[HN Gopher] The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble
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The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble
Author : jrepinc
Score : 20 points
Date : 2023-06-11 21:17 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (doctorow.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (doctorow.medium.com)
| jstx1 wrote:
| It isn't. There's a fundamental difference between hype around
| something useful and hype around something that isn't useful.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Right. The blockchain at least has semi-novel ideas around
| hashing and distributed trust, AI is just spitting out the same
| words we've seen for years!
|
| I'm not a crypto or AI advocate, but it's easy to see how
| "technology with overestimated social consequences" could get
| tiring for everyone who isn't an investor. The "fundamental
| difference" between cryptocurrency and AI is that one is built
| on reproducible and accountable logging and the other is
| guesswork. Trying to champion one or the other feels like
| pointless virtue signalling really.
|
| I also have to admit I really don't like Cory Doctorow's other
| works (I especially despise the reductive theory of
| "enshittification") but his thesis is 100% the truth. People
| need new buzzwords to cling to, and AI is the one with the most
| popular demo. The usefulness is an accessory to the marketing
| and positioning of AI-powered products.
| jstx1 wrote:
| > Trying to champion one or the other feels like pointless
| virtue signalling really.
|
| No, I mean something very specific - I can do things at work
| with LLMs that I couldn't do a year ago without them. I can't
| say the same about anything crypto related.
|
| If you think that AI is just spitting our word we've seen or
| that it's guesswork, I don't know how you can even discuss it
| in good faith.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Overall, I agree - the progress of AI has been breakneck
| over the past 12 months. But the difference in quality of
| Talk-to-Transformer and GPT-4 hasn't been _that_ much in my
| experience. Both produce seemingly-correct text that
| crumbles under scrutiny and becomes useless for anything
| with a sub-80% acceptable failure rate.
|
| It's great stuff, and I'd be lying if I said I liked
| cryptocurrency and don't use AI. The parallels are starkly
| visible though, and the "overpromise/underdeliver" cycle is
| already _much_ further along than cryptocurrency ever got.
| The bubble will eventually pop because people are
| dissatisfied with the pace of progress, and then everyone
| will look for a scapegoat. We 're already halfway there,
| judging by the daily deluge of "Ask HN: Why Does It Feel
| Like OpenAI Nerfed ChatGPT?" posts.
| mxkopy wrote:
| To most people the main use of crypto is to make money go up.
| This is a dubious use case.
|
| To most people the main use of AI is:
|
| Code suggestions
|
| Code analysis
|
| Document summarization
|
| Document creation
|
| Clipart generation
|
| Audio transcription
|
| Audio synthesis
|
| Realistic chat bots
|
| ...
|
| These are not dubious use cases.
|
| The number of people who have been defrauded by crypto number
| in the millions. The number of people who have been defrauded
| by AI are zero.
|
| Even if AI is wrong 90% of the time, 10% of the time it makes
| someone's job easier. Making someone's job easier is
| objectively more valuable than making someone's bank account
| number go up. One adds wealth to society. The other
| redistributes existing wealth.
|
| I can go on about the differences but I'll let you tell me
| about how Ethereum has a really good logging system first.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| > The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are
| zero.
|
| Not true. I'm seeing fake voice scam stories on the news
| lately, fake kidnapping claims, etc
| breakyerself wrote:
| Also AI voice and image recognition and language
| translation are already ubiquitous.
| smoldesu wrote:
| You're not refuting the point, though. Both technologies
| provide utility that is not all-encompassing. People
| promote it as a panacea, and investors get angry when their
| investments aren't reciprocated. That's a hype bubble, and
| AI perfectly aligns with all of it's criteria.
|
| > The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are
| zero.
|
| What's the number of people who have been murdered by AI?
| It's a much more dubious figure, but a larger one to be
| sure. If you want to move the goalpost to which one is
| _more harmful_ , I still think you hamstring your attack on
| cryptocurrency.
| mxkopy wrote:
| > You're not refuting the point, though.
|
| Why do people keep saying their opinions as if they are
| fact? Whether or not I refuted your point is independent
| from your assertions of such.
|
| > Both technologies provide utility that is not all-
| encompassing.
|
| No. Crypto provides _no_ utility. At all. AI provides _a
| lot_ of utility, _some_ of the time.
|
| And you know what, you're wrong. AI _is_ a panacea. It 's
| called _general purpose_ transformer ffs. And not by
| marketers, but by actual engineers who developed the
| Transformer architecture. (Obviously I 'm being a little
| facetious but AI is infinitely more of a cure-all than
| crypto)
|
| > What's the number of people who have been murdered by
| AI?
|
| The second most common use case of crypto is for
| anonymous transactions for illegal drugs and weapons. So
| that's all I'm going to say on that point.
| rvz wrote:
| Whilst one has an efficient greener method of achieving
| consensus which one blockchain (Ethereum) switched from the
| wasteful proof-of-work to the greener proof-of-stake making
| that possible.
|
| On the another hand after years of deep learning, there is
| still no viable efficient methods of training, fine tuning or
| inference without needing more data centers as the data and the
| AI model scales and its hype is currently contributing to the
| increased wastage of water and resources all for the sake of
| incinerating the planet to produce broken and hallucinating
| black-box AI models.
|
| Being 'useful' isn't an excuse for not finding greener
| efficient alternatives that significantly lower emissions
| rather than continuing to burn the planet over the new 'hype'.
| BinRoo wrote:
| Over-hyped at times? Yes.
|
| A bursting bubble? Not in my opinion. I'm already able to capture
| value in ways that were thought too difficult just 6 months ago.
| That's not vaporware.
| graypegg wrote:
| I do think "AI" is a hype-bubble, but machine learning and
| specifically the sort of LLMs we're seeing now are definitively
| not a hype-bubble.
|
| We don't really need general AI, nor are we going to be able to
| make a true flawless general AI anytime soon. AI was always a
| really vague marketing term, and can be applied to anything for
| instant relevancy boost. Bubble territory.
|
| The LLMs we have now are extremely effective though. There's real
| use case here for automating writing, and some menial tasks that
| human beings were unfairly burdened with, but we're impossible to
| automate till now.
|
| That'll stick around. (Considering that ML concepts have been
| around for decades, you could even say they already have!)
| jstx1 wrote:
| > I do think "AI" is a hype-bubble, but machine learning and
| specifically the sort of LLMs we're seeing now are definitively
| not a hype-bubble.
|
| There isn't any kind of distinction - when people say AI in
| 2023 they mean ML, LLMs, image models etc.
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