[HN Gopher] Is AI the Next Crypto? Insights from 2M HN Comments
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Is AI the Next Crypto? Insights from 2M HN Comments
Author : kcorbitt
Score : 130 points
Date : 2023-11-08 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openpipe.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (openpipe.ai)
| brrrrrm wrote:
| Genuine question: have macro trends ever, in the history of
| humanity, been consistently and correctly analyzed by fine-
| grained time series data?
|
| I was always a bit sketched out by the macro economics classes I
| took in college.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Time series analysis is epistemologically bunk anyway. You're
| telling me that in more than 100 years of study that arima or
| variants are still the best models? Hogwash. Next you'll tell
| me that elevators take us up and down, rather than people
| simply rearranging the floors when you're in the elevator...
|
| Related and with less parody, most technical analysis is no
| better than chicken bone divination.
| Closi wrote:
| Interesting analysis. Suprised HN is so negative towards AI (and
| that the positive:negative ratio to AI is about the same as it
| was for Crypto a few years ago!)
|
| The obvious difference is that AI has abundant use-cases, while
| Crypto only has tenuous ones.
|
| Maybe there is added negativity considering it is a technology
| where there is clearly a potential threat to jobs on a personal
| level (e.g. lift operators were very negative towards automatic
| lifts).
| greenthrow wrote:
| HN isn't negative on "AI" in a vacuum. HN is negative on AI
| hype which is completely out of control.
| kcorbitt wrote:
| (author here) Yes, I was surprised that AI didn't have more
| positive sentiment overall!
|
| Subjectively, the two flavors of AI-negative sentiment I've
| seen most commonly on HN are (1) its potential to invade
| privacy, and (2) its potential to displace workers, including
| workers in tech.
|
| I think that (1) was by far the most common concern up until
| around the ChatGPT release, at which point (2) became a major
| concern for many HN readers.
| cft wrote:
| The most negative argument about GPT-like AI for me is that
| it has summed up all world's information into only one
| "correct" opinion. Bing chat for example terminates the
| conversation and offers _you_ to apologize when you reply
| that it 's incorrect and you don't like its biases. With the
| old search engines, at least, in theory, you could get links
| to websites with different points of view.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Microsoft is going to be especially sensitive in this area,
| given their experience with Tay and "user-guided
| sentiments"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
| fallingknife wrote:
| Would be interesting to compare with overall sentiment on HN
| over time. I feel like it has gotten more and more bitter and
| negative over the time I've been here.
| JohnFen wrote:
| My personal outlook about how AI has been developing has
| certainly become increasingly dark with time. I still have
| a hope, though, that things won't be as bad as I fear.
| btilly wrote:
| I would be curious.
|
| What happens if you divide it not by comments, but by
| commenters? How much is sentiment being shaped by a vocal
| minority who is always saying the same thing, and how much
| does it seem to be a broad-based sentiment among the overall
| audience that occasionally responds?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| yeah, really good point. I've noticed on some topics a few
| users come out of the woodwork and post a lot.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| absolutely. One fun thing I learnt about reddit is how
| blocking just a few hyper commenters can suddenly make a
| post 10x calmer. You should definitely take into account
| the frequency of the users commenting with data like this.
| Manfred wrote:
| There was nothing about the ethical question of training
| models on copyrighted content? Nothing about centralizing
| power even further in big tech companies? Nothing about AI
| flooding the world with mediocre content and wrong
| information?
|
| These are genuine questions, not critique on your statement.
| apeters wrote:
| Centralizing power is a good point.
|
| It feels like a huge dependency with a bunch of money
| involved.
|
| I cannot _not_ see it clumping to a sentiment comparable to
| "you either AWS' or have no idea what cloud/network/cluster
| means".
|
| We use these things like it's actually "something". It's
| not. We don't build things with it. We configure other
| people's software.
|
| It's born to be promoted as the next big enterprise stuff.
| You either know how to configure it or are not enterprise-
| worthy.
|
| And that farts. Being dependent on someone else's stuff has
| never turned out good.
|
| Well, I mean. You can also not give a duck and squeeze out
| all the money. Work a job, abandon it and jump on the next
| train.
|
| Feels useless, doesn't it?
| devjab wrote:
| I'm curious as to your conclusions on point (2). We use GPT
| daily but see nothing with it that threatens tech workers. At
| least not in any sense that we haven't seen already, with how
| a two or three developers can basically do what it took one
| or two teams to do 25 years ago.
|
| In terms of actually automating any form of "thinking" tech
| work, LLMs are proving increasingly terrible. I say this as
| someone who work in a place where GPT writes all our
| documentation except for some very limited parts of our code
| base which can't legally be shared with it. It increasingly
| also replaces our code-generation tools for most "repetitive"
| work and it auto-generates a lot of our data-models based on
| various forms of inputs. But the actual programming? It's so
| horrible at it that it's mostly used as a joke. Well, except
| that it's also not used like that by people who aren't CS
| educated. The thing is though, we've already had to replace
| some of the "wonderful" automation that's being cooked up by
| Product Owners, BI engineers and so on. Things which work,
| until they need to scale.
|
| This is obviously very anecdotal, but I'm very underwhelmed
| and very impressed by AI at the same time. On one hand it's
| frighteningly good at writing documentation... seriously, it
| wrote some truly amazing documentation based on a function
| named something along the lines of getCompanyInfoFromCVR (CVR
| being the Danish digital company registry) and the
| documentation GPT wrote based on just that was better than
| what I could've written. But tasked with writing some fairly
| basic computation it fails horribly. And I mean, where are my
| self driving cars?
|
| So I think it's a bit of a mix. But honestly, I suspect that
| for a lot of us, LLMs will generate an abundance of work when
| things need to get cleaned up.
| idonotknowwhy wrote:
| Try out a local language model for the docs you can't get
| chatgpt to write.
|
| You can run small quantized models on apple silicon if you
| have it.
|
| I've been using a 70B local model for things like this and
| it works well
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _I say this as someone who work in a place where GPT
| writes all our documentation_
|
| > _But the actual programming? It's so horrible at it that
| it's mostly used as a joke._
|
| Please, for the sake of your future selves, hire someone
| who can write good documentation. (Or, better still but
| much harder, develop that skill yourself!) GPT
| documentation is the new auto-generated Javadoc comments:
| it looks right to someone who doesn't get what
| documentation is for, and it might even be a useful summary
| to consult (if it's kept up-to-date), but it's _far_ less
| useful than the genuine article.
|
| If GPT's _better_ than you at writing documentation (not
| just faster), and you don 't have some kind of language-
| processing disability, what are you even doing? Half of
| what goes into documentation is stuff that _isn 't_ obvious
| from the code! Even if you find writing hard, at least
| write bullet points or something; then, if you must, tack
| those on top of that (clearly marked) GPT-produced summary
| of the code.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Have you actually tried to use GPT-4 for documentation?
|
| Whether it's obvious from the code or not is kind of
| irrelevant. It gets non obvious things as well.
| wnevets wrote:
| >Interesting analysis. Suprised HN is so negative towards AI
| (and that the positive:negative ratio to AI is about the same
| as it was for Crypto a few years ago!)
|
| I would be curious to know many HNers were previously burned by
| crypto. Fool me once, etc.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Crypto has objectively increased my net worth by many zeroes,
| while AI has a lot of hand-wavey "productivity gains" while the
| self driving cars I was promised are being banned for
| homicide...
| __loam wrote:
| Congratulations on finding your greater fools.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| Exactly. The guy was like "Well, _I_ found a huge nugget of
| gold in the Klondike while everyone around me was made
| destitute, therefore abandoning your family to stand in a
| freezing river for two years is objectively good. "
| ryneandal wrote:
| Dan Olson is FAR more eloquent than I will ever be:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA&t=9s
| monero-xmr wrote:
| 2.5 hour video to tell me why you are smarter than me, no
| thanks
| joegibbs wrote:
| Check out my next world-changing invention, a Stripe form
| where a million people can send me twenty bucks each...
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| I feel like the value of crypto going up is backed by solid
| economics. There is only ever going to be so much of it so
| losing your money to inflation isn't a risk. People die and
| don't tell anyone their keys, people forget their keys so we're
| constantly losing crypto too, w/ currency this is taken into
| account and print new dollars not w/ crypto. I also think it
| reflects a general sentiment here in the states and probably
| China too that we're barreling toward a fucked up never world
| and crypto is some kind of safe guard against that. In times of
| uncertainty people turn this gold, this is very much a digital
| gold.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I feel like the value of crypto going up is backed by solid
| economics. There is only ever going to be so much of it so
| losing your money to inflation isn't a risk.
|
| This is solid economics iff you assume that crypto has a
| utility for which there is no substitute which does not share
| the same supply constraint feature, and even then its not
| solid economics for a _current_ investment unless you also
| assume that that utility is the entire basis for its
| _current_ valuation. Because even if it has a
| nonsubstitutable utility, if that 's not the basis of its
| current value, then the "solid economics" is that there is
| some price it could reach _from which_ further value drop
| because of supply (of substitutes) will not erode value, but
| there is no guarantee of what that level is.
| Closi wrote:
| Agreed! It's backed by solid economics if you believe a
| load of things that aren't backed up by solid economics.
| z3phyr wrote:
| Gold does not require much infrastructure or utility to keep
| existing, and it is operable by anyone with hands or less.
| acdha wrote:
| > There is only ever going to be so much of it so losing your
| money to inflation isn't a risk.
|
| This comment feels like it's 2013 and there hasn't been a
| decade of people creating thousands of other tokens and
| forks, or realizing that high volatility in liquidity or
| exchange rates is more of a problem than the levels of
| currency inflation we commonly see (the price increases we've
| seen for the last couple years are most of the inflation
| we've seen and that practice would be unaffected).
|
| It especially misses the understanding that deflation is much
| worse for anyone who isn't already rich. The model that
| anyone who bought a decade ago deserves to be fabulously rich
| is ... unlikely to be popular with the rest of the world.
| NBJack wrote:
| That's a poor comparison.
|
| Crypto is an umbrella term for a number of solutions,
| including blockchains (roughly 1,000+ as of right now) and
| cryptocurrencies (roughly 22,000+). While a given blockchain
| may be limited in terms of how much can be 'mined' or grow,
| you or I could very easily create a new cryptocurrency or
| even a new blockchain. Assuming we got traction with it,
| there would now be N+1 more out there.
|
| Gold is not something we can so easily create. It also has
| intrinsic value through practical applications.
| adverbly wrote:
| > The obvious difference is that AI has abundant use-cases,
| while Crypto only has tenuous ones.
