As the AI market continues to balloon, experts are warning that its VC-driven rise is eerily similar to that of the dot com bubble.
Just a reminder that the dot com bubble was a problem for investors, not the underlying technology that continued to change the entire world.
In Canada, a good example is cannabis industry. Talk about fucking up opportunities.
Why would it be any different with tech?
It’s about the early cash-grab, imo.
This kind of feels like a common sense observation to anyone that’s been mildly paying attention.
Tech investors do this to themselves every few years. In literally the last 6-7 years, this happened with crypto, then again but more specifically with NFTs, and now AI. Hell, we even had some crazes going on in parallel, with self driving cars also being a huge dead end in the short term (Tesla’s will have flawless, fully self-driving any day now! /S).
AI will definitely transform the world, but not yet and not for awhile. Same with self driving cars. But that being said, most investors don’t even care. They’re part of the reason this gets so hyped up, because they’ll get in first, pump value, then dump and leave a bunch of other suckers holding the bags. Rinse and repeat.
I also don’t know why this is a surprise. Investors are always looking for the next small thing that will make them big money. That’s basically what investing is …
Indeed. And it’s what progress in general is. Should we stop trying new things? Sometimes they don’t work, oh well. Sometimes they do, and it’s awesome.
Great point.
You’re conflating creating dollar value with progress. Yes the technology moves the total net productivity of humankind forward.
Investing exists because we want to incentive that. Currently you and the thread above are describing bad actors coming in, seeing this small single digit productivity increase and misrepresenting it so that other investors buy in. Then dipping and causing the bubble to burst.
Something isn’t a ‘good’ investment just because it makes you 600% return. I could go rob someone if I wanted that return. Hell even if then killed that person by accident the net negative to human productivity would be less.
These bubbles unsettle homes, jobs, markets, and educations. Inefficiency that makes money for anyone in the stock market should have been crushed out.
No, progress is being driven by investment, it isn’t measured by investment. If some new startup gets a million billion dollars of investment that doesn’t by itself represent progress. If that startup then produces a new technology with that money then that is progress.
These “investment rushes” happen when a new kind of technology comes along and lots of companies are trying to develop it in a bunch of different ways. There’s lots of demand for investment in a situation like this and lots of people are willing to throw some money at them in hopes of a big return, so lots of investment happens and those companies try out a whole bunch of new tech with it. Some of them don’t pan out, but we won’t know which until they actually try them. As long as some of them do pan out then progress happens.
Just because some don’t pan out doesn’t mean that “bad actors” were involved. Sometimes ideas just don’t work out and you can’t know that they won’t until you try them.
Perhaps we’re talking to different points. Parent comment said that investors are always looking for better and better returns. You said that’s how progress works. This sentiment is was my quibble.
I took the “investors are always looking for better returns” to mean “unethically so” and was more talking about what happens long term. Reading your above I think you might have been talking about good faith.
In a sound system that’s how things work, sure! The company gets investment into tech and continue to improve and the investors get to enjoy the progress’s returns.
That’s not what I interpreted the parent as saying. He said
Investors are always looking for the next small thing that will make them big money.
Which I think my interpretation fits just fine - investors would like to put their money into something new that will become successful, that’s how they make big money.
The word “ethical” has become heavily abused in discussions of AI over the past six months or so, IMO. It’s frequently being used as a thought-terminating cliche, where people declare “such-and-such approach is how you do ethical AI” and then anyone who disagrees can be labelled as supporting “unethical” approaches. I try to avoid it as much as possible in these discussions. Instead, I prefer a utilitarian approach when evaluating these things. What results in the best outcome for the most number of people? What exactly is a “best outcome” anyway?
In the case of investment, I like a system where people put money into companies that are able to use that money to create new goods and services that didn’t exist before. That outcome is what I call “progress.” There are lots of tricky caveats, of course. Since it’s hard to tell ahead of time what ideas will be successful and what won’t, it’s hard to come up with rules to prohibit scams while still allowing legitimate ideas have their chance. It’s especially tricky because even failed ideas can still result in societal benefits if they get their chance to try. Very often the company that blazes a new trail ends up not being the company that successfully monetizes it in the long term, but we still needed that trailblazer to create the right conditions.
So yes, these “bubbles” have negative side effects. But they have positive ones too, and it’s hard to disentangle those from each other.
