No bubble has deserved to pop as much as AI deserves to
Blockchain and crypto were worse. „AI” has some actual use even if it’s way overblown.
I’m glad you didn’t say NFTs because my Bored Ape will regain and triple its value any day now!
Crypto has a legitimate value, you can buy drugs with it.
Honestly kinda miss when the drugs I did were illegal. I used to buy weed from this online seller that was really into designer drugs. The amount of time I used to spend on Erowid just to figure out wtf I was about to take.
Creating a specialized neural net to perform a specific function is cool. Slapping GPT into customer support because you like money is horse shit and I hope your company collapses. But yeah you’re right. Blockchain was a solution with basically no problems to fix. Neural nets are a tool that can do a ton of things, but everyone is content to use them as a hammer.
Yes! “AI” defined as only LLMs and the party trick applications is a bubble. AI in general has been around for decades and will only continue to grow.
Blockchain has many valuable uses. A distributed zero trust ledger is useful. Sadly the finance scammers and the digital beanie baby collectors attracted all the marketing money.
And yet, every single company that has ever tried to implement a distributed zero trust ledger into their products and processes has inevitably ditched the idea after releasing that it does not, in fact, provide any useful benefit.
It is exceptionally useful for the auditing of damn near everything in digital space, as long as shared resources and 3rd parties have access to the blockchain … which is probably the major reason corporations and politicians don’t want anything to do with it.
It’d be a lot harder to hide crimes, fraud, grey business dealings, bribery and illegal donations, sanction violations, secret police slush funds, etc, etc if every event in the entire financial system and supply chain was logged and verifiable.
The idea has merit, in theory – but in practice, in the vast majority of cases, having a trusted regulator managing the system, who can proactively step in to block or unwind suspicious activity, turns out to be vastly preferable to the “code is law” status quo of most blockchain implementations. Not to mention most potential applications really need a mechanism for transactions to clear in seconds, rather than minutes to days, and it’d be preferable if they didn’t need to boil the oceans dry in the process of doing so.
If I was really reaching, I could maybe imagine a valid use case for say, a hypothetical, federated open source game that needed to have a trusted way for every node to validate the creation and trading of loot and items, that could serve as a layer of protection against cheating nodes duping items, for instance. But that’s insanely niche, and for nearly every other use case a database held by a trusted entity is faster, simpler, safer, more efficient, and easier to manage.
I’m not even understanding what AI is at this point because there’s no delineation between moderately sophisticated algorithms and things that are orders of magnitude more complex.
I mean, if something like multisampling came out today we’d all know how it’d be marketed
AI is a ridiculous broad term these days. Everybody had been slapping the label on anything. It’s kinda like saying “transportation” and it means anything between babies crawling up to wrap drive and teleportation.
Technically speaking how I differentiate it is:
- clever algorithm is a good heuristic
- statistics on steroids is machine learning
- using a transformer model is AI (for now)
The AI buzzword means machine learning. You give it a massive dataset and it identifies correlations.
Regular hand-coded AI is mostly simple state machines.
Yes. But companies bought into AI way more than they bought into crypto though, in many outlandish and stupid ways. And many AI companies sell it in ways they shouldn’t.
As a counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.
Truly the hardest and most weird buy-in of crypto that happened.
Oh yeah. Kodak too. Gamestop, right? There were a bunch of others.
Try Venice Ai, free to use, won’t try to censor your topics. Still just a chat bot though (although I think it does image generation too).
I’m sorry, what about their comment made you think they were asking for reccomendations?
Aw, only 99%?
As a major locally-hosted AI proponent, aka a kind of AI fan, absolutely. I’d wager it’s even worse than crypto, and I hate crypto.
What I’m kinda hoping happens is that bitnet takes off in the next few months/years, and that running a very smart model on a phone or desktop takes milliwatts… Who’s gonna buy into Sam Altman $7 trillion cloud scheme to burn the Earth when anyone can run models offline on their phones, instead of hitting APIs running on multi-kilowatt servers?
And ironically it may be a Chinese company like Alibaba that pops the bubble, lol.
If bitnet takes off, that’s very good news for everyone.
The problem isn’t AI, it’s AI that’s so intensive to host that only corporations with big datacenters can do it.
The fuck is bitnet
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/bitnet-scaling-1-bit-transformers-for-large-language-models/ use 1 bit instead of 8 or 16, yay performance gainz
As someone who follows the startup space (and is thinking of starting their own, non-AI driven startup), the issue is all of the easily solvable problems have already been solved. The only thing that shakes up the tree is when new tech comes along and makes some of the old problems easy to solve.
So take a look at crypto - If you wanted to make a tip bot on Telegram, before crypto that was really hard. You needed to register with something like PayPal, have the recipient register with PayPal, etc etc etc. After crypto it was “Hey this person sent you 5$, use this private key if you want to recover it” (btw I made this service and it was used a lot).
Now look at AI - Imagine making a service that detects CSAM before AI took off. As an aside, I did NOT make this service, but I know a group of people who did. Imagine trying to make this without the AI boom - you’d need millions of images for training data, a PhD in machine learning, and so much more. Now, anyone can make it in their basement.
The point is, investors KNOW the bubble is a bubble and that it will pop. It doesn’t matter though. They’re looking for people who will solve problems that previously cost 1bln to solve with only 1mln of funding. If even 1% of their companies pay off, they make a profit.
bubble after bubble after bubble after…
problem is, the amount of soap(money) that goes around to make the bubbles keeps shrinking because the bubbles are siphoning it away from the consumers.
I wonder what happens when there’s no more soap left to go around?
Not shocked. It seems the tech bros like to troll us every few years.
The tech bros are selling, but it’s the VCs that are fueling this whole thing. They’re grasping for the next big thing. Mostly they don’t care if any of it actually works, as long as they can pump share value and then sell before it collapses.
Techbros are the modern day equivalent to snake oil salesmen.
They they have been trying to repeat big tech rise…
But each generation is more limp dick
Uber/airbnb > crypto > ai
Checks to see if Baidu is doing AI…yes, they are. How shocking.
“probably 1% of the companies will stand out and become huge and will create a lot of value, or will create tremendous value for the people, for society. And I think we are just going through this kind of process.”
Baidu is huge. Sounds like good news for Baidu!
YUP
Tech makes bubbles because people think it’s magic.
I think less restrictive AI that are free, like Venice AI (you can ask it pretty much anything and it will not stop you) will be around for longer than ones that went with restrictive subscription models, and that eventually those other ones will become niche.
New technology always propagates further the freer it is to use and experiment with, and ChatGPT and OpenAI are quite restrictive and money hungry.