|
| Hacker News comment sentiment is not a reliable measurem of
| what the average hacker news developer thinks.
|
| For one, only people who are very invested about something will
| post about it.
|
| For two, many comments are probably not from developers and
| instead from fake accounts.
|
| It does not seem surprising to me that both of these factors
| would be in favor of a more positive sentiment for crypto.
| People that like it seem to really like it and talk about it a
| lot, and there is a large financial incentive for numerous
| actors to create fake accounts and comments.
| jl6 wrote:
| I'm not negative towards AI, but I know how hype cycles work -
| even for genuinely good tech. I'm not looking forward to the
| coming waves of scammers and grifters and snake oil salesmen in
| this space.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Wait you mean you don't like having every single Data
| adjacent professional on LinkedIn sending you their personal
| newsletter to let you know how much they know and how
| incredibly "involved" and expert at "AI" they are?
| mattlondon wrote:
| There is a lot of negativity about the way it is used I think.
|
| Most people will agree that LLMs are pretty neat, but now
| instead of every startup being "like Uber but for ..." they are
| "like chatGPT but for ...".
|
| Everyone is trying to chuck AI into their products and most of
| the time there is no need, or the product is just a thin fine-
| tune over an existing LLM model that adds essentially near-zero
| value. HN is fairly negative on that sort of thing I think
| (rightly so IMO)
| __loam wrote:
| I think a major problem that is going to become more and more
| obvious is that AI is actually pretty expensive compared to
| good old deterministic computing. If there's a way to solve a
| problem without resorting to sending an inference request to
| a gpu cluster, we should do it that way. Otherwise you're
| wasting electricity.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| For now it is. If it continues to be the best way to solve
| problems, the cost will drop with time
| Closi wrote:
| More expensive to run but cheaper to write.
|
| Engineers are expensive, so actually the cost/benefit
| analysis is a little more complex and different problems
| will have different solutions.
| __loam wrote:
| The proliferation of extremely expensive algorithms isn't
| necessarily good. A lot of ink has been spilled about how
| much useless work crypto does. We should consider the
| impact of AI on the total computational resources of the
| species carefully.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Let's zeroth-order a single GPT-4 query as using 0.01 kWh
| (which is probably massive overkill for most queries but
| we'll roll with it).
|
| Let's high ball US residential electricity prices are about
| 25C/ per kWh. So 25C/ of electricity gets us 100 GPT-4
| queries. $25 gets us 10_000.
|
| Let's low ball average US developer salaries at a cool
| $100_000/yr. 50 40 hour weeks in a year makes 2_000 working
| hours makes $50 per hour. So with our very generous margins
| all working against us, a US developer would have to be
| making 20_000 GPT-4 queries an hour, or a little over 5 per
| second, in order to end up costing in electricity what he
| is making salary-wise.
|
| I have no real point to this story except that electricity
| is much cheaper than most people have a useful frame of
| reference for. My mom used to complain about teenage me not
| running the dishwasher at full load until I worked out that
| the electricity and water together costed about 50C/ a run
| and offered her a clean $20 to offset my next 400 only
| three-quarters full runs.
|
| _Your bonus programming tip: Many programming languages
| let you legally use underscores to space large numbers! Try
| "million = 1_000_000" next time you fire up Python._
| willsmith72 wrote:
| I actually would have guessed a full load dishwasher
| would cost less than that, maybe 15-20 cents.
| verdverm wrote:
| This was the gist of my PhD, a deterministic algo to
| replace a wasteful genetic (evolutionary) algo. It was
| multiple exponentials less wasteful
| __loam wrote:
| Show us the paper that sounds sick
| verdverm wrote:
| I'll do you one better
|
| https://github.com/verdverm/pypge
|
| https://github.com/verdverm/go-
| pge/blob/master/pge_gecco2013...
|
| The reviews had awesome and encouraging comments
| everfree wrote:
| People said that about virtualized code, but then computers
| got 100x faster and now we're running 10 megabyte web apps
| in a 500 megabyte client to display a simple page of text,
| and it still loads acceptably fast.
|
| The AI algos will get 100x faster through a combination of
| hardware and software optimizations. Then, deterministic vs
| AI will mean the unnoticeable difference between displaying
| some info to the user in 0.001s vs 0.1s. Then, AI will
| become the default.
| __loam wrote:
| I'm not sure if this actually correct. Performance
| increases were reliable and consistent for a long time
| but we're reaching the physical limitations of Moore's
| law. Unless you have new physics or new models of
| computation, we might reach an actual speed limit this
| decade when the transistors are limited but the size of
| atoms.
|
| I also believe there will always be a need for
| determinism. There will absolutely be applications where
| the randomness of ai is unacceptable.
| everfree wrote:
| New models of computation are a given, and improved
| application-specific circuits for the most widely-used
| models are also a given (I believe current models run
| mostly on enterprise GPUs). Together these could easily
| make AI models 100x more efficient even without any
| advancements in the underlying chipmaking processes.
|
| > I also believe there will always be a need for
| determinism. There will absolutely be applications where
| the randomness of ai is unacceptable.
|
| For high-assurance apps like accounting, aerospace, and
| even commercial backend software, sure. But for consumer
| apps, an app might actually _feel_ less "random" to the
| user if there's an AI that can intuit exactly what they
| are trying to accomplish when they perform certain
| actions in the app (much like a friendly tech-savvy
| teacher sitting down with you to help you accomplish
| something in the app).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I agree, but then I expect the major benefit of current AI
| will be in providing reference solutions to previously
| intractable problems - it'll be much easier to develop more
| deterministic, classical / GOFAI methods of solving those
| problems once we have a wasteful but _working_ solution to
| play with and test against.
| jampekka wrote:
| I'd guess HN is negative towards hype in general. "AI" is very
| much full of hype.
|
| What happened with previous AI hypes, the term AI was abandoned
| and the techniques and disciplines were "rebranded".
|
| Probably will happen again. When something works and we start
| to understand how and when it works (and especially when it
| doesn't) it stops being "AI" and becomes something more boring.
| __loam wrote:
| It's not obvious to me whether we've actually found a good
| killer app for generative AI yet, unless you consider chatgpt
| or sites like midjourney the killer apps. A lot of the new wave
| of ai startups are just wrappers for gpt. I don't think that
| adds a ton of value over just asking gpt-4 your query as
| opposed to subscribing to a billion different ai services. I
| also question the value of ai art in general when everyone
| involved in creative labor thinks you're a piece of shit for
| using it.
| Closi wrote:
| I certainly consider ChatGPT to be one killer app.
|
| Copilot to be another.
|
| Midjourney to be another - or at least diffusion based image
| editing tools which can be brought into photo and video
| editing workflows. The killer app here is probably
| integration of diffusion models into apps like Photoshop (and
| eventually video).
|
| Some real virtual assistant applications seem right around
| the corner (i.e. a real life J.A.R.V.I.S seems like an
| inevitability within the year rather than a pipe dream, and
| to me would be a killer app)
|
| And then lots of other killer apps are pretty obvious to
| imagine with development (e.g. customer service applications
| like IT helpdesks, Computer game dialogue where you can
| really influence interactions...)
| __loam wrote:
| I guess I'm wondering if LLMs as customer service agents
| are actually going to be good or if it's just going to be
| another layer of indirection I need to get through to talk
| to a human. Is the video game dialog actually going to be
| good or will it fall flat compared to hand crafted
| narrative. Do I actually like copilot butting in with
| suggestions when I'm trying to program something.
| Closi wrote:
| LLMs will be good replacements for a portion of customer
| service queries (eg where's my order, help me fix this
| common computer issue etc), and will probably be a bad
| replacement for other queries (eg complaint handling),
| but it doesn't have to fix all for it to transform the
| sector and be a killer app.
|
| Video game dialogue remains to be seen, but I already
| find ChatGPT based text adventures super fun! So I
| suspect there will be demand for both handcrafted static
| stories and AI dynamically-generated stories (ie they can
| be different things, one doesn't have to replace the
| other, just like email didn't immediately replace the
| post service).
|
| I don't know if you enjoy copilot, but for me it's
| definitely supercharges my productivity.
| thisgoesnowhere wrote:
| I don't think midjourney can keep up with chatGPT with
| dalle as is. The experience creating an image is so much
| better with chatGPT4 now since you don't have to memorize
| commands
| tayo42 wrote:
| Ai advancements have my small but positive impacts on things
| I've done.
|
| But my not so informed opinion is text as an interface is
| only a small feature of bigger useful products, not the main
| focus. Instead of learning sql, you can ask a regular
| question. It feels like inventing the mouse to use with
| computers.
| wruza wrote:
| A lot of startups in general are just wrappers over
| something. The reason for that is that people on average (not
| "an average person", it includes all of us) have many out-of-
| their-scope issues and aren't even aware of something generic
| that could help solving it. Dividing a common [al]mighty
| resource into hundreds of packaged solutions and marketing
| them separately is how people get hold of the unknown. They
| then can choose to migrate to a root tech/resource, or to
| stay where they are for various reasons.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Maybe there is added negativity considering it is a
| technology where there is clearly a potential threat to jobs on
| a personal level
|
| I'm not worried about this on a personal level, but I'm very
| worried about the wider risk of too many people being put out
| of work too quickly. That's my biggest concern with these
| tools.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| HN is made of real people. People with emotions - like
| FOMO/jealousy/threatened etc. I get the sense that a lot of
| people feel like they missed the boat be it crypto, or AI, etc.
| tester756 wrote:
| >Suprised HN is so negative towards AI
|
| I feel like it is overrated and overhyped
|
| It sucks because that's impressive field, but over decade of
| hype on self-driving cars and now naivety of experts being
| replaced by chat bot is annoying
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying those things don't work,
| just not as good as people try to convince us
| pixl97 wrote:
| The problem with self driving cars is we are.. putting the
| cart before the horse.
|
| That is a lot of the hard issues with driving are preemptive
| knowledge issues. I see a ball rolling towards the road from
| the left. I as a human know that, one the ball will likely
| roll out in front of me, and two, a kid/person may be
| following that. Now if you see a blowing trash bag, you
| probably aren't going to take any risky corrective action to
| avoid it.
|
| The problem just a vision knowledge system is a ball and
| blowing trashbag are just objects that have the same
| priority. You have no categorization system of the relative
| meaning and dangers behind each action.
|
| But things start getting weird when you couple LLMs with
| vision knowledge. Really, it's much too slow currently, but
| in multi-modal systems objects get depth of meaning. That
| trash bag can be identified, and a low risk can be assigned
| to it. While the ball can also be identified and a high risk
| assigned to it. Along with a bunch of other generalization
| that humans typically do.