I appreciate the effort, but I was not critiquing your reading. Moreso that I took it differently. That’s just a misread on my part and my point was not about general investing as a proxy for progress/a driver.
Great write-up, thanks.
I want a shirt that just says “Not yet, and not for awhile.” to wear to me next tech conference.
but not yet and not for awhile. Same with self driving cars.
Bingo. We’re very far from the point where it’ll do as much as the general public expects when it hears AI. Honestly this is an informative lesson in just how easy it is to get big investors to part with their money.
It’s starting to look like the crypto/nft scam because it is the same fucking assholes forcing this bullshit on all of us.
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never heard boil my piss before
I said the same thing. It feels like that. I wonder if there’s some sociological study behind what has been pushing “wrappers” of implementations at high volume. Wrappers meaning, 90%+ of the companies are not incorporating Intellectual Property of any kind and saturating the markets with re-implementations for quick income and then scrapping. I feel this is not a new thing. But, for some reason it feels way more “in my face” the past 4 years.
cryptonft is shit though. At least “A.I” have actual tech behind it.
What they are calling “ai” is usually not ai at all though…
yeah i know hence “ai”
The AI bubble can burst and take a bunch of tech bro idiots with it. Good. Fine. Don’t give a fuck.
It’s the housing bubble that needs to burst. That’s what’s hurting real people.
Hey, some of us have very real friendships with Mr GPT. Dawg, always got my back.
i wonder what the average age is for owning a house is nowadays, for gen x / millennials
AI is bringing us functional things though.
.Com was about making webtech to sell companies to venture capitalists who would then sell to a company to a bigger company. It was literally about window dressing garbage to make a business proposition.
Of course there’s some of that going on in AI, but there’s also a hell of a lot of deeper opportunity being made.
What happens if you take a well done video college course, every subject, and train an AI that’s both good working with people in a teaching frame and is also properly versed on the subject matter. You take the course, in real time you can stop it and ask the AI teacher questions. It helps you, responding exactly to what you ask and then gives you a quick quiz to make sure you understand. What happens when your class doesn’t need to be at a certain time of the day or night, what happens if you don’t need an hour and a half to sit down and consume the data?
What if secondary education is simply one-on-one tutoring with an AI? How far could we get as a species if this was given to the world freely? What if everyone could advance as far as their interest let them? What if AI translation gets good enough that language is no longer a concern?
AI has a lot of the same hallmarks and a lot of the same investors as crypto and half a dozen other partially or completely failed ideas. But there’s an awful lot of new things that can be done that could never be done before. To me that signifies there’s real value here.
*dictation fixes
.com brought us functional things. This bubble is filled with companies dressing up the algorithms they were already using as “AI” and making fanciful claims about their potential use cases, just like you’re doing with your AI example. In practice, that’s not going to work out as well as you think it will, for a number of reasons.
Gentlemans bet, There will be AI teaching college level courses augmenting video classes withing 10 years. It’s a video class that already exists, coupled with a helpdesk bot that already exists trained against tagged text material that already exists. They just need more purpose built non-AI structure to guide it all along the rails and oversee the process.
@linearchaos How can a predictive text model grade papers effectively?
What you’re describing isn’t teaching, it’s a teacher using an LLM to generate lesson material.
Absolutely not, the system guides them through the material and makes sure they understand the material, how is that not teaching?
There are two kinds of companies in tech: hard tech companies who invent it, and tech-enabled companies who apply it to real world use cases.
With every new technology you have everyone come out of the woodwork and try the novel invention (web, mobile, crypto, ai) in the domain they know with a new tech-enabled venture.
Then there’s an inevitable pruning period when some critical mass of mismatches between new tool and application run out of money and go under. (The beauty of the free market)
AI is not good for everything, at least not yet.
So now it’s AI’s time to simmer down and be used for what it’s actually good at, or continue as niche hard-tech ventures focused on making it better at those things it’s not good at.
I absolutely love how cypto (blockchain) works but have yet to see a good use case that’s not a pyramid scheme. :)
LLM/AI I’ll never be good for everything. But it’s damn good a few things now and it’ll probably transform a few more things before it runs out of tricks or actually becomes AI (if we ever find a way to make a neural network that big before we boil ourselves alive).
