No bubble has deserved to pop as much as AI deserves to
Blockchain and crypto were worse. „AI” has some actual use even if it’s way overblown.
Creating a specialized neural net to perform a specific function is cool. Slapping GPT into customer support because you like money is horse shit and I hope your company collapses. But yeah you’re right. Blockchain was a solution with basically no problems to fix. Neural nets are a tool that can do a ton of things, but everyone is content to use them as a hammer.
Yes! “AI” defined as only LLMs and the party trick applications is a bubble. AI in general has been around for decades and will only continue to grow.
Crypto has a legitimate value, you can buy drugs with it.
Honestly kinda miss when the drugs I did were illegal. I used to buy weed from this online seller that was really into designer drugs. The amount of time I used to spend on Erowid just to figure out wtf I was about to take.
I’m glad you didn’t say NFTs because my Bored Ape will regain and triple its value any day now!
Bro the GME short squeeze is going to hit any day now. We’re going to be millionaires bro, you just wait
Die almond hands, bro! We’re all gonna make it, bro!!! Trust the code, bro!!!
I’m not even understanding what AI is at this point because there’s no delineation between moderately sophisticated algorithms and things that are orders of magnitude more complex.
I mean, if something like multisampling came out today we’d all know how it’d be marketed
AI is a ridiculous broad term these days. Everybody had been slapping the label on anything. It’s kinda like saying “transportation” and it means anything between babies crawling up to wrap drive and teleportation.
Because most of them are AI
It’s just once AI becomes useful (and not magical), we tend to stop calling it AI unless AI gets more VC money.
It’s called the AI effect
Technically speaking how I differentiate it is:
- clever algorithm is a good heuristic
- statistics on steroids is machine learning
- using a transformer model is AI (for now)
The AI buzzword means machine learning. You give it a massive dataset and it identifies correlations.
Regular hand-coded AI is mostly simple state machines.
Yes. But companies bought into AI way more than they bought into crypto though, in many outlandish and stupid ways. And many AI companies sell it in ways they shouldn’t.
As a counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.
Truly the hardest and most weird buy-in of crypto that happened.
Oh yeah. Kodak too. Gamestop, right? There were a bunch of others.
Blockchain has many valuable uses. A distributed zero trust ledger is useful. Sadly the finance scammers and the digital beanie baby collectors attracted all the marketing money.
And yet, every single company that has ever tried to implement a distributed zero trust ledger into their products and processes has inevitably ditched the idea after releasing that it does not, in fact, provide any useful benefit.
It is exceptionally useful for the auditing of damn near everything in digital space, as long as shared resources and 3rd parties have access to the blockchain … which is probably the major reason corporations and politicians don’t want anything to do with it.
It’d be a lot harder to hide crimes, fraud, grey business dealings, bribery and illegal donations, sanction violations, secret police slush funds, etc, etc if every event in the entire financial system and supply chain was logged and cryptographically verifiable.
EDIT: NOTE I’m not talking about everyones transactions being in a public ledger (bad). Only enhancing the current system between businesses and orgs so it’s exceptionally difficult for any of them to falsify data without the others knowing, as well as having near instant visibility and analytics of the entire market (great for regulators, academics, etc).
A supply-chain wide blockchain could enable individuals to view every raw material that went into every product they consume, down to the location, date — even the exact time in many cases — each was mined, refined, harvested, transported, picked, traded, etc. in a way that no individual corp could hide or falsify dramatically. Each corp and individuals true (embodied energy consumption would be visible to every buyer; developed world politicians and corporations couldn’t simply blame China and other developing countries for their own consumption.
The reason major businesses haven’t bothered using distributed blockchains for auditing is because they fundamentally do not actually help in any way with auditing.
At the end of the day, the blockchain is just a ledger. At some point a person has to enter the information into that ledger.
Now, hear me out here, because this is going to be some totally out there craziness that is going to blow your mind… What happens if that person lies?
Like, you’ve built your huge, complicated system to track every banana you buy from the farm to the grocery store… But what happens if the shipper just sends you a different crate of bananas with the wrong label on them? How does your system solve that? What happens if the company growing your bananas claims to use only ethical practices but in reality their workers are effectively slaves? How does a blockchain help fix that?