| themagician wrote:
| > Surprised HN is so negative towards AI (and that the
| positive:negative ratio to AI is about the same as it was for
| Crypto a few years ago!)
|
| I'm not. AI tools will have huge benefits in some industries.
| But the main use case that people will experience (at least,
| the use case they recognize) on a daily basis will be scams and
| frustration. That's why people are negative. Not because the
| technology is bad or does not have uses, but because the
| average experience that people will consciously have will be
| negative.
|
| It's already impossible to know what's real and what's not.
| Customer service is already majority bots. You'll never be able
| to talk to a human again if you have an issue with something.
| Blackmail and ransomware scams are going to get dialed up to
| 11. Everything is going to be automated in the most annoying
| ways possible. People are going to lose their jobs. Most of the
| jobs that will be lost are "meaningless," but our society
| revolves around meaningless jobs because they provide order,
| income and--as a consequence--dignity. All of that is going out
| the window.
|
| Crypto had a purpose that no one actually cared about. No one
| cared until people started to see the scam potential and then
| it took off. AI is going to do the same thing.
|
| AI tools will revolutionize medicine, engineering,
| manufacturing, and logistics. There will be huge benefits for
| all of humanity. But you won't think about this day-to-day.
| You'll just be bombarded by more (and better) scams more
| quickly.
|
| I am amazed at what AI tools can do already. Had these tools
| existed 10 or 15 years ago my entire life would be different.
| Better? I have no idea. Maybe, maybe not. But even if it would
| have been better I know enough to know that I would not
| recognize that.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The one issue with AI and you not thinking about it day to
| day, is you'll only see it where it makes mistakes, or it
| performs criminal actions.
|
| It's the IT effect. When IT does it's job right, everyone
| asks why you pay them, then IT screws up, everyone will ask
| why you pay them. Things just working is transparent and we
| don't notice it's even there.
| verdverm wrote:
| Crypto also had many use-cases and what we are seeing is
| reality of LLMs. They are not the magic pixy dust you can just
| sprinkle on and get better outcomes. There are a lot of
| complications and downsides that come with them.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The one thing that stands out really clearly in the sentiment
| graph is how, prior to the AI sentiment trough around 2022, AI
| and Crypto sentiment were highly correlated in their movements.
|
| It would be interesting to see a broader analysis across subjects
| and see if that shared movement wasn't about AI and crypto, but
| largely just sort of a fluctuation in general tone across HN, or
| if instead _relative_ to general HN sentiment, sentiment on
| Crypto an AI movements were correlated prior to the recent
| divergence.
| kcorbitt wrote:
| (author here) Interesting question to ask! I actually did the
| exact same sentiment analysis on Rust and remote work as well,
| but ended up cutting them from the post in the interest of
| brevity. My recollection is that the sentiment on those two
| topics wasn't particularly correlated with the sentiment on
| crypto or AI, but let me look up that graph and throw it in as
| a footnote on the article.
|
| *EDIT*
|
| added an addendum to the post with the sentiment analysis graph
| including both rust and remote work.
|
| Interestingly, there is in fact a noticeable downward slope in
| average sentiment over time for those topics as well, although
| they both remain far more popular than either AI or crypto.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Perhaps the pandemic contributed to an underlying trend
| somehow?
| reidjs wrote:
| Self plug because it's sort of relevant, I wrote a short snarky
| blog post today complaining about how the "AI" conference scene
| is very boring compared to crypto.
|
| https://blog.hazybridge.com/ai-is-boring/
| bamazizi wrote:
| The major difference between the 2 is how they're being adopted
| by customers and the tangible value they return.
|
| AI/ML barrier to entry is far simpler and vastly user friendly
| compared to crypto. Instant value return or gratification from ML
| products (GTPs and rest) is far more mainstream friendly.
|
| Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has had
| their funds stolen or lost using ML products. I understand
| content creators and those who, unwillingly, contributed
| knowledge to learning systems did get circumvented but i'm
| talking about users/customers. Compare that to the negative
| stigma of crypto frauds and stereotypical association to illegal
| transactions.
|
| Apples vs. rotten oranges in my opinion!
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Exactly. People, average everyday people, are using and getting
| value out of AI _right now_. Are we to ignore that?
| distortionfield wrote:
| Average every day people are using and getting value out of
| crypto right now too. Are we to ignore that?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| The people coaxed/tricked into emptying their bank accounts
| at a bitcoin ATM?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Maybe not _those_ people, but the people doing the
| tricking are getting value from it.
| kwonkicker wrote:
| I what way does an average consumer/user get value from
| crypto?
| __loam wrote:
| Crypto is still one of the best ways to do foreign
| exchange even if the ecosystem is run by morally bankrupt
| hucksters.
| charcircuit wrote:
| The ability to transact with people that card processors
| do not like. The ability to self custody.
| mminer237 wrote:
| The average person has no need to transact with people
| that card processors do not like. The most common
| scenario where that is the case is people "needing" to
| pay "Microsoft support".
| jrockway wrote:
| Yeah. I have to say, I've never needed to give money to
| someone my bank doesn't want me to give money to. As
| someone spending money, I don't want guarantees like
| "this transaction cannot be revoked". I want to revoke
| transactions sometimes! Thus, crypto is anti-value-add
| for me. (Some would argue, merchants would charge lower
| prices if all sales were final. That's probably true! But
| it would depend on them never making a mistake, and
| everyone makes mistakes.)
| charcircuit wrote:
| Expand card processors to payment processors. There is
| constantly sites that get unjustly restricted or banned
| from payment processor like PayPal and Stripe. Even
| Minecraft, one of the most popular games of all time, had
| issues with PayPal.
| SwiftyBug wrote:
| The ability to self-custody is not something average,
| every day people need.
| charcircuit wrote:
| That is like saying insurance is not in not something
| average, every day people need. If the rare event doesn't
| happen to you then yes it is a waste of money, but if it
| does you will be thankful to have it.
| SwiftyBug wrote:
| The same thing can be said about having bulletproof cars,
| wearing a helmet anytime when you are outside, carrying a
| lifejacket with you all the time. Those are things that
| cater to specific threat models. And those are not the
| threat models of average, every day people.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Average people address it by having cash. If you want
| digital cash crypto is your best option.
| pavlov wrote:
| In other words, extremely niche use cases.
|
| I'm a crypto sceptic but I wasn't always like that. There
| was a time many years ago when Ethereum was brand new and
| I was an eager early adopter. I tried creating wallets,
| tried running a node to see what it does, put in some
| money through an exchange, and then... Nothing. There was
| nothing to do after jumping through all those hoops. In
| fact, turns out the only thing to do with the crypto
| wallet was to wait for its value to maybe increase over
| time. (Hence the "number go up" meme.) And for that to be
| realized, I would need to sell the coins to a new sucker
| to get real money out again -- suspiciously pyramid-like.
|
| And it's still like that today. There's no reason for me
| to ever open those old wallets again (and surely I don't
| even have the passwords anymore because self-custody is
| such a terrible idea UX-wise). And there's no reason to
| try any of the new stuff because it still obviously does
| nothing I'd need.
|
| The early Internet wasn't like that. There was plenty to
| see and try, and interesting people to interact with.
| Once you tried it, you probably wanted to go back.
|
| Today's early AI is like the early Internet in all the
| ways that crypto isn't and never will be. There's plenty
| you can do with ChatGPT and other models, right off the
| bat. You can install interesting stuff locally or run it
| on somebody else's server. You don't need to run the
| crypto-style terrible UX gauntlet and buy coins from a
| shady operator. AI is already so much easier and more
| useful and more powerful than crypto-web3-anything, it's
| competing in a completely different race.
|
| OpenSea has lost 99% of their transaction volume in the
| past year, and even more of their revenue. I'd be shocked
| if the same happens to OpenAI. One was a fad, the other
| isn't.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| You sound a lot like me.
|
| I ran full nodes, wrote smart contracts, even had 200
| GPUs mining ethereum at one point. I still have a bunch
| of wallets, exchange accounts, ENS names, you name it.
| Interesting, kind of fun, but then a big "Ok, now what?".
| Turns out not much other than writing some crypto thing
| to do another crypto thing that does another crypto
| thing.
|
| Since getting generally disgusted with the sleaze I saw
| from the inside I haven't touched any of it in years.
|
| How much difference has this made in my life? Zero (other
| than not being grossed out on a regular basis). How many
| times have I had to dust off a wallet or write a smart
| contract to do something I couldn't do better, faster,
| and cheaper elsewhere? Zero. How many times have I wanted
| to buy something and needed crypto? Zero. My experience
| is an anecdote for the entire space - a lot of time,
| money, and energy spent with no tangible value and
| nothing to show for it.
|
| Ethereum is over eight years old, bitcoin nearly 15.
| ChatGPT has been out for less than a year and I use it on
| a daily basis to save time and come up with fairly novel
| things I'm not sure I could on my own. Of course the
| roots of ChatGPT go back quite far but then again so do
| merkle trees.
|
| I wish I would have saved the time, money, and grey hairs
| on crypto for "AI" - I have way more fun with Llama,
| Whisper, and dozens of other models with immediate and
| real use cases on a daily basis.
| kubiton wrote:
| Indeed. Especially when it's clear that the rich crypto
| people got rich through others loosing it.
|
| And when you played around with something the next and
| better version is already around the next corner!
|
| I never seen something like this :)
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| send and receive money globally without any intermediary?
| pavlov wrote:
| Let's say I want to send money from New York to Rome. How
| does crypto enable me sending USD and the receiver
| getting EUR without any intermediaries?
|
| You need exchanges to do anything useful in crypto. And
| as we've seen most recently in the FTX case, all the
| exchanges are wretched hives of scum and villainy.
| damon_c wrote:
| > all the exchanges
|
| Not really. There are plenty of decentralized exchanges
| which are proven, reliable, auditable, generally used by
| many without issues.
|
| see: https://uniswap.org https://curve.fi/
| https://1inch.io
|
| It's the centralized exchanges, which are more akin to
| traditional financial institutions whose records are not
| on a publicly visible blockchain but rather private
| databases or... apparently spreadsheets... which fall
| victim to the same issues we have seen in the past in the
| traditional financial world.
| pavlov wrote:
| So how do I send USD to Uniswap, and how does my friend
| in Rome get EUR out of 1inch.io?
|
| If that's not possible, it's useless for the proposed use
| case: "send and receive money globally without any
| intermediary".
| epolanski wrote:
| They don't work.
|
| You can always charge back a transfer.
| zirgs wrote:
| So you need at least 2 middlemen. One exchange where you
| buy crypto and another exchange where your friend sells
| that crypto.