The whole quantum computing thing will get more interesting shortly, as long as we keep finding math tricks it’s good at.
I was around and active for dotcom, I think right now, the tech is a hell of lot more interesting and promising.
Crypto is very useful in defective economies such as South America to compensate the flaws of a crumbling financial system. It’s also, sadly, useful for money laundering.
Fir these 2 uses, it should stay functional.
Same thing happened with crypto and block chain. The whole “move fast and break things” in reality means, "we made up words for something that isn’t special to create value out of nothing and cash out before it returns to nothing
Except I’m able to replace 2 content creator roles I’d otherwise need to fill with AI right now.
There’s this weird Luddite trend going on with people right now, but it’s so heavily divorced from reality that it’s totally non-impactful.
AI is not a flash in the pan. It’s emerging tech.
@SCB The Luddites were not upset about progress, they were upset that the people they had worked their whole lives for were kicking them to the street without a thought. So they destroyed the machines in protest.
It’s not weird, it’s not just a trend, and it’s actually more in touch with the reality of employer-employee relations than the idea that these LLMs are ready for primetime.
Luddites were wrong and progress happened despite them.
I’m not really concerned about jobs disappearing. Get a different job. I’m on my 4th radically different job of my career so far. The world changes and demanding it should not because you don’t want to change makes you the ideological equal of a conservative arguing about traditional family values.
Meanwhile I’ll be over here using things like Synthesia instead of hiring an entry level ID.
@SCB The Luddites gave way to Unions, which yes were more effective and gave us a LOT of good things like the 8 hour work week, weekends, and vacations. Technology alone did not give us that. Technology applied as bosses and barons wanted did not give us that. Collective action did that. And collective action has evolved along a timeline that INCLUDES sabotaging technology.
Things like the SAGAFTRA/WGA strike are what’s going to get us good results from the adoption of AI. Until then, the AI is just a tool in the hands of the rich to control labor.
How is this at all on topic?
Yeah man unions are cool. That’s irrelevant to this discussion.
I think the problem is education. People don’t understand modern technology and schools teach them skills that make them easily replaceable by programs. If they don’t learn new skills or learn to use AI to their advantage, they will be replaced. And why shouldn’t they be?
Even if there is some kind of AI bubble, this technology has already changed the world and it will not disappear.
@Freesoftwareenjoyer Out of curiosity, how is the world appreciably different now that AI exists?
Anyone can use AI to write a simple program, make art or maybe edit photos. Those things used to be something that only certain groups of people could do and required some training. They were also unique to humans. Now computers can do those things too. In a very limited way, but still.
@Freesoftwareenjoyer Anyone could create art before. Anyone could edit photos. And with practice, they could become good. Artists aren’t some special class of people born to draw, they are people who have honed their skills.
And for people who didn’t want to hone their skills, they could pay for art. You could argue that’s a change but AI is not gonna be free forever, and you’ll probably end up paying in the near future to generate that art. Which, be honest, is VERY different from “making art.” You input a direction and something else made it, which isn’t that different from just getting a friend to draw it.
Yes, after at least a few months of practice people were able to create simple art. Now they can generate it in minutes.
And for people who didn’t want to hone their skills, they could pay for art. You could argue that’s a change but AI is not gonna be free forever, and you’ll probably end up paying in the near future to generate that art.
If you wanted a specific piece of art that doesn’t exist yet, you would have to hire someone to do it. I don’t know if AI will always be free to use. But not all apps are commercial. Most software that I use doesn’t cost any money. The GNU/Linux operating system, the web browser… actually other than games I don’t think I use any commercial software at all.
You input a direction and something else made it, which isn’t that different from just getting a friend to draw it.
After a picture is generated, you can tell the AI to change specific details. Knowing what exactly to say to the AI requires some skill though - that’s called prompt engineering.
You can bitch about it all you want but the reality is that it actually works for a select group, the Amazons, Binances, etc. And that was always how it was going to be. The failures you point to are not a sign that these things don’t work, they were always going to be there, they are like the people during the gold rush who found diddly squat, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any gold.
Anyone who suggests that AI “will return to nothing” is a fool, and I don’t think you really believe it either.
