AI can make porn. It’s not going anywhere.
I have to say, the technology behind cryptocurrencies is brilliant, but unfortunately, it got misused and got ironically centralised.
NFTs are stupid.
Now with hype train dying, we could see some real use of AI.
You see, no one actually wants a digital currency. There have been several (nano was my favorite) that functioned especially well as a currency, because it used very little compute power to perform or verify transactions.
But a currency is stable. Which means you don’t magically make money by holding or trading it. So it doesn’t get attention, and therefore doesn’t get widely adopted.
Everyone likes Bitcoin because it’s speculative digital gold.
There are plenty of people who want a digital equivalent to cash from a privacy perspective.
Crypto is the exact opposite of private. You literally share all your transactions with everyone.
Name one stable currency. All currency fluctuates (Forex trading). But yes, crypto is very volatile comparatively
nano was my favorite
Hello, fellow Nanite!
I recently tried Nano-GPT and had a very good experience (see https://feddit.org/post/3081522/2172497), so there is at least some real-world usage – it’s cool and kind of impressive technology, though spam during certain periods was always an issue and I don’t know how resilient the network is currently.
NFTs of art was really not supposed to be anything more than a proof of concept. I think the original purpose of NFTs was to be able to have an NFT representing title to land or something that you could then barter or sell on the blockchain.
NFTs were created in a code jam and had no intents to become title transfer tools.
It was and always be limited by the amount of data the NFT can contain. They went with URLs because they are small enough to fit. An actual land deed title document? Too big to fit into an NFT. Simply not enough bytes to go around.
This was the strict limitation from the very beginning. The only thing an NFT actually verifies “ownership” of is a URL.
While the NFT can’t contain the entire title document, it can contain the hash of the title document, and then the title document is simply recorded elsewhere on-chain.
Nfts legitimately confuse me.
“Why can’t you put the whole image in an nft?”
“It’s too big”
“Why is it too big?”
“It’d take too long to generate.”
“Okay, but why?”
“Because nfts can’t hold that much information.”
“Okay, but why?”
“Because it’d take too long to generate.”
“Okay, but why would it take too long to generate???”
“Fuck you, stop wasting my time.”
“Oooookay. I really don’t understand but okay, fuck you too I guess.”
Does anyone know why nfts are so small? Everything I’ve read says that they’re fucking tiny, but nothing explains why they can’t be larger, why being larger would be too slow, and so on. They honestly seem like a decent answer to the digital ownership problem of “I want to resell this game like I could 20yrs ago but I can’t because it didn’t come on a disc”, however I get sent in a circle whenever I try to figure out what makes nfts so unwieldy and impractical.
(Not that I think anyone should be able to own a digital good; I pay for digital things because I want to support people, not because I think digital ownership is a legitimate concept. Imo, because digital things can be copied as many times as you want, you can’t truly own a digital item, and nor should anyone be allowed to try and revoke said item unless said item is illegal for other reasons. However… As long as we live in a capitalist society hell-bent on applying the concept of ownership to a system that’s only limited by your hardware, I think people should have the ability to actually “own” their digital goods (in a traditional sense), which includes things like the right to not have a company take them away whenever it feels like it and the ability to sell digital goods like an IRL market.)
What’s actually going to kill LLMs is when the sweet VC money runs out and the vendors have to start charging what it actually costs to run.
You can run it on your own machine. It won’t work on a phone right now, but I guarantee chip manufacturers are working on a custom SOC right now which will be able to run a rudimentary local model.
Both apple and Google have integrated machine learning optimisations, specifically for running ML algorithms, into their processors.
As long as you have something optimized to run the model, it will work fairly well.
They don’t want to have independent ML chips, they want it baked into every processor.
This isn’t the case. Midjourney doesn’t receive any VC money since it has no investors and this ignores genned imagery made locally off your own rig.
NFTs and crypto were dubious as to the value they provided
LLMs on the other hand provide very tangible, immediate value to a large number of people
Also they allow companies to save a ton of money on support at the expense of the user experience so of course it’s here to stay
It’s still overhyped and being shoved into every app, service and system that exists whether it adds value or not.
Its definitely not going away, there’s some real value to LLM/AI (much more than crypto anyway) but make no mistake there’s going to be a significant correction where the bubble bursts and AI becomes right sized.
When the microwave first hit mass adoption there was an enormous amount of microwave meals, cookbooks, and recipes that tried to use it for everything imaginable. Eventually the hype settled down and now for most people the microwave isn’t the primary or at least sole means of cooking.