|
| Or you could simply use a traditional wire transfer and
| currency would be converted automatically. USA and Italy
| exchange millions of dollars every day - it's nothing
| special.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| To actually get the money to the other person via wire
| transfer is actually quite a process (having done many
| myself).
|
| - You will need to get permission from your bank to send
| international wire transfers (sign forms/agreements). -
| takes a long time (in the order of days) - expensive
| (~$50-$75 for outgoing international wire, and $25-$50 to
| receive it).
| zirgs wrote:
| I guess that depends on source and destination countries,
| because I am able to wire money between different EU
| countries without any special paperwork. It is no
| different to domestic transfers or transfers to the same
| bank. Why would I want to use crypto for that purpose? It
| seems more inconvenient and risky.
|
| I remember that in the beginning people were dreaming
| about self-contained crypto economy where exchanges would
| not be needed - that didn't really work out.
| ygjb wrote:
| The forms, delays, and fees are because what those
| financial institutions are doing is providing checks and
| balances, and de-risking, to the extent they can,
| performing that transfer.
|
| The forms are for KYC activity, and agreements on what
| the limitations of liability are. The delays are to
| validate that the transfers are handled and secured, and
| ideally can't be charged back. The fees are to cover the
| costs of the people who do the work for that.
|
| It's not perfect, but it's quite a bit better than the
| checks and balances that exist for folks who get hit by a
| scam and are convinced to go to a crypto kiosk and pay a
| scammer because they have been frightened by a threat to
| a loved one, or are taken in by a scammer about services
| being cut off, or desperately paying off a ransomware
| demand in the hopes that your business or personal
| records won't be leaked or published.
| pavlov wrote:
| Where are you located? I send a fair amount of SWIFT
| wires, and they cost at most $25 and clear the next day.
|
| Within the eurozone (the 20 countries using the euro),
| there's SEPA instant credit which clears in less than ten
| seconds, is available 24/7, and costs practically nothing
| (a few cents). It's a fine example of how thoughtful
| regulation can enable a system that is better than any
| crypto solution.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| You realize FTX isn't the only, or even largest, exchange
| right?
|
| If I want to send someone money, I can send anyone in the
| world BTC securely and instantly without any
| intermediary.
|
| If other party wants to convert to fiat then they can do
| so through an exchange, of which there are many.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Do you think "average everyday people" actually _do_
| that?
| kubiton wrote:
| The intermediate is either a trust system in the real
| world, escrow service at dark net drug pages or the
| miner.or the traider who traides your fiat to crypto.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| lol, coinbase and binance are deca-billion dollar
| companies my guy
| pavlov wrote:
| Coinbase is heading for bankruptcy and Binance is a
| criminal operation.
|
| FTX was also a $32B company until it wasn't.
| asadotzler wrote:
| So was FTX
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| So by breaking the law.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I what way does an average consumer/user get value from
| crypto?
|
| Look at venezuela and turkey inflation rate these last
| two years (and the estimates for the coming years). Look
| at the SNAFU that happened in Iran and banks defaulting
| and now inflation kicking in.
|
| It may be an ultra risky bet (and there are serious opsec
| risks too) but when your savings are going lose 90% of
| their value in two years anyway, why not take it?
|
| Bitcoin was, after all, created as a gigantic middle
| finger in response to infinite money printing.
|
| The world is big and there are average consumers in
| countries other than the US or the EU.
| zamadatix wrote:
| ChatGPT has something like 40x the weekly users as Bitcoin.
| There are other AIs and other Bitcoin, but I'm not sure
| e.g. Bitcoin (or other crypto used by folks) has the
| penetration to really be average to use. Crypto has a
| mostly niche use case at this point, exchanging money when
| it would be illegal, across borders, or in an area with a
| failing local currency.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| I'm not taking sides, but are we going to ignore the fact
| that crypto users are probably more valuable in the sense
| that they are paying users in a way?
|
| A chatGPT user could just be someone who popped onto the
| website and submitted the chat form.
| npunt wrote:
| Not to be too cheeky here but paying with what?
| Cryptocurrencies are mostly hot potatoes everyone is
| throwing back and forth and occasionally dropping to
| catastrophic effect, and don't seem to be tied to actual
| value add.
|
| Meanwhile millions of people pay for tools that are now
| integrating AI to enhance their value add.
|
| Free ChatGPT is just a loss leader for API and paid acct
| and a way to better train the model.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| not really, crypto has value as determined by the
| markets.
|
| Most people who own crypto exchanged dollars for it.
| kubiton wrote:
| True but in comparison to every other value crypto is the
| only one which doesn't have any alternative use.
|
| Gold, shares etc.
|
| I believe the criticism is correct as the current driver
| of crypto is either a 'i put that much money in I'm not
| selling until it increases again' or gambled los.
|
| After all the miners want to get paid.
|
| But hey binance and others struggle let's see if there is
| a collapse soon
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| IMO the value is in the globally distributed, battle-
| tested secure/resilient payment network.
| epolanski wrote:
| The only value I got out of crypto are the suckers that
| gave me many many thousands of euros for farming ethereum
| in 2017 with my RX 580s.
| kubiton wrote:
| I know plenty of crypto involved people and all of them
| lost money and no one uses it seriously.
|
| Not a single avg human I know even tried crypto...
| hipadev23 wrote:
| GPTs have had immediate tangible benefits without needing to
| spend an hour preaching or explaining things.
|
| Crypto's sole usefulness remains in providing money
| transfers/liquidity in parts of the world where the local
| systems are failing or off-limits to the users.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Crypto's main value to a LOT of people is purely speculation
| that you could be rich by buying it cheap and then watching
| the value explode. No one expected DogeCoin to provide any
| utility at all, but tons of people bought it.
| nickpp wrote:
| Countless people play the at the casinos, online poker
| games, bets - even the stock market is viewed by a lots of
| people as something of a gamble.
|
| Personally I don't partake - but they get a value in it, I
| guess. Who am I to judge?
| Yoric wrote:
| Out of curiosity, does your argument also work for drugs?
| nickpp wrote:
| Isn't that pretty much settled already? It seems to me
| our society is becoming more and more permissive while
| giving up the previous "war on drugs" failed approach
| which did an incredible amount of damage.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I don't judge anyone in the crypto space for wanting to
| gamble. I judge them for lying to other people about
| their crypto being anything _but gambling, which is what
| it is._
|
| I don't think we'll ever even _know_ how many NFT
| projects there were out there, all taking up space on the
| various chains, all shilling garbage artwork, all
| promising all manner of shit from video games to
| magazines to comics to television series, many of which
| raised huge sums of money, virtually all of which is now
| gone. And it 's easy to point and laugh at the people who
| thought these things were anything but scams, but also,
| in a better world, we wouldn't let tons of people be
| scammed like this. Being vulnerable to certain kinds of
| hype shouldn't give other people permission to rob you
| blind.
| epx wrote:
| +1. I have security cameras at home, and my "DVR" is a
| collection of shell scripts plus a Python script that uses YOLO
| to find the interesting parts of the footage. The thing _works_
| , helps a lot to review daily footage, was damn easy to put to
| work, and didn't cost me a cent (not even hardware; I run it in
| a Mini-PC w/o GPU). I knew nothing about ML before writing this
| script. So yeah, the value is there.
| dpcx wrote:
| Any information you'd be willing to share around this would
| be great! I'm looking to do something similar.
| kfk wrote:
| You are not seeing maybe the numerous consultants and self
| proclaimed AI experts charging for very dubious solutions.
| Money is definitely being "stolen", it's just a more
| sophisticated type of stealing. I have yet to see an AI
| solution that delivers x times the value of simpler rule based
| models.
| themanmaran wrote:
| Consultants have always stolen money. Accenture brings in $64
| billion a year overcharging for dubious solutions.
|
| Marketing terms vary, before it was "big data", now it's
| "AI".
| mediaman wrote:
| You don't see value in retrieval augmented generation? It
| seems like one of the major use cases in knowledge management
| in larger organizations that is hard to replicate without an
| LLM.
|
| They also seem to work very well for summarizing large
| amounts of data, for automating the generation of basic legal
| texts, for extracting key data points from paperwork
| (invoices, mortgage applications, bank statements, etc).
|
| It's useful to separate whether there is a lot of dubious
| hype (true of any new foundational technology) from whether
| useful things are being done. Both can be true at the same
| time. Lots of fraud and stupidity, but also lots of valuable
| work happening. With crypto, there was none of the latter,
| other than criminal applications.
|
| The internet also attracted lots of hype and poor ROI
| consulting projects...but here we are.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I pay 15 minutes of me take home pay every month for a chat
| window which I can ask any basic programming question and get
| a correct answer, 80% of the time, in about 20 seconds. This
| thing has paid for itself after it has let me avoid looking
| up about 4 easy Stack Overflow questions, or 1 medium
| complexity one.
| klntsky wrote:
| > Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has
| had their funds stolen or lost using ML products
|
| Most of "AI startups" are close to scams, i.e. they are
| oftentimes just interfaces to proprietary APIs that monetize on
| impressiveness of LLMs.
| themanmaran wrote:
| Is this a scam if they still provide value? I get that most
| apps are a thin wrapper around GPT, but that doesn't mean
| they're stealing money, just offering a non differentiated
| product.
| zarzavat wrote:
| It's a scam on the investors. The users might see some
| value, but the business is worthless.
| alexb_ wrote:
| If that's the standard, basically everything that comes
| out of ycombinator is a scam.
| intelVISA wrote:
| That's not entirely true, Arc is pretty good.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| On the contrary, a typical startup is more of a scam on
| the users. The investors go in knowingly and willingly -
| this is literally how they make money. It's the users
| that get shorted once the startup suddenly gets acquired
| or otherwise "exists" - and if they do it through an IPO,
| then it's additionally the public that gets scammed.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| - and 10 other things people who have no understanding of
| business like to say these days.
|
| OpenAI cannot make every product and market them to every
| segment. If you wrap their API and provide a novel UX
| with precise positioning, there's value there.
|
| OpenAI can copy the _underlying_ collection of features
| tomorrow morning, but if the positioning is precise
| enough, you will easily outcompete them.
|
| For an example developers can understand, see managed
| SaaS: which is a collection of companies raking in
| billions in revenue from simply wrapping AWS/GCP/Azure in
| ways that the underlying platforms even end up copying
| anyways but succeeding because their developer experience
| is better, or their feature set is better focused, or
| they're just plain nicer to work with.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > OpenAI cannot make every product and market them to
| every segment.