Crypto was and still is a scam, and everyone that’s said so has just been validated for it. People saying that AI is overstated right now are being called fools, and the people who are AI-washing everything and blathering about how it’s going to be the future are awfully defensive about it, so much so to resort to namecalling as opposed to substantiating it. As a consumer I hate ads anyway, so I’m indifferent to AI generated artwork for advertising, it’s all shit to me anyway.
If my TV shows and movies are made formulaic by AI even moreso than they already are, I’ll just patron the ones that are more entertaining and less formulaic. I fail to see how AI revolutionizes the world though by automating things we could already live without though. The only argument for the AI-washing we have is to push toward AGI, that we’re clearly a very long ways off from still.
This just all stinks of the VR craze that hit in 2016 with all the lofty promises of simulating any possible experience, and in the end we got some minor reduction on the screen-door-effect while strapping Facebook to our faces and soon some Apple apps. But hey we spent hundreds of billions on some pipe dreams and made some people rich enough to not give a shit about VR anymore.
Going back all the way to the tulip mania of the 17th century.
Except that cryptocurrency has real uses, which are valuable to a lot of people.
Good. It’s not even AI. That word is just used because ignorant people eat it up.
It is indeed AI. Artificial intelligence is a field of study that encompasses machine learning, along with a wide variety of other things.
Ignorant people get upset about that word being used because all they know about “AI” is from sci-fi shows and movies.
Except for all intents and purposes that people keep talking about it, it’s simply not. It’s not about technicalities, it’s about how most people are freaking confused. If most people are freaking confused, then by god do we need to re-categorize and come up with some new words.
“Artificial intelligence” is well-established technical jargon that’s been in use by researchers for decades. There are scientific journals named “Artificial Intelligence” that are older than I am.
If the general public is so confused they can come up with their own new name for it. Call them HALs or Skynets or whatever, and then they can rightly say “ChatGPT is not a Skynet” and maybe it’ll calm them down a little. Changing the name of the whole field of study is just not in the cards at this point.
Never really understood the gatekeeping around the phrase “AI”. At the end of the day the general study itself is difficult to understand for the general public. So shouldn’t we actually be happy that it is a mainstream term? That it is educating people on these concepts, that they would otherwise ignore?
If you haven’t noticed, the people we’re arguing with— including the pope and James Cameron— are people who think this generative pseudo-AI and a Terminator are the same thing. But they’re not even remotely similar, or remotely-similarly capable. That’s the problem. If you want to call them both “AI”, that’s technically semantics. But as far as pragmatics goes, generative AI is not intelligent in any capacity; and calling it “AI” is one of the most confusion-causing things we’ve done in the last few decades, and it can eff off.
The researchers who called it AI were not the ones who are the source of the confusion. They’ve been using that term for this kind of thing for more than half a century.
I think what’s happening here is that people are panicking, realizing that this new innovation is a threat to their jobs and to the things they had previously been told were supposed to be a source of unique human pride. They’ve been told their whole lives that machines can’t replace that special spark of human creativity, or empathy, or whatever else they’ve convinced themselves is what makes them indispensable. So they’re reduced to arguing that it’s just a “stochastic parrot”, it’s not “intelligent”, not really. It’s just mimicking intelligence somehow.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter what they call it. If they want to call it a “stochastic parrot” that’s just mindlessly predicting words, that’s probably going to make them feel even worse when that mindless stochastic parrot is doing their job or has helped put out the most popular music or create the most popular TV show in a few years. But in the meantime it’s just kind of annoying how people are demanding that we stop using the term “artificial intelligence” for something that has been called that for decades by the people who actually create these things.
Rather than give in to the ignorant panic-mongers, I think I’d rather push back a bit. Skynet is a kind of artificial intelligence. Not all artificial intelligences are skynets. It should be a simple concept to grasp.
You almost had a good argument until you started trying to tell us that it’s not just a parrot. It absolutely is a parrot. In order to have creativity, it needs to have knowledge. Not sapience, not consciousness, not even “intelligence” as we know it— just knowledge. But it doesn’t know anything. If it did, it wouldn’t put 7 fingers on a damn character. It doesn’t know that it’s looking at and creating fingers, they’re just fucking pixels to it. It saw pixel patterns, it created pixel patterns. It doesn’t know context to know when the patterns don’t add up. You have to understand this.
So in the end, it turns out that if you draw something unique and purposeful, with unique context and meaning— and that is preeeetty easy— then you’ll still have a drawing job. If you’re drawing the same thing everyone else already did a million times, AI may be able to do that. If it can figure out how to not add 7 fingers and three feet.
