most people don't know anything about. It might not be a mainstream thing any time soon or ever, but that is not necessary as long as the people invovled woth VR are having fun. :)
- jiggawatts 2mo agoA big part of the metaverse was "buying land" in exclusive locations, a similar concept to NFTs or crypto in general.
- GolfPopper 2mo agoYou start with "real utilitarian value" and your example is... how much you pay for it. That sounds more like a drug habit.
- chung8123 2mo agoHow much you spend on something does have an indication on what the utility is for you. Though people spent on all the other hype things so at the time those things also had some utility for that user.
- quietbritishjim 2mo agoI think their point is that is pretty cheap for such a useful service. The opposite of a bubble price.
- EA-3167 2mo agoQuite a few of the usual suspects are involved in Crypto, NFT’s, “Metaverse”, and now AI. You’d think people would figure it out, but there’s the old Upton Sinclair quote I guess.
- smokel 2mo agoThis is a pretty confusing article. It seems to string together some loosely related facts to make the current AI boom look bad.
- simonjgreen 2mo agoIt is confusing. But I enjoyed the read, it’s refreshing to read a string of rants from a human rather than something perfectly polished by Opus.
- andy99 2mo agoI didn’t read it, primarily because of the tulip thing in the title which seems anything but a refreshing take.
- c-fe 2mo agoI also enjoyed it. Something about the writing really made me enjoy it, it was so different from the llm text i read all day long
- cadamsdotcom 2mo agoCan you point me to where to read things perfectly polished by Opus? I'll give them to Opus to show it how not to suck at writing.
- bjourne 2mo agoAgreed. It has nothing to do with either tulips nor mania. Just some random musings.
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- blfr 2mo agoWe created the content their systems are built on, yet they won’t even share how much energy each query uses, how much water goes to cooling "You read my blog so now show me your utility bill" is... an interesting argument.
- simonjgreen 2mo ago“You ingested the vast majority of available human knowledge to build your product, and intend to change the entire world with it, and in fact are doing so incredibly rapidly at a rate that dodges scrutiny. Could we know more?” Would be the expanded version I guess
- jayd16 2mo agoTake advantage of open information, provide little yourself. Seems like a consistent enough line of questioning.
- andy99 2mo agoThe OPs framing is better. Where does anyone say there’s a requirement to share data as demanded because you used a publicly available resource. These companies have created something world changing that everyone uses now, that you can get for free or for a very small amount of money. They certainly don’t need to indulge anyone’s nosing or whatever this is, the argument is ridiculous.
- watwut 2mo agoThey literally created the situation where we are forced to use it, whether we want or not. It is pushed on us along with slop. And our work is changing from interesting to slop review. They intend to create monopoly and abuse it to extract maximum money from us. They talk about how they will make all of us obsolete and literally brag about harms they will do to us. They throw middle finger on artists, mock them, call them obsolete and cant even perform. They destroy environment and dont care. They help paladin, they help to bomb schools. And they act like we should be thankful for being target of hype, doom trolling, environmental harm, insults and arrogance. They deserve all the scrutiny and questioning.
- turtleyacht 2mo agoAren't human skills the tulips? That's why we're recording all kinds of movements; tokens become generic execution currency.
- dgellow 2mo agoNo, AI tokens aren’t generic, they by definition cannot be used as a currency because they aren’t fungible. Generated tokens have completely different value depending on their meaning. You can spend 1M tokens doing nothing but wasting time and energy, then spend 100K tokens that bring a lot of value. It’s even weirder because we don’t have a way to know the ROI of tokens in advance
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- dools 2mo agoI don't understand how you could compare crypto, which has no utility and no fair value, with AI which is used by hundreds of millions of people every day to achieve real outcomes.
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- bigstrat2003 2mo agoCrypto bros claim that crypto is super useful, revolutionary tech too. The proof is in the pudding, and AI has yet to show any real utility.
- dools 2mo ago> and AI has yet to show any real utility Ummm ... have you not tried using LLMs for coding work?
- VorpalWay 2mo agoNot OP, but I have, and I'm not impressed. Perhaps it would be good if you are doing things in the training data (like churning out yet another bland website). But if you are doing things that are not well represented in publicly available code, or in unusual languages, then LLMs are not great currently. They are great for finding the right ffmpg command line arguments though, and not having to deal with that mess must count for something.
- cyfex 2mo ago"GPU compute powering crypto for the last decade..." I keep hearing this lately. Also, that GPU compute has been re-purposed from crypto to AI. I had the impression that crypto was powered by ASICs for the last... many years. And that was why GPU mining (let alone CPU mining) was not profitable
- decimalenough 2mo agoBitcoin mining is powered by ASICs. Random shitcoins are not.
- reverius42 2mo agoRandom shitcoin mining surely isn't a large fraction of industrial GPU usage?
- decimalenough 2mo agoNot anymore, but around 10 years ago it absolutely was, because for a short period you could literally print money with them.
- reverius42 2mo agoAh, but any 10 year old GPU now is e-waste, not useful LLM hardware. So it might as well have been mining ASICs.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cryptocurrencies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cryptocurrencies Major cryptocurrencies are based on Proof of Work or Proof of Stake. There are other consensus algorithms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt#Introduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt#Introduction scrypt has been introduced to stave off ASIC and FPGA solutions.
- latchkey 2mo agoGPUs were used primarily for ethereum and to a lesser extent, other shitcoins. ETH switched to PoS in Sept 2022 and 18+ million GPUs were turned off almost over night. Nothing else has the liquidity to sustain a large operation any longer. ASIC's are used for bitcoin and a few smaller shitcoins, GPUs hadn't been used for bitcoin in many years. GPUs used for mining don't translate well to AI at any large scale. It is all newly created (modern) hardware. Some miners who ran GPUs (and ASICs) have transitioned to running AI compute (CoreWeave, IREN, NScale, myself...), but that's not the same thing as taking the hardware and using it for AI. It is new hardware. CPUs for mining crypto are a niche edgecase with very little liquidity and generally a bad idea, since it just incentivizes botnets.
- botencat 2mo agoDoes this article being unreadable prove that it was at least written by a human? Frustrating tradeoff.
- nadermx 2mo agoNot the solution you where hoping AI to solve?
- arisAlexis 2mo agoIn the meantime tulips prove math theorems that humans couldn't solve. Ridiculous article title (I wouldn't read it)
- gyanchawdhary 2mo agothis article reminds me of Greta for some reason .. wonder what she's upto these days ?