233 points

No bubble has deserved to pop as much as AI deserves to

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177 points

Blockchain and crypto were worse. „AI” has some actual use even if it’s way overblown.

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103 points

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.

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36 points

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.

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61 points

Crypto has a legitimate value, you can buy drugs with it.

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19 points

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.

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54 points

I’m glad you didn’t say NFTs because my Bored Ape will regain and triple its value any day now!

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11 points

Bro the GME short squeeze is going to hit any day now. We’re going to be millionaires bro, you just wait

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21 points

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

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14 points

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.

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6 points

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)
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5 points

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.

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10 points

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.

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7 points

As a counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.

Truly the hardest and most weird buy-in of crypto that happened.

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5 points

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.

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48 points

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.

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13 points

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.

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1 point

I mean, block chain does have some actual uses, definitely more niche than LLMs though.

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7 points

the housing bubble.

ai is probably close second though.

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7 points

Maybe real estate?

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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

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-26 points

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).

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30 points

I’m sorry, what about their comment made you think they were asking for reccomendations?

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-7 points
*

The part where they were saying they don’t like the current AIs they know about. Showing disapproval of the trend.

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61 points

Always invest in the spades never the gold mine

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27 points
*

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.

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27 points

That’s why Nvidia is making bank right now

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12 points

And AMD won the console wars

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6 points

AMD won because it has x86 CPUs and GPUs.

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51 points

No shit.

Like all new technologies, there is a time when bunches of companies jump on the band wagon to get in on the action. You can see it all throughout the history of the industrial revolution.

They mostly know that there will come a great weeding out of those that can’t handle the technology or just fail from poor management. But they are betting they will be among the 1% that wins the race and remain to dominate the market.

The rest will just bide their time until the next Big Thing comes along. And the process starts over again.

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66 points
*

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.

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32 points

Crypto is still just as awful as it ever was IMO. Still plenty of assholes gambling investing in crypto.

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3 points

This message has existed for 10 hours and a cryptobro hasn’t commented yet?

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18 points

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.

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10 points

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.

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

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-8 points

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.

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11 points

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.

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7 points

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.

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2 points

Well yeah, it’s easier to steal it if you click on a link you shouldnt.

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6 points

The supply is absolutely more like unlimited lol.

Not enough btc? Make lite coin! Etc etc etc

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-5 points

No one cares about lite coin though which defeats the purpose.

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-3 points

That’s like saying US Dollars are Unlimited because you can always buy Zimbabwe Dollars…

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17 points

It will probably burst, but that does not man that AI will go away completly.

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6 points

Same thing happened to the Dot Com bubble. The fundamental technology has valid uses, but we’re in the stage where some people are convinced it can be used for literally anything.

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2 points

It will burst because no one is going to pay subscription fee for every AI gizmo every app puts in your phone. The way they make any money now is just funneling more and more vc money in exchange of AGI promise (coming soon)

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