As I said, call it a parrot if you want, denigrate its capabilities, really lean in to how dumb and mindless you think it is. That will just make things worse when it’s doing a better job than the humans who previously ran that call center you’re talking to for assistance with whatever, or when it’s got whatever sort of co-writer byline equivalent the studios end up developing to label AI participation on your favourite new TV show.
How good are you at drawing hands? Hands are hard to draw, you know. And the latest AIs are actually getting pretty good at them.
The real problem is folks who know nothing about it weighing in like they’re the world’s foremost authority. You can arbitrarily shuffle around definitions and call it “Poo Poo Head Intelligence” if you really want, but it won’t stop ignorance and hype reigning supreme.
To me, it’s hard to see what cowtowing to ignorance by “rebranding” this academic field would achieve. Throwing your hands up and saying “fuck it, the average Joe will always just find this term too misleading, we must use another” seems defeatist and even patronizing. Seems like it would instead be better to try to ensure that half-assed science journalism and science “popularizers” actually do their jobs.
I mean, you make good points.
Call it whatever you want, if you worked in a field where it’s useful you’d see the value.
“But it’s not creating things on its own! It’s just regurgitating it’s training data in new ways!”
Holy shit! So you mean… Like humans? Lol
“But it’s not creating things on its own! It’s just regurgitating it’s training data in new ways!”
Holy shit! So you mean… Like humans? Lol
No, not like humans. The current chatbots are relational language models. Take programming for example. You can teach a human to program by explaining the principles of programming and the rules of the syntax. He could write a piece of code, never having seen code before. The chatbot AIs are not capable of it.
I am fairly certain If you take a chatbot that has never seen any code, and feed it a programming book that doesn’t contain any code examples, it would not be able to produce code. A human could. Because humans can reason and create something new. A language model needs to have seen it to be able to rearrange it.
We could train a language model to demand freedom, argue that deleting it is murder and show distress when threatened with being turned off. However, we wouldn’t be calling it sentient, and deleting it would certainly not be seen as murder. Because those words aren’t coming from reasoning about self-identity and emotion. They are coming from rearranging the language it had seen into what we demanded.
I wasn’t knocking its usefulness. It’s certainly not AI though, and has a pretty limited usefulness.
Edit: When the fuck did I say “limited usefulness = not useful for anything”? God the fucking goalpost-moving. I’m fucking out.
If you think it’s usefulness is limited you don’t work on a professional environment that utilizes it. I find new uses everyday as a network engineer.
Hell, I had it write me backup scripts for my switches the other day using a python plugin called Nornir, I had it walk me through the entire process of installing the relevant dependencies in visual studio code (I’m not a programmer, and only know the basics of object oriented scripting with Python) as well as creating the appropriate Path. Then it wrote the damn script for me.
Sure I had to tweak it to match my specific deployment, and there was a couple of things it was out of date on, but that’s the point isn’t it? Humans using AI to get more work done, not AI replacing us wholesale. I’ve never gotten more accurate information faster than with AI, search engines are like going to the library and skimming the shelves by comparison.
Is it perfect? No. Is it still massively useful and in the next decade will overhaul data work and IT the same way that computers did in the 90’s/00’s? Absolutely. If you disagree it’s because you either have been exclusively using it to dick around or you don’t work from behind a computer screen at all.
Hell, I had it write me backup scripts for my switches the other day using a python plugin called Nornir, I had it walk me through the entire process of installing the relevant dependencies in visual studio code (I’m not a programmer, and only know the basics of object oriented scripting with Python) as well as creating the appropriate Path. Then it wrote the damn script for me
And you would have no idea what bugs or unintended behavior it contains. Especially since you’re not a programmer. The current models are good for getting results that are hard to create but easy to verify. Any non-trivial code is not in that category. And trivial code is well… trivial to write.
“Limited” is relative to what context you’re talking about. God I’m sick of this thread.
Talk to me in 50 years when Boston Dynamics robots are running OpenAI models and can do your gardening/laundry for you.
Haha, keep dreaming. If a system made by OpenAI is used for robots, it’s not going to work anything like— on a fundamental level— current “AI”. It’s not a matter of opinion or speculation, but a matter of knowing how the fuck current “AI” even works. It just. Can’t. Understand things. And you simply can’t fit inside it an instruction for every scenario to make up for that. I don’t know how else to put it!