But the microwave is still a great way to make a quick baked potato.
I’d argue that people got way too excited about what NFTs offer. Being able to own/transfer a digital item with a standardized interface is interesting technically (and has real value, for example ENS names), but holy hell did people go all Beanie Baby on them…
That’s not arguing with my point though, people definitely did get excited about perceived value, but it didn’t really benefit most people in any way because it was only a promise, not an actual thing
LLMs and other generational AI produce something that immediately has value
If I ask chatgpt to write me a python function I now have a python function I can use, if I ask it to explain something and then attempt to apply that knowledge I’ve learned something useful
If I bought an nft the value of that nft would only be what people decide it is worth
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t intending to argue against your main point. For the most part, I agree with you.
What I don’t agree with is that the value of NFTs (as a technology) is dubious. Instead I think it’s overstated.
In the same vein as “LLMs can write Python”, NFTs provide ownership information. Regardless of what some asshat pays for a picture of a monkey, the underlying technology still has merit.
Is it really saving the cost? considering it increased 14 times compared to last year based on the article above.
It said cost worries have risen not costs themselves, it was in the same paragraph about concerns with response accuracy, I imagine that’s just a survey
In reality both cost and reliability have improved massively since ai took off like this, requests cost a fraction of a penny each and provided you prompt it right gpt 4o gets it right 90% of the time for me
as dubious as the value they provided
Go look at bitcoin and tell me the value dubious. Here I’ll help: https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/BTC-USD click the 5y view at the bottom.
Yes crypto is full of scam coins, but scammers permeate everything, should we give up on email too for the same reasons? Saying crypto in general is a scam is just ignorant.
XMR as well provides key privacy protections, etc.
When I say dubious I mean it’s not tangible, there’s no guarantee of its value.
If I have chatgpt write me a block of code that block of code is inherently and immediately useful to me
If I buy a bitcoin it will probably eventually increase in value but I can’t do anything with it, and there’s no guarantee it won’t be immediately worthless the next day
I guess by the same logic you could say the code might be immediately worthless if there’s a solar flare that wipes out all technology on earth but you get my point I’m sure
They are not, managers only think it is saving them money. All the same current llms are a grift that have no plausible value statement outside of scam markets. Even then the price of their use is both massively subsidized and scales at best exponentially with performance. This cannot last forever.
I hope this is the case, but I don’t really think so. I got a call Thursday from a friend and he told me he and his whole department were losing their jobs. He was pretty upset about it. Apparently management decided they could be replaced with AI.
He and his team manage a medium sized in-house developed management application. It’s a combination of stock management, product management and sales tools. Because the products their company sells are pretty unique, they never found a good off the shelf application to do everything they wanted. So they developed their own and connected it to the off the shelf applications they have for ERP and CRM. Pretty slick and his team and him are praised across the company.
Apparently the IT manager had gotten a very impressive demo for Microsoft Power BI with AI integration. Using AI tools to realtime develop an application. He was so impressed he decided they were going to fire the in-house team and have an external company use the AI to develop a replacement tool. The external company said they could use very cheap people as the AI would do basically all the work. And it would be done before the notice on the current team ran out (2 months).
He called me kinda in shock about the whole thing. Like that’s not realistic right? That’s not something Power BI can do? With or without AI? And even with AI it can’t do that on such short notice? I told him he was right, that’s not how anything works and the IT manager got duped. Either way, they are out on their ass. Now they are very skilled people and will probably find new jobs right away, but it still sucks ass. AI sucks!
I recall the AI insights feature years ago being a mess, flagged patterns across dimensions, unrelated trends etc, useless noise to slog through, if not outright dangerous if people just assume everything is actionable, maybe it’s gotten better but it’s going to rely heavily on data quality, good governance, the model itself.
Straight up, this is not a good use case for Power BI, tabular is really good at aggregates and analytics, I’d not use it for management like this, especially if there’s already an existing application, as an enhancement though yeah go ahead, but not a full on replacement.
I’d be willing to bet this won’t be done in 2 months and certainly not to budget, to do properly you need to understand business context, data model etc. I’m guaranteeing this is going to be sludge with half-baked power apps, people will complain about the change. Shit the change management for end users will take more than 2 months, took us years to get people to switch off of a barely maintained shift summary report to a Power BI version and that actually was a good use of the tool.
This project gives me nightmares and I’m not even working on it.