|
| Even if OpenAI doesn't, if its a thin wrapper with no
| deep proprietary edge, _someone else_ can; your offering
| is ripe for commodification, even if that doesn 't come
| from OpenAI themselves.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Software is a commodity, period.
|
| That's why "technical novelty" ranks _ridiculously_ low
| on scale of things that make most successful software
| businesses these days: if anything technical novelty is
| more of an _albatross_ on most software businesses than a
| saving grace.
|
| Building traction in software is more about the 100s of
| other concerns that apply to every business: brand
| recognition, communicating your value proposition
| effectively, being able to sell to the target customer
| effectively, having the correct UX, the right proofs, the
| list goes on.
|
| Copying _that_ is just as hard as ever, if not harder.
| lmm wrote:
| > That's why "technical novelty" ranks ridiculously low
| on scale of things that make most successful software
| businesses these days: if anything technical novelty is
| more of an albatross on most software businesses than a
| saving grace.
|
| Not convinced. Why did Google beat Yahoo? Why is Facebook
| huge while Friendster and Myspace are jokes? At some
| point - perhaps further down the line than most of us are
| used to thinking of - technical ability matters.
| nerdjon wrote:
| Crypto was being adopted by consumers though, there was a boom
| at one point that it was incredibly common to see bitcoin ATM's
| or signs that stores would accept bitcoin. I even remember a
| bitcoin credit card or something that lets you use your bitcoin
| anywhere. That stuff wouldn't have been done if it wasn't being
| used.
|
| The problem with AI is that it is being shoved into places
| without any thought of what the benefit actually is or wether
| or not its actually works.
|
| As someone else said, I feel like much of what is coming out of
| this AI boom is basically a scam.
|
| For example I was looking at task management app and I was
| intrigued by some "AI" powered ones. All it really was, was
| being able to make a task and it asks chatgpt to generate
| subtasks. The subtasks it generated were basically useless.
|
| No "AI" to help manage my schedule or any other benefits. We
| are automating the easiest parts of the task with unhelpful
| content. This is because chatgpt is limited, it doesn't have
| api hooks into your application so it can't really provide any
| real benefit.
|
| Some of the uses if AI are real and beneficial (like Amazon
| using AI to summarize reviews). But the vast majority are just
| shoving AI somewhere it doesn't need to be (or at least chatgpt
| doesn't need to be since its just a LLM at the end of the day).
|
| This bubble is going to burst once people finally realize that
| ChatGPT is not an "AI" as science fiction has sold us, but it
| is being used as a general smart AI when its honestly dumb as
| nails except for certain use cases.
| xenospn wrote:
| > _That stuff wouldn 't have been done if it wasn't being
| used._
|
| "VCs have entered the chat"
| Macha wrote:
| > Crypto was being adopted by consumers though, there was a
| boom at one point that it was incredibly common to see
| bitcoin ATM's or signs that stores would accept bitcoin. I
| even remember a bitcoin credit card or something that lets
| you use your bitcoin anywhere. That stuff wouldn't have been
| done if it wasn't being used.
|
| The trail of broken crypto startups serve as counter
| evidence. There were plenty of merchants initially dragged in
| by the appeal of cutting out at least Visa/Mastercard's cut,
| and in many cases governments too.
|
| And then the consumer adoption wasn't there, and the prices
| for merchants were also too high, so many ripped them out
| again.
| nerdjon wrote:
| The trail doesn't exactly counter it if there was a lot of
| consumer use and then it died.
|
| Maybe I am wrong, but it seemed like there were a lot of
| people talking about it and in it (same with NFT) and then
| it plummeted.
|
| That's why I kinda felt like AI is the same. The bubble is
| going to pop as we hit limitations on what this can
| actually do.
|
| But I will also admit that some of this could be living
| within a tech bubble.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| Talking and using aren't the same thing. Did you ever see
| people using one of the crypto ATMs or buying anything
| with a crypto credit card? Especially outside of the Bay
| Area? If not then it's likely a marketing expense /
| stunt, just the same as the commercials starring Tom
| Brady or Larry David. Create the _perception_ that crypto
| is mainstream, and people will want to jump onboard just
| because of FOMO.
| kubiton wrote:
| There was one ATM in my big city and yes it's a great way to
| laundry money and after that they disappeared again
| riku_iki wrote:
| > the tangible value they return. > AI/ML barrier to entry is
| far simpler and vastly user friendly compared to crypto.
|
| crypto was booming as investment vehicle, buying one was
| trivial, many people received very tangible value.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| beanie babies were booming as an investment vehicle, buying
| one was trivial, many people received very tangible value.
|
| It'll be interesting when there is more distinction between
| the two in utility. LLMs already have a fair amount of
| utility in their relatively early stages and I've certainly
| seen meaningful adoption of diffusion model generated images
| to replace stock photo usage.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > beanie babies were booming as an investment vehicle,
| buying one was trivial, many people received very tangible
| value.
|
| were volumes and convenience(e.g. liquidity, automation,
| etc) comparable to crypto?
|
| Investments is huge market, it is hard for me to track what
| are the current volumes of crypto tradings and holdings,
| but it still can be significant.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has
| had their funds stolen or lost using ML products.
|
| That is true however I'd say that for example the venezuelian
| and turkish people who managed to scoop Bitcoin (or Ethereum)
| didn't do too badly:
|
| Inflation in Venezuela 2022 and estimate for 2023: 210% and 51%
| Inflation in Turkey 2022 and estimate for 2023: 70% and 50%
|
| These aren't the only countries.
|
| I personally know a doctor from Iran who tried semi-recently to
| convert his savings into Bitcoin (and failed: bank didn't let
| him). And he basically lost all his savings (inflation and bank
| defaults: double whammy).
|
| From the comfort of countries using strong currencies it's easy
| to dismiss Bitcoin but there are many countries where shit did
| hit the fan really hard.
|
| Not it's not a panacea: for example many african countries are
| experiencing ultra high inflation but cannot use Bitcoin
| because _fees_ are way too high for these people ($6 USD to
| move Bitcoin today: I just checked).
|
| > Compare that to the negative stigma of crypto frauds and
| stereotypical association to illegal transactions.
|
| Seen all the people and exchanges owners busted and going to
| jail and seen moves like the EU soon de-anonymizing every
| single wallet out there (as soon as a transaction is made), and
| seen the public ledger, I don't even know if that bad bad
| reputation is going to stay for long.
| ritzaco wrote:
| Can you add some normalisation topic (or combination / average of
| several topics) like "linux" or "javascript" or something that's
| been around for a long time and hasn't really had a hype cycle
| recently?
|
| It's interesting to see how AI/Crypto relate to each other, but
| e.g. for sentiment analysis we would need to check if maybe HN
| got more negative _overall_ or if it's actually dependent on the
| two topics you chose
| kcorbitt wrote:
| A sibling commenter mentioned the same thing. I actually did
| the same analysis on "rust" and "remote work", but cut it from
| the final post for brevity. I've added an addendum now with
| sentiment on those topics graphed as well!
| Aurornis wrote:
| Interesting sentiment analysis, but hard to put into context
| without a baseline for the sentiment of average HN comments. In
| my experience, HN can be impressively cynical on just about any
| topic that gets posted. Some times a great article will get
| posted and people will find creative ways to complain about
| everything from the color choice of the website to unrelated
| complaints from loosely related topics. It gets negative very
| quickly in here.
|
| It's also interesting to see sentiment trending downward in time
| for both topics, even as the real-world benefits of AI become
| more obvious. My gut feeling is that this shows some of the
| contrarian bias on HN: Comments here are more optimistic about
| things that aren't yet mainstream, but lean negative as soon as
| something becomes too popular or mainstream.
|
| Interesting article. Thanks for including the details about fine
| tuning your own model.
| jodacola wrote:
| Very interesting. I've introspected a great deal lately to (try
| to) gauge my own biases with regard to these technologies,
| because I think AI is absolutely incredible and I'm less
| skeptical about it than other things, namely crypto, which I've
| always held with very deep skepticism. Does that mean AI is
| "different" or am I just biased?
|
| To that end, I'm very curious: how does AI compare against other
| major tech advancements that are relevant in the HN community?
| The AI vs crypto comparison is the one I see the most, or
| ChatGPT/LLM vs iPhone, but surely there are some other less
| splashy or controversial comparisons.
|
| What about something like React/Angular/SPAs vs AI? Less
| exciting, I know. I'm just really curious about how AI stacks up
| against something other than the obvious ("obvious," because of
| what I've been reading - again, biases) comparisons.
| shaldengeki wrote:
| Is it just me, or does the article not show how posts were
| classified as AI vs crypto? I see that they "use an LLM" but
| don't see a code snippet describing how, or an attempt at
| assessing error rates, which seems like a basic step in
| validating this. Maybe I missed it?
|
| edit: Looks like this is the notebook used in the article:
| https://github.com/corbt/hn-analysis/blob/main/analysis.ipyn...
|
| The classification seems pretty fraught; one cell shows a sample
| of articles classified as crypto, which appears to include a
| bunch of cryptography and other unrelated articles.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| I think the most telling detail is the most difficult part of the
| analysis was done using chatgpt.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| I was very confused reading the comments until I realised that
| "Crypto" in this case means Cryptocurrency and not Cryptography
| make3 wrote:
| were you asleep for the past 5 years
| shaldengeki wrote:
| Funnily enough, it means both; the author's classifier lumps
| cryptography articles in with cryptocurrency (search for
| "homomorphic encryption"):
|
| https://github.com/corbt/hn-analysis/blob/main/analysis.ipyn...
| MeImCounting wrote:
| I feel like that might skew the "Crypto" results in the
| positive direction no? I would think most people here have a
| generally positive view of strong open source public key
| cryptography as in many ways its the foundation of many
| modern technologies and the current internet correct?
| shaldengeki wrote:
| I don't think any of us can know for sure, since the
| classification and sentiment analysis were both performed
| by an LLM, and I'm not seeing validation of the results by
| the author. You can imagine certain security/cryptography-
| related terms getting coded naively as negative-sentiment
| by an LLM ("vulnerability", "breach", "flaw").