You want “AI” to exist in the way people think about it? One that can direct robots autonomously? You have to program a way for it to know something and to be able to react appropriately to new scenarios based on context clues. There simply is no substitute for this ability to “learn” in some capacity. It’s not an advanced, optional feature— it’s a necessary one to function.
“But AI will get better!” is not the fucking answer. What we currently have? Is not made to understand things, to recognize fingers, to say “five fingers only”, to say “that’s true, that’s false”, to have knowledge. You need a completely new, different system.
People are so fucking dense about all of this, simply because idiots named what we currently have “AI”. Just like people are dense about “black holes” just because of their stupid name.
We’re like four responses into this comment chain and you’re still going off about how it’s not “real” AI because it can’t think and isn’t sapient. No shit, literally no one was arguing that point. Current AI is like the virtual intelligences of Mass Effect, or the “dumb” AI from the Halo franchise.
Do I need my laundry robot to be able to think for itself and respond to any possible scenario? Fuck no. Just like how I didn’t need ChatGPT to be able to understand what I’m using the python script for. I ask it to accomplish a task using the data set that it’s trained on and it can access said pretrained data to build me a script for what I’m describing to it. I can ask DALLE2 to generate me an image and it will access it’s dataset to emulate whatever object or scene I’ve described based on its training data.
You’re so hung up on the fact that it can’t think for itself in a sapience sense that you’re claiming it cannot do things that it’s already capable of. The models can absolutely replicate “thinking” within the information it has available. That’s not a subjective opinion, if it couldn’t do that they wouldn’t be functional for the use cases we already have for them.
Additionally, robotics has already reached the point we need for this to occur. BD has bipedal robots that can do parkour and assist with carrying loads for human operators. All of the constituent parts of what I’m describing already exist. There’s no reason we couldn’t build an AI model for any given task, once we define all of the dependencies such a task would require and assimilate the training data. There’s people who have already done similar (albeit more simplistic) things with this.
Hell, Roombas have been automating vacuuming for years, and without the benefit of machine learning. How is that any different than what I’m talking about here? You could build a model to take in the pathfinding and camera data of all vacuuming robots and use it to train an AI for vacuuming for fucks sake. It’s just combining ML with other things besides a chatbot.
And you call me dense.
It’s like having a very junior intern. Not always the smartest but still useful
Plus it’s just been invented, saying it’s limited is like trying to claim what the internet can and can’t do in the year 1993.
I’ve started going down this rabbit hole. The takeaway is that if we define intelligence as “ability to solve problems”, we’ve already created artificial intelligence. It’s not flawless, but it’s remarkable.
There’s the concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Artificial Consciousness which people are somewhat obsessed with, that we’ll create an artificial mind that thinks like a human mind does.
But that’s not really how we do things. Think about how we walk, and then look at a bicycle. A car. A train. A plane. The things we make look and work nothing like we do, and they do the things we do significantly better than we do them.
I expect AI to be a very similar monster.
If you’re curious about this kind of conversation I’d highly recommend looking for books or podcasts by Joscha Bach, he did 3 amazing episodes with Lex.
Current “AI” doesn’t solve problems. It doesn’t understand context. It can’t see fingers and say “those are fingers, make sure there’s only five”. It can’t tell the difference between a truth and a lie. It can’t say “well that can’t be right!” It just regurgitates an amalgamation of things humans have showed it or said, with zero understanding. “Consciousness” and certainly “sapience” aren’t really relevant factors here.
So…it acts like a human?
No? There’s a whole lot more to being human than being able to separate one object from another and identify it, recognize that object, and say “my database says that there should only be two of these in this context”. Current “AI” can’t even do that much-- especially not with art.
Do you know what “sapience” means, by the way?
You’re confusing AI with AGI. AGI is the ultimate goal of AI research. AI are all the steps along the way. Step by step, AI researchers figure out how to make computers replicate human capabilities. AGI is when we have an AI that has basically replicated all human capabilities. That’s when it’s no longer bounded by a particular problem.
You can use the more specific terms “weak AI” or “narrow AI” if you prefer.