The data in a system is only as good as your ability to verify it. Verifying the integrity of the data within systems was largely a solved problem long before distributed blockchains came along, and was rarely if ever the primary avenue for fraud. It’s the human components of these systems where fraud can most easily occur. And distributed blockchains do absolutely nothing to solve that.
Counterpoint, having a currency where every token is tied into its own transaction history might be unpopular with large businesses for other reasons. Like maybe they don’t want to be that transparent or accountable. The FBI have made public statements about how much easier it is to track criminals who used Crypto.
Your opinion seems to contradict reality.
This is a very poorly considered argument. Even if we suppose that everything you’ve said is true, the existence of a second plausible explanation doesn’t invalidate the first. You’ve not actually offered any reason why any of what I said is wrong, you just said “X is possible, therefore Y cannot be true.”
Also, I want to note that this particular digression wasn’t about cryptocurrency at all. The point I was responding to was a claim that blockchains had uses other than as currencies. So you really might want to step back a bit and consider what you think is being discussed here, and what you’re actually trying to say.
The idea has merit, in theory – but in practice, in the vast majority of cases, having a trusted regulator managing the system, who can proactively step in to block or unwind suspicious activity, turns out to be vastly preferable to the “code is law” status quo of most blockchain implementations. Not to mention most potential applications really need a mechanism for transactions to clear in seconds, rather than minutes to days, and it’d be preferable if they didn’t need to boil the oceans dry in the process of doing so.
If I was really reaching, I could maybe imagine a valid use case for say, a hypothetical, federated open source game that needed to have a trusted way for every node to validate the creation and trading of loot and items, that could serve as a layer of protection against cheating nodes duping items, for instance. But that’s insanely niche, and for nearly every other use case a database held by a trusted entity is faster, simpler, safer, more efficient, and easier to manage.
Your second point of trading loot and items got me thinking about my Steam CS:GO skins. Why should I trust a centralized entity like Steam who could at any moment decide to delete all my skins or remove my account for whatever reason with my skins, vs storing those skins in a wallet on a public blockchain for example to keep it’s value and always allow trading? Ofc there will always be a “centralized” smart contract but at least they can’t make changes to it if the smart contract code is audited ,
In that case (as is the case with most games) the near-worst case scenario is that you are no worse off trusting Valve with the management of item data than you would be if it was in a public block chain. Why? Because those items are valueless outside the context of the commercial game they are used in. If Valve shuts down CS:GO tomorrow, owning your skins as a digital asset on a blockchain wouldn’t give you any more protection than the current status quo, because those skins are entirely dependent on the game itself to be used and viewed – it’d be akin to holding stock certificates for a company that’s already gone bankrupt and been liquidated: you have a token proving ownership of something that doesn’t exist anymore.
Sure, there’s the edge case that if your Steam account got nukes from orbit by Gaben himself along with all its purchase and trading history you could still cash out on your skin collection, Conversely, having Valve – which, early VAC-ban wonkiness notwithstanding, has proven itself to be a generally-trustworthy operator of a digital games storefront for a couple decades now – hold the master database means that if your account got hacked and your stuff shifted off the account to others for profit, it’s much easier for Valve support to simply unwind those transactions and return your items to you. Infamously, in the case of blockchain ledgers, reversing a fraudulent transaction often requires forking the blockchain.
I mean, block chain does have some actual uses, definitely more niche than LLMs though.
Maybe real estate?
the housing bubble.
ai is probably close second though.
I think all the crypto scams, all the shitcoins, NFTs and other blockchain bullshit were much worse. At least AI companies usually don’t require you to give them large sums of money, they’re only after your data and absolutely fuck the environment by wasting absurd amounts of power, but they don’t try to take away your life savings
Try Venice Ai, free to use, won’t try to censor your topics. Still just a chat bot though (although I think it does image generation too).
I’m sorry, what about their comment made you think they were asking for reccomendations?
The part where they were saying they don’t like the current AIs they know about. Showing disapproval of the trend.
Censoring topics is the least of the issues with the AI bubble.
No it’s a huge one, because it’s the most likely application of AI, AI site moderation will be the start of AI digital policing a field which risks growing larger and larger until it manifests as actual legal policing.
As a major locally-hosted AI proponent, aka a kind of AI fan, absolutely. I’d wager it’s even worse than crypto, and I hate crypto.