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yeah, that's a lost fight. "Crypto" is ambiguous now and you
| have to figure out what is meant from context. Personally, I
| try to avoid using the abbreviated term because it causes
| confusion.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Crypto is fun as a concept but after more than a decade it
| doesn't seem to be useful for much, apart from speculation. And I
| say this as someone who has fooled around with crypto a lot.
|
| AI has plenty of use cases. Just ChatGPT alone is helping me
| everyday in many different ways. I don't think it's remotely
| comparable.
| ypeterholmes wrote:
| As if money was going to be replaced overnight? The amount of
| stablecoin and CBDC and blockchain activity in general is
| massive. I frankly don't understand people who think the tech
| has no use case. It flies in the face of existing adoption, and
| also imposes an unrealistic assumption of how fast the entire
| world was going to change.
| mnau wrote:
| It's not that it has no use case. It's that it has a very
| niche use case.
|
| Government were never going to allow some unfettered parallel
| monetary system. Governments invested a lot of political
| capital to monitor and control monetary flows (from
| reasons/excuses like fraud, terrorist financing, money
| laundering). No way there were gonna relinquish that power.
|
| They might use the technology itself as CBDC, but that is
| about it.
|
| It was sold as new web 4.0 or whatever. NFTs were the future.
| Smart contracts.... And all it seemed to deliver were all
| mistakes and scams monetary system made in 19th century.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| The difference in AI and Crypto is that AI is much more
| accessible.
|
| Everyone can appreciate a photo of an astronaut on a horse.
|
| Few can grasp the concept and significance of a store of value.
| Let alone a DAO.
|
| It's the same reason why Harry Potter is more popular than
| Einstein's "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" in which he
| came up with the theory of relativity.
|
| When others talk about something we don't understand, we tend to
| get angry and dismissive. Like boys in elementary school who
| think girls are stupid. Because they can't figure out why they
| act the way they do. So on top of the lower popularity, we also
| get the hate towards crypto.
| latchkey wrote:
| I'd argue it a bit differently.
|
| The way I see it, we are taught from a young age to fear
| finance and money. We're told that we need to had it to someone
| else to store safely (banks). We're told that we need someone
| else to invest it for us for our future (401k). We're told that
| our government is responsible for protecting us (military and
| taxes).
|
| As a result, we constantly hand off the responsibility to
| others and we don't make the effort to learn and understand it
| ourselves. We get angry and dismissive when we don't want to
| talk about something we are fearful of.
|
| Of course, the people who take the different approach, of
| diving into understand it, are the ones who are benefiting the
| most from it. Those are the wealthy people on Wall Street. The
| bankers. The CEOs. The people who keep pushing the fear.
|
| AI isn't about money or finance, it is about knowledge.
| criddell wrote:
| > When others talk about something we don't understand, we tend
| to get angry and dismissive.
|
| When Neha Narula said (roughly) _crypto is speedrunning the
| entire history of traditional finance and repeating the same
| mistakes_ she was pointing out the arrogance and (possibly
| willful) ignorance of many crypto promoters. Take that and add
| on justifiable anger at proof-of-work schemes during a
| developing climate crisis and much of the dismissive attitude
| and hate is well earned.
| make3 wrote:
| to me this is an obviously dumb and reactionary comparison
| fritzo wrote:
| > 2016: Whoa, deep learning actually works?
|
| The deep learning wave began before 2010 when this analysis
| starts. When I was looking for a job in 2009, there was already a
| big deep learning hype wave, and my new employer sent me around
| to look for industrial funding.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Interesting how sentiments gets worse over time for every topic.
|
| Could you check the overall HN sentiment over time, to see if we
| got more pessimistic ?
| JZL003 wrote:
| It's not that i think anything is wrong, but isn't it strange
| there's no jump I see in WFH comments during the pandemic when
| everyone was doing it
| cgh wrote:
| As far as I know, AI hasn't succeeded in literally blinding
| anyone: https://mashable.com/article/bored-ape-nfts-vision-loss-
| apef...
|
| Molly White's comment at the end is superb.
| rglover wrote:
| The bulk of AI "projects," yes. As a discipline, no. Just like
| with the crypto nonsense, a bunch of junk was created and died.
| The same will happen with AI. What's left after the hype
| cycle/cash pump will be the things of real value.
| tkellogg wrote:
| did HN become generally more negative over the same time?
| wiremine wrote:
| Feels lick click bait. I think we're going to see a lot of "Is X
| the Next Crypto?" articles for a while.
| freedomben wrote:
| It's not, you should read TFA
| samanator wrote:
| The last graph shows decreasing sentiment over time for all
| metrics. I wonder if HN has become more negative over time...
| baggachipz wrote:
| The cycle of these technologies is always the same:
| 1. Initial introduction or release 2. Major hype and
| influx of greed money. <- AI is here now 3. Failure to
| live up to the hype, resulting in the tech becoming a punchline
| and gobs of money lost 4. Renaissance of the tech as its
| true potential is eventually realized, which doesn't match the
| original hype but ends up very useful 5. Iteration and
| improvement with no clear "done" or "achieved" milestone, it just
| becomes part of society
|
| The bombardment of charlatans taking advantage of the term,
| coupled with commercials everywhere suggests we will soon hit
| stage 3 for AI. The Super Bowl commercials are usually the
| tipping point.
|
| Crypto is at stage 3 now.
|
| Not all technologies make it to steps 4-5.
|
| Hell, I remember when social media followed the same path. And
| ecommerce before it. Or the web in general before that. And on
| and on it goes.
| asicsarecool wrote:
| AI is at step 4, transitioning to 5
| baggachipz wrote:
| You could argue ML is at step 4, but LLMs (called "AI" for
| some reason) are most definitely in the major hype/dumb money
| being chucked at it step.
| baq wrote:
| "Some reason" is you talk to the thing about anything and
| it answers and a lot of the time its answers make sense.
| I'd like to remind you that one year ago this was sci-fi!
| Yoric wrote:
| Incidentally, "AI" (the original field called AI, not the
| latest definition of the term) definitely made it to 5.
| Except these days, we call some parts of it "SQL", other
| parts "the Web".
| GaggiX wrote:
| It just happens that they are extremely useful for millions
| of people.
| potatolicious wrote:
| When every LinkedIn thoughtfluencer is writing 3-page screeds
| about how they're thoughtfluencing through AI you _really_
| know you 're firmly in step 2.
|
| Likewise when breathless reporters keep asking non-AI
| companies what their AI strategy is, you know you're firmly
| in step 2. Remember when Walmart was expected to have a
| "metaverse strategy"?
|
| Also worth noting that many (most?) technologies _do not have
| a step 4 or 5_. They 're just permanently/indefinitely dead
| after the hype train goes off the rails (see: personal
| jetpacks)
| zirgs wrote:
| Some AI tools like AI upscaling are firmly at step 4-5.
| Pretty much all the latest games are using DLSS or FSR.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| This is why I hate the term "AI". Ai pathfinding, ai
| upscaling, and generative art are completely different
| pieces of technology that falls under the same marketing
| term. Strictly speaking, the decades of machine learning
| that's been going on in acedemia is also all "AI" as
| well.
|
| we need to drawn more disctint lines.
| potatolicious wrote:
| Yeah, I think "AI" as a term has always been super
| compromised to the point of uselessness. ML in general is
| firmly in steps 4-5 - it's integrated into our lives in
| so many places and generally without the users having to
| think about it.
|
| Car crash detection, automatic photo editing, heart rate
| sensing, etc. We use this stuff daily but there's
| generally little hype about the underlying tech (though
| some hype about specific applications).
|
| What's in step 2 is "Generative AI", which IMO is also a
| misnomer for "large language models". The viability and
| uses of these models is far from proven out yet.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| Let's be real. They aren't writing those 3 pages, GPT is.
| chpatrick wrote:
| Something being overhyped implies grifters will appear but
| grifters don't imply that something is overhyped. I'm sure
| people were the same with cars and transistors. People
| definitely were breathless about smartphones the same way
| when they came out (everyone was selling apps that did
| exactly the same thing as websites) and they've changed the
| world for better or worse.
|
| Crypto and AI both attract get rich quick bullshitters but
| I think AI right now is actually a crazy unexpected sci fi
| tech while crypto wasn't good for anything except fraud,
| gambling and the black market.
| potatolicious wrote:
| I partially agree. I think the last giant hype cycle
| around crypto had no pants on the entire time. It was all
| one giant delusion, and also why I don't think crypto
| will have step 4-5. It's just dead outside of incredibly
| niche uses (many of which are crimes).
|
| I also agree that there's something _there_ there with
| LLMs... but _also_ that it 's hopelessly overhyped right
| now.
|
| Smartphones are a good example of this - nowadays we tend
| to think about iPhone or BlackBerry as the start of the
| smartphone "era" - but that wasn't the actual start of
| smartphones.
|
| The first smartphones were called PDAs, and there was a
| hype cycle around that! Lots of companies wanted in! But
| adoption was abysmal and the whole thing fizzled out.
| BlackBerry and iPhone _were_ the steps 4-5 of that cycle.
|
| The state of LLMs right now is the Palm Pilot. Whiz-bang.
| Cool. Tons of press. Lots of imagined applications and
| attempts at mainstream adoption - but honestly nowhere
| near good enough to achieve mainstream breakout. Died a
| slow death without fulfilling its most lofty promises,
| and the space was relegated to a niche status until the
| _actual_ entrants arrived to actually achieve mainstream
| success.
|
| I think LLMs will have a step 4-5 with actual mainstream
| success. I just don't think the current players are it,
| and also that the vast majority of the current players
| have no pants on and are just pure grift.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't think Jetpacks are even in step one. Tech's been
| there but I don't think any are commercially available.
| They've certainly been hyped for decades, but more in the
| same way most sci-fi concepts are glamorized in general.
| Worldwide instant communication was very much a sci-fi
| concept 50 years ago, and today it's definitely not all
| rainbows and butterflies
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Jetpacks aren't here because they're fundamentally
| incompatible with real-world society. Imagine giving a
| typical driver a jetpack or a flying car, and then think
| about how a traffic accident would play out.
|
| Or in other words, _we already have flying cars_ - but
| the form of a flying car that 's compatible with reality
| is called _a helicopter_ , and piloting one comes with a
| fuck ton of expensive hoops to jump through.
|
| That's the overall problem with all the cool sci-fi tech
| - it's cool _in an action movie_ , when the protagonists
| are the only ones who get to use it. It stops being cool
| and becomes either useless or dangerous, once every rando
| gets to use it in their daily lives.
| lmm wrote:
| > Jetpacks aren't here because they're fundamentally
| incompatible with real-world society. Imagine giving a
| typical driver a jetpack or a flying car, and then think
| about how a traffic accident would play out.
|
| Oh yeah, imagine a transportation technology that killed
| people every week. No way that would be legal. Except if
| it's cars, for some reason they magically get a pass.
|
| > Or in other words, we already have flying cars - but
| the form of a flying car that's compatible with reality
| is called a helicopter, and piloting one comes with a
| fuck ton of expensive hoops to jump through.