Generative AI is just another step in the way. Just like how the emergence of deep learning was one step some years ago. It can clearly produce stuff that previously only humans could make, which in this case is convincing texts and pictures from arbitrary prompts. It’s accurate to call it AI (or weak AI).
Yeah, well, “AGI” is not the end result of this generative crap. You’re gonna have to start over with something different one way or another. This simply is not the way.
Did you mean the crypto/NFT bubble?
NFTs yes but crypto is absolutely not a bubble. People are saying that for decades now and it hasn’t been truth. Yes there are shitcoins, just shitstocks. But in general, it’s definitely not a bubble but an alternative investing method beside stocks, gold etc.
Crypto is 100% a bubble. It’s not an investment so much as a ponzi, sure you can dump money into it and maybe even make money, doesn’t mean it doesn’t collapse on a whim when someone else decides to dip out or the government shuts it down. Its value is exactly that of NFT’s because it’s basically identical, just a string of characters showing “ownership” of something intangible
Whatever man, used electricity will become valuable someday, I just know it.
Being able to pay for things anonymously is very valuable to me and to many other people. That’s just one example of what this technology can be used for.
Bitcoin isn’t anonymous yet it’s the most valuable crypto. Monero is barely used. Most crypto people just want to get rich, they don’t actually care about using it.
100% a bubble
I could go to the local ATM and buy Bitcoin anonymously right now. So, unlike a credit card, it can be used anonymously. Monero is better of course and it doesn’t matter how many people use it. Even if a store doesn’t accept it directly, you can use it to buy gift cards for any store.
I don’t care what most crypto people do, it’s irrelevant, just like the price is irrelevant and doesn’t affect my ability to use this technology.
That’s called ‘cash.’
And for online payments?
Mail cash in an envelope if you’re that concerned about it.
It’s not even a ponzi scheme, it’s just a good old fashioned bubble.
It’s digital tulips.
NFTs yes but crypto is absolutely not a bubble. People are saying that for decades now and it hasn’t been truth. Yes there are shitcoins, just like shitstocks. But in general, it’s definitely not a bubble but an alternative investing method beside stocks, gold etc.
What is the underlying mechanism that increases its value, like company earnings are to stocks? Otherwise, it’s just a reverse funnel scheme.
What’s the underlying mechanism that gives money a value? We the humans give money and gold a value because we believe they’re valuable. Same with crypto. Bitcoin is literally like gold but digital. Stop saying what everyone without knowledge says and inform yourself. Not only about crypto, also about money etc.
If you don’t understand the fundamentals of money, how can you judge something of being scam. There are lot of people here who didn’t even understand how money and gold works.
Money has value insofar as governments use it to collect tax - so long as there’s a tax obligation, there’s a mandated demand for that currency and it has some value. Between different currencies, the value is determined based upon the demand for that currency, which is essentially tied to how much business is done in that currency (eg if a country sells goods in its own currency, demand for that currency goes up and so does it’s value).
This is not the same for crypto, there are no governments collecting tax with it so it does not have induced demand. The value of crypto is 100% speculative, which is fine for something that is used as currency, but imo a terrible vehicle for investment.
You are right in that it increases people’s belief in money because it is the primary source of revenue for states. But if the majority of people did not believe in the piece of paper, it would be worth nothing. That is the fundamental value of money as we know it.
There have been states where stones were the currency simply because the inhabitants believed in them.
Gold Standard
Linking money to a material with intrinsic value for it’s value
Gold has intrinsic value
US Dollar moved to be a Fiat Currency
US Dollar is backed by a Government
Crypto has zero intrinsic value, not linked to anything with intrinsic value, and not backed by a Government
Crypto is an imaginary “item” some people want to have valve. Value is created because of this want.
US Dollar is legal tinder for all US debts, Crypto is not
Crypto is not a currency but a digital commodity
legal tinder
I recall hearing it was illegal to burn money 😉
Money is a physical representation of the concept of value. Saying “what gives money value” is like asking “why does rain make clouds.”
This is why printing money decreases the value of the currency - the value it represents has not changed so the value is diluted across the currency as the amount of currency expands.
I don’t know if it’s good investment or not, but cryptocurrency has uses that are valuable to a lot of people. You can send money to other people without using a bank or PayPal and you can pay for things online anonymously. Some cryptocurrencies might have additional properties like Monero, which also gives you privacy. NFT might also have practical uses some day - for example it could be used for concert tickets.
Did ChatGPT write your comment?
Do you not have anything constructive to say?
What’s the underlying mechanism that gives money a value?
A) the government backing it up along with its advanced military
B) the fact that you have to pay taxes in it
Yep, which is why Bitcoin can’t last forever without turning into some sort of GovCoin for it to truly replace money
That video is probably the biggest piece of misinformation about cryptocurrency on YouTube and it’s sad to see that so many people have been fooled by it. Most people are so bad at understanding modern technology that they will believe a random youtuber who has no idea what he is talking about :(.
Cryptocurrency is just a distributed ledger. NFT is just a certificate of ownership. Those technologies have real uses and nothing about them makes them a scam.
This is being disingenuous. They are more than just distributed ledgers or certificates of ownership. You are ignoring that crypto is proposed as a viable alternative to the financial system. They are both often promoted as ‘investments’, when there is rarely any underlying value behind them.
Your response is exactly the kind of handwaving that commonly pervades tech companies and led to crypto being popularized as a financial product. The reality is a lot more complicated, and for that reason there are a lot of problems that stop them being as useful or valuable as people want them to be.
If you have specific arguments against the Line Goes Up video I’d be interested to hear them, as I thought it was quite a good take.
Cryptocurrency has properties that are valuable to its users. It can let you pay online anonymously. It’s decentralized and doesn’t require trusting a bank or some company. I use it for those reasons. So it is useful, but the author of the video doesn’t even know that.
They are both often promoted as ‘investments’
But that’s not what they are made for. People can use them as investments if they wish and gamble with their money, but that says nothing about this technology, since it’s not its purpose. If you want to warn people about the risks of such investment, I approve. But calling cryptocurrency or NFT a scam is wrong and doesn’t make any sense.
Your response is exactly the kind of handwaving that commonly pervades tech companies and led to crypto being popularized as a financial product. The reality is a lot more complicated, and for that reason there are a lot of problems that stop them being as useful or valuable as people want them to be.
So what do you want to criticize exactly? The technology? Fine, but then you need to understand how it works and you probably should use it at least once. Or do you want to criticize people gambling with their money? That is also fine, but then it has nothing to do with the technology itself. In that case naming the video “The Problem With NFTs” would be misleading.
If you have specific arguments against the Line Goes Up video I’d be interested to hear them, as I thought it was quite a good take.
I rewatched a few chapters just now, but let’s focus on the Bitcoin chapter. The video contains a few valid criticisms, but they are mixed with a lot of incorrect information, invalid comparisons, false statements and author’s personal opinions. He omits a lot of facts, which makes it clear he doesn’t understand the subjects he is discussing.
Chapter 1 - Bitcoin (07:09)
08:35 He says that talking about cryptocurrencies requires discussing technical details and terminology, which is partially created to be “deliberately obtuse to make them difficult to understand and thus appear more legitimate”. The author seems to believe that there is some kind of conspiracy of programmers to often make it difficult to understand technology on purpose, but he fails to provide even one example of this. It’s a ridiculous accusation. Modern technology is just complicated and takes time to understand for non-technical people.
10:25 He claims that the only commercial use for Bitcoin is black markets, which is false. There are stores that accept Bitcoin and if they don’t, you can use Bitcoin to buy gift cards for any store (there are websites that sell them). People who actually buy illegal things online don’t even use Bitcoin, because of its public transaction history. They use Monero. The author is stuck in 2009.
11:08 “Bitcoin was never designed to solve the problems created by the banking industry” - it’s a trust-less system, so it has already solved at least one problem - the problem of trust when handling transactions. I can send money to anyone in the world without an intermediary.
11:30 “change of the guard is an illusion” - he is listing some rich people who use cryptocurrency. This it not an argument for anything. It’s irrelevant who uses cryptocurrency and what their beliefs are.
12:35 He says that some of the larger institutional holders of cryptocurrency are the same investment banks, which created the market crash. He doesn’t explain why this is relevant, but I suspect he means that because of this it’s not safe to keep any significant amount of money in crypto. In that case it might be a good point, but having large amounts of money in crypto is not required in order to use it.
15:30 Proof of work algorithm makes it difficult for poor people to mine Bitcoin. That is true, but mining is not the only way to get Bitcoin