What I’m kinda hoping happens is that bitnet takes off in the next few months/years, and that running a very smart model on a phone or desktop takes milliwatts… Who’s gonna buy into Sam Altman $7 trillion cloud scheme to burn the Earth when anyone can run models offline on their phones, instead of hitting APIs running on multi-kilowatt servers?
And ironically it may be a Chinese company like Alibaba that pops the bubble, lol.
If bitnet takes off, that’s very good news for everyone.
The problem isn’t AI, it’s AI that’s so intensive to host that only corporations with big datacenters can do it.
The fuck is bitnet
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/bitnet-scaling-1-bit-transformers-for-large-language-models/ use 1 bit instead of 8 or 16, yay performance gainz
So will the return of the flag conclude the adventures of ressource usage in computers?
What star said, but what it also does is turn hard matrix multiplication into simple addition.
Basically, AI will be hilariously easy to run compared to now once ASICs start coming out, thought it will run on CPUs/GPUs just fine.
I am old enough to remember when the CEO of Nortel Networks got crucified by Wall Street for saying in a press conference that the telecom/internet/carrier boom was a bubble, and the fundamentals weren’t there (who is going to pay for long distance anymore when calls are free over the internet? where are the carriers-- Nortel’s customers-- going to get their income from?). And 4 years later Nortel ceased to exist. Cisco crashed too, though had enough TCP/IP router biz and enterprise sales to keep them alive even until today.
This all reminds me of the late 1990s internet bubble rather than the more recent crypto bubble. We’ll all still be using ML models for all kinds of things more or less forever from now on, but it won’t be this idiotic hype cycle and overvaluation anymore after the crash.
Shit, crypto isn’t going anywhere either, it’s a permanent fixture now, Wall Street bought into it and you can buy crypto ETFs from your stockbroker. We just don’t have to listen to hype about it anymore.
Crypto is still just as awful as it ever was IMO. Still plenty of assholes
gamblinginvesting in crypto.This message has existed for 10 hours and a cryptobro hasn’t commented yet?
Well put.
Soon, it won’t be this idiotic hype cycle, but it’ll be some other idiotic hype cycle. Short term investors love hype cycles.
We just don’t have to listen to the hype about it anymore.
True, it’s now in most circles just been mixed in as a commodity to trade on. Though I wish everyone would get that. There’s still plenty of idiots with .eth usernames who think there’s some new boon to be made. The only “apps” built on crypto networks were and are purely for trading crypto, I’ve never seen any real tangible benefit to society come out of it. It’s still used plenty for money laundering, but regulators are (slowly) catching up. And it’s still by far the easiest way to demonstrate what happens to unregulated markets.
Crypto has been turned into gold by wallstreet, they bought up enough of it to jot be completely exposed, it’s supply is extremely limited and will run out. Putting your money into it is no different than putting it into gold, you might catch a good moment and buy in low and get some return, but most wont.
Putting your money into it is no different than putting it into gold
Sorry kiddo, putting your money into crypto is very, very different to putting it into gold.
Once the apocalypse comes, you can at least use a gold brick to brain the zombies, whereas your crypto will vanish along with the Internet and electrical grid.
Well yeah, it’s easier to steal it if you click on a link you shouldnt.
The supply is absolutely more like unlimited lol.
Not enough btc? Make lite coin! Etc etc etc
That’s like saying US Dollars are Unlimited because you can always buy Zimbabwe Dollars…
Good metaphor.
No one cares about lite coin though which defeats the purpose.
Etherium bla bla bla there are tons of them thousands. There us no shortage lol.
Silver, bronze etc, are you being dense on purpose? Though your seeming affinity for crypto implies you are simply dense.
Lol touch grass cryptobro.
I think you are the cryptobro, how the fuck is likening crypto to a known stupid investment like gold make me a crypto bro you absolute muffin.
Always invest in the spades never the gold mine
I went to a AI conference and you can just sense how bogus it all feels. Like “Our patent pending AI system references billions of crowd-sourced data points to identify what you are craving for breakfast! Never think about breakfast again!”
And as a engineer speaking with other engineers, we all collectively shrug and just keep taking the money. I’ll AI your toaster for enough money IDGAF.