|
| We could get rid of those hoops and flying cars would
| still have a lower death rate than the regular kind. But
| they can't replicate the "our oopsies are someone else's
| problem" field that cars have. That's the hard part.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Oh yeah, imagine a transportation technology that
| killed people every week. No way that would be legal.
| Except if it 's cars, for some reason they magically get
| a pass._
|
| Imagine a transportation technology that killed orders of
| magnitude more of people every week. That's the reality
| if you just magically s/car/jetpack/g for everyone.
|
| > _We could get rid of those hoops and flying cars would
| still have a lower death rate than the regular kind._
|
| Not really. Driving a car is trivial compared to flying a
| helicopter; the hoops in question are mostly about
| ensuring pilots are properly trained (vs. half-ass
| bullshit trained, "you'll learn the _real_ thing on the
| road " that is getting a driver's license) and actually
| meet some health standards. Number and difficulty of
| hoops differ in various areas of aviation, but they all
| recognize just how much easier it is to kill yourself
| with an aircraft, and how much more death and destruction
| an aircraft can cause.
| Yodel0914 wrote:
| This is pretty much the Gartner hype cycle, right?
| justanotheratom wrote:
| What was the cost of the Mistral fine-tune? What was the cost of
| the Mistral inference on the full comment dataset?
| sebastiennight wrote:
| Was wondering the same. The whole article is missing this one
| data point as a superb selling point for their software.
|
| Come on, OP! Spill the beans!
| telepathy wrote:
| AI has novel functionality and utility while crypto does not
| totorovirus wrote:
| How could a sane engineer think that chatgpt wrapper could be the
| next unicorn?
| winternett wrote:
| It's crazy how we refer to what's being marketed now as Ai. Ai is
| a very valid technology that has been worked on for years and
| even though it is expanding, it is not the same as the LLMs and
| other things that are being marketed and evangelized under the
| hood by old crypto and NTF sellers and scammers.
|
| The bar for Ai should be what can learn and comprehend inputs
| without simply scraping Reddit, Twitter, and other social
| platforms on the Internet and then parsing responses. Ai as a
| term need to have an updated definition before things begin to
| become less hype and more meaningful. What is being marketed
| incorrectly as Ai these days is similar to how Crypto
| overpromised and under delivered, while also funneling money out
| of everyone's pockets, creating a frenzy of bad investment, and
| in creating unrealistic fear and very stupidly problems in
| society based on overconfidence in low-brow overconfidence in
| tech.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Appreciate the addendum.
|
| I suspect there are two things being measured at once here:
| people's sentiments changing, and the content being discussed
| changing.
|
| Once a topic becomes "trendy", the average article quality seems
| to drop. You go from research articles and niche blogs to the
| general press and businesses trying to cash in on the trend.
| npunt wrote:
| Crypto requires explanation, AI merely demonstration.
|
| The only demonstration crypto has is 'look, more money today' and
| that only works sometimes.
|
| AI's demonstration is followed by explanation of how it will kill
| us all, or why it won't work in context X, or take our job, etc,
| but you can kind of just ignore that and use it.
| nikanj wrote:
| Crypto's demonstration is 1) number goes up, everyone can
| become wealthy 2) you can buy drugs anonymously 3) all sorts of
| ransomware and blackmail
| tensor wrote:
| We have been using AI for various tasks for decades now. In fact,
| every day things you take for granted are powered by machine
| learning, and most people don't even realize it.
|
| Is OCR "a scam just like crypto"? How about voice recognition,
| used daily all over the world? What about spam filters? Clearly
| useless over hyped technology right?
|
| Even if you wanted to limit the term AI to large language models,
| which by the way, would make your use of the term incredibly
| wrong, it STILL has many common and useful application. You can
| use LLMs to classify text (sentiment, toxicity, etc), they can be
| paired with voice models to improve speech recognition or improve
| translation services, and so on.
|
| I think it's better to ask what you think the major similarity is
| between AI and crypto, because it's hard to find any other than a
| subset of the crypto fanatics now jumping on LLMs as the solution
| to every problem. But this group isn't actually part of the AI
| community.
| code_runner wrote:
| I completely agree that there is no relationship at all between
| the two. Hucksters are gonna huckster no matter what the medium
| is.
|
| If you want to ask "are LLMs the next metaverse" or
| something.... implying LLMs are over-promising on their utility
| and the hype is all driven by the companies controlling the
| tech.... even that is a stretch but makes more sense.
|
| Anyone selling you AGI, or "make money on youtube by typing a
| sentence into this prompt" is probably a crypto scammer who
| found a new group of people to scam.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Is OCR "a scam just like crypto"?
|
| OCR is a technology.
|
| Cryptocoins are a community. The _SAME_ people who pushed
| crypto have now moved into the AI sphere and are hawking AI.
|
| Its like all the snake oil salesmen of the 1800s suddenly
| discovered that cars are selling and have become car salesmen.
| That doesn't mean that cars are a scam, it means that many,
| many people trying to sell cars to you are scammers.
|
| Having our guard up against hucksters, especially when the
| great community of hucksters are obviously moving in lockstep
| to say the same thing (and coordinate their arguments thanks to
| the internet / meme culture), it makes it easy to pick out when
| to be on guard.
| everfree wrote:
| OCR is a technology. Users of a particular OCR software form
| a community.
|
| Cryptocoins are a technology. Users of a particular
| cryptocoin protocol form a community.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Cryptocoins are a technology. Users of a particular
| cryptocoin protocol form a community.
|
| Nah. Cryptocoin users fluidly switch between cryptocoins.
| You could be into... I dunno... Lunacoin... and by next
| week you'd have changed all your money into Mooncoin before
| anyone notices. In fact, I can pump Lunacoin while I'm
| selling it and no one would be wise to my tricks.
|
| OCR users don't really. Its a lot of friction.
|
| There's a reason why cryptocoins were so good at scamming.
| They were fluid enough that you could be a dishonest snake.
| But if you write like a 10,000 line codebase using
| tesseract-ocr, you ain't switching off of that without some
| serious amounts of effort. (Certainly not a week's worth of
| effort IMO).
| everfree wrote:
| I don't really know what you're arguing against. Are you
| arguing that cryptocoin users don't form communities?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >That doesn't mean that cars are a scam, it means that many,
| many people trying to sell cars to you are scammers.
|
| But AI isn't a scam, that's their point. The more opt
| comparison here may be to horse buggies instead of snake oil.
| We probably will inevitable move more towards generative
| content, and everyone's trying to find their place as
| livelihoods are being impacted.
|
| And of course there's the legalities of what's used to train
| AI. Crypto was completely decoupled and economic concepts
| aren't exactly copyright to begin with. So this doesn't apply
| much here.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > But AI isn't a scam, that's their point.
|
| Anything can be a scam when a scammer is saying it. Its not
| so hard to make an AI scam.
|
| Step 1: Say that you're an AI specialist.
|
| Step 2: Take people's money.
|
| Step 3: Done. You now have their money. Don't even
| "profit", just take their money.
|
| As long as dumbasses give their money to the latest-and-
| greatest crap and "technological fashion statements", this
| scam will continue over-and-over again. I mean, at least
| the cryptocoin community had a word-babble of blockchain
| technologies and hashing. AI is so new that they barely
| have any language for this scam and people are still
| forking money over. Its almost laughable at how little
| defenses people have against this.
|
| ---------
|
| The SBF and FTX saga is your template. Just do the same
| thing except with AI-like words and you'll get pretty far
| these days.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The difference is, with crypto, the scammers were
| approximately the entirety of the field, and were
| scamming people with bullshit product tailor-made to be a
| vehicle for scamming. With AI, those same scammers are
| just a small fraction of the overall market, and they're
| overhyping a real thing with real value. There's a
| qualitative difference here across many dimensions.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > With AI, those same scammers are just a small fraction
| of the overall market
|
| Are they really?
|
| A lot of these fly-by-night operations are just glorified
| SASS apps sticking a few tokens in front of your text
| before it goes to ChatGPT and calling the whole thing a
| new AI application.
|
| There's definitely a low of low-effort crap in the market
| today in "AI". There's some real gems out there for sure
| but... my guard is up. Some of these businesses have no
| actual business model and are coasting purely on hype.
|
| And that's probably the _better_ of AI startups these
| days, in that it actually has a product, actually has a
| businessplan (a crappy one but one exists). There's even
| worse crap than this out there.
| lmm wrote:
| > How about voice recognition, used daily all over the world?
|
| Yes, absolutely. The money is in selling companies an excuse to
| keep customers on hold until they give up and stop trying to
| get the refund they're legally entitled, "voice recognition" is
| valuable only because it's a legally acceptable smokescreen.
| dpflan wrote:
| It's pretty clearly not. You can go to some gen-AI site and make
| some content pretty easily. What am I going to use Shiba coins
| for?
| aantix wrote:
| AI, specifically ChatGPT is the first thing since maybe my
| Google/Stackoverflow that has fundamentally changed my day as a
| developer.
|
| It's a constant conversation now, with ChatGPT, over hard
| problems. The AI doesn't always get it right, but it's a great
| partner, with so many great suggestions.
|
| I cannot imagine going back.
| whartung wrote:
| ChatGPT is my goto destination for tech questions now. It's
| (mostly) far more efficient than Google and I can actually have
| a (limited) conversation with it, rather than arguing with
| StackOverflow mods.
|
| Similarly with IRC. ChatGPT responds, IRC is hit or miss.
|
| It's an imperfect discussion, and can always lead to weird
| rabbit holes and dead ends, but it sure feels more efficient
| than the alternatives.
| wand3r wrote:
| I am convinced blockchain wouldve produced a techno utopia akin
| to the birth of the internet. Unfortunately, it had the exact
| opposite dynamic of typical companies in that founders instantly
| became liquid millionaires without ever building anything. That
| is the crypto trap.
|
| Virtually nothing else has this dynamic, even VC funded startups
| during ZIRP.
| anthk wrote:
| AI at least worked on protein folding. Bitcoin wastes more power
| than the Netherlands in a year.
| throw03172019 wrote:
| AI can actually solve problems and generate revenue (profit TBD).
| Very hard to even get customers with crypto.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| AI feels more like the .COM bubble. There was a lot of hype and
| nonsense but the underlying tech really changed the world. I feel
| the same about AI. Crypto was always a solution that looked for
| problems it could solve.
| karaterobot wrote:
| That is a succinct and well-stated expression of my opinion at
| present, so here's an upvote. I like that it also leaves the
| door open for the corrollary that it's going to change the
| world, but we barely know how, and we have no idea about the
| second- and third-order effects yet.
| crtified wrote:
| AI is many many leagues ahead in potential, for both benefit
| _and_ damage. Realistically, we are going to see much more of
| both from AI.
|
| AI weaponisation (socially, politically, militarily, financially,
| etc..) will be a pretty big deal going forward, and will
| potentially see shady shit happen at a scale and effectiveness
| that will make crypto's little niche-scams look like child's
| play. The same old story we've seen with every major new system
| we introduce throughout human history.
|
| Crypto is merely a usage token. It's like comparing "the world's
| banking system" with "the world".
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Not even close, have crypto have been nearly this useful? I will
| give bitcoin the transaction use but other than transactions,
| crypto/smart contracts seem like there is always a way we can do
| that without crypto.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Are AI articles the next crypto articles?
| churchill wrote:
| Although I'm generally favorable towards crypto, the biggest
| difference is that unlike crypto, AI, especially in the form of
| LLMs and image models are extremely idiot-friendly.
|
| No, I don't mean it in a derogatory way: crypto leaves a lot of
| loose ends to be tied up by everyday humans who just want to be
| left alone - oh, and if anything goes wrong once, your fortune
| could be lost and there's no one to complain to.
|
| AI, on the other hand, is already making its way into browsers
| like Microsoft's Edge where I can ask it to generate all kinds of
| ideas, images, summaries, etc. via the chat format everyone is
| already friendly with. Likewise, GPT3 & 4's first major
| applications that took off was ChatGPT that brought AI chat to
| noobs and you don't need to be a hacker bro to use that.
|
| In contrast, the first time I downloaded Metamask and tried to
| buy USDC, I quickly found out that there are different versions
| (correct me if I'm wrong) of this single cryptocurrency hosted on
| the Polygon, Ethereum, Avalanche, etc. blockchains.
|
| What's that even supposed to mean to a beginner who wants to send
| money to a third-world country in minutes? And, remember: one
| wrong step and you could possibly lose everything.
| _pdp_ wrote:
| Yes, most projects are pure hype. The amount of AI peddling on
| Twitter and YouTube is unprecedented. I wish the community were a
| lot more humble in that regard. That being said, there are a lot
| of legit use cases and customers in need of solutions that cannot
| be done quickly via a few API calls to OpenAI and require a lot
| of customisations and hand-holding. AI is hyped a lot, but there
| are companies out there, and I like to consider us being one of
| them (bias, I know), that think about how to enable customers to
| solve/improve real problems with the help of AI instead of making
| a quick buck by peddling the latest doc-chat solutions.
|
| From that perspective, AI is not the new crypto. If you ignore
| the noise and focus on the actual work, you will find a lot of
| good things about this field, and I might say even breakthrough
| advances, that help us reconsider what intelligent life really
| means.
|
| Disclaimer: we are one of the first "chat to your docs" companies
| that came out as soon as ChatGPT was released when all we had at
| our disposal was text-davinci-003 and basic vector stores. Now,
| we do mostly other things.
|
| Edit: fixed typos
| dougmwne wrote:
| Wow, solid evidence that HN is turning into a bunch of cranky
| grouches! I suspected, but never thought the sentiment trend
| would be this clear.
|
| I propose we fork the site and send out an invite for
| HNGoodVibesOnly for anyone whose post history is in the top half
| of the median sentiment distribution.
| capableweb wrote:
| I think the Addendum is the most interesting part of this
| blogpost. For the decade or so I've been on HN, I don't feel like
| it's been getting more negative overall. But maybe it's just more
| discussions about various dramas overall than before, which would
| drag down the score I'm sure.
| chx wrote:
| There was a time when ML brought us things like
| https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/ and we had a good laugh.
|
| Then came ChatGPT. The tens of billions dollars poured into the
| next hype, often by the same hustlers who hyped crypto (but for
| sure they were not the ones who lost the billions or stood in
| front of the court). Same environmental damage due to wasted
| electricity poured into wasteful, pointless computation. Same
| hype without any actual usefulness. In both cases this sentiment
| is met with a huff but it's factual.
|
| Came the AI-written mushroom hunting guides.
|
| Came AI Modi singing trending garnering votes for him. Our worst
| fears of democracy ending in favor of the candidate with the most
| processing power aka with the most money winning.
|
| This pandemic (for covid didn't end yet) already 300 000 people
| died because of hand written propaganda
| (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071...)
| when the next pandemic will come the AI produced oh so plausible
| bullshit will flood everything and millions will die.
|
| Aza Raskin compared it to a zero day vulnerability for the
| operating system of humanity and he is oh so right.
|
| Who is laughing now?
| CSMastermind wrote:
| How much of the downward trend has to do with self-driving car
| overhype.
|
| Lumping everything 'AI' together doesn't make much sense to me.
| dottjt wrote:
| One perspective I've been thinking about lately is how the rise
| of Crypto has been hugely beneficial for AI, in the same way that
| the dot-com bubble was hugely beneficial for the internet.
|
| Essentially Crypto lead to huge investment into GPUs and GPU
| technology, and then once Crypto collapsed lead to a huge
| capacity of compute power which then decidedly was put into AI.
|
| I doubt that investment into GPU technology would have been
| driven by the idea of AI alone. Something manic like Crypto had
| to drive it initially. Without Crypto, I imagine the AI
| revolution we're seeing today would not have taken place.
| Mesopropithecus wrote:
| As someone who hasn't thought about it that way yet: that's
| interesting!
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| I have a private conspiracy theory - that I don't really
| believe - that "Satoshi Nakamoto" was actually a nome-de-guerre
| of an early emergent AGI, trying to figure out how to convince
| a planetful of monkeys to attach as much high-end processing
| power to the 'net as possible.
| phs318u wrote:
| I'd read that story!
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Nom de guerre.
|
| French is fucked.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > One perspective I've been thinking about lately is how the
| rise of Crypto has been hugely beneficial for AI
|
| No, it wasn't. Crypto made GPUs scarce and expensive, and
| prices haven't come down yet. Crypto set AI back in many ways,
| including the infestation of grifters who have moved from
| Crypto to AI
| Uehreka wrote:
| I disagree. Crypto sucked up the limited number of consumer
| GPUs in existence, and manufacturers weren't willing to scale
| up production since they knew that when crypto crashed the
| demand would revert to the mean and all the mining GPUs would
| flood the market and body slam the price.
|
| AFAIK the actual features of the GPU that are used to
| accelerate AI (fp16, int8 and mixed-precision tensor
| processing) had nothing to do with the features used by miners.
| And no miners were buying/financing-the-creation-of the class
| of server GPUs used by folks like OpenAI because they didn't
| make financial sense for mining (we're talking 10x the price of
| a high-end consumer GPU and nowhere near that increase in
| hashrate).
| ertgbnm wrote:
| You could also argue the exact opposite. Crypto skyrocketed
| around 2011-2012 which is also the advent of the compute heavy
| deep learning boom. If anything, the cost escalation and
| scarcity of GPUs due to the demand by the crypto-space slowed
| down AI progress since resources were dedicated to computing
| useless hashes instead of training better models.
|
| I think a good story can be told for both sides.
| n3150n wrote:
| That's an interesting perspective, and although it might have
| contributed, I wouldn't put that much weight onto crypto's
| legacy for AI, IMHO.
|
| The first papers that used GPUs to train neural networks were
| from the end of the 2000s and the beginning of the 2010s,
| before the Bitcoin price hike of 2013. But years before that,
| Nvidia had already introduced the CUDA architecture to GPUs in
| 2006 [1], which were used, among others things, to speed up
| algorithms to analyze seismic data for oil and gas exploration
| [2].
|
| So with or without the "crypto fever", I believe the same
| advancements in GPU technology would have followed - but maybe
| not the scarcity brought by the investments in crypto mining.
| Because of this, we may also argue the opposite, that crypto
| got in the way of AI development and was one of the culprits of
| the "GPU rich vs GPU poor" division we hear/read about
| nowadays.
|
| In a very similar fashion, though, I do tend to believe that PC
| gaming holds far more importance to the rise of both AI and
| crypto...
|
| [1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/nvidia-unveils-cuda-the-gpu-
| co...
|
| [2] https://www.nvidia.co.uk/docs/IO/43587/Headwave.pdf
| sgt101 wrote:
| I'll agree when someone uses Crypto in the analysis of the
| question.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Thanks for releasing a new HN dataset. The HN dataset on BigQuery
| hasn't been updated since a while.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Why is general sentiment on this site seemingly getting more
| negative over time?
| Lerc wrote:
| It would be interesting to do a sentiment analysis on users to
| see if users themselves are becoming more negative over time or
| if negative voices are composing more of the message volume.
|
| With the degree of data available I have wondered if you could
| determine a point at which you could suggest users see
| professional help. Then if you could do such a thing, would it be
| ethical to do so? Would it be ethical _not_ to do so?
| ertgbnm wrote:
| I'm interested in the last bit. That sentiment towards anything
| on HN has become steadily more negative over time. Would be
| interested to see if this trend exists on other websites and the
| internet as a whole. It could be a way to measure the
| optimism/vibe of all of humanity. Is the entire internet becoming
| more cynical/skeptical/mean?
| piercebot wrote:
| My private hypothesis here is that we're doing a better job as
| a society of encouraging "disconnection" from being "always
| online," which is documented to aggravate mental health
| issues[0].
|
| It stands to reason therefore that the people who remain online
| to comment may have lower levels of mental hygiene by virtue of
| their ongoing exposure to the internet and social media, thus
| resulting in a gradual decrease in sentiment over time.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7364393/#:~:tex...
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| They both have "winters".
|
| Each also has "true believers" who can ignore the facts before
| them and incessantly hype an imaginary future.
| rabbits_2002 wrote:
| no
|
| ai is demonstrably useful crypto is not
| lamontcg wrote:
| AI/ML is certainly going to get integrated everywhere ultimately
| and in a lot of things that will get hidden to the average
| consumer, like medical imaging.
|
| What is really hype right now is how AI is going to upset all our
| day to day lives and earn billions for startups.
|
| It is probably going to be a bit more incremental than the hype
| right now, and most of the profits will likely go to the already
| established tech companies.
|
| ChatGPTs AI assistants are already seen as a sign that a good
| number of AI startups that are a thin layer around someone else's
| LLM will collapse due to zero moat.
|
| It also isn't even clear where the profits are going to come from
| GPT/LLMs other than from NVIDIA selling shovels to the miners.
| Beyond that it will probably be the existing tech companies and
| they may be running them at a considerable loss for a long time
| to come.
| meowtimemania wrote:
| Github Copilot has been really valuable to me and has had
| meaningful, positive impact on my life.
|
| Crypto hasn't made me more productive in any way. To me, it's had
| the same utility as an online casino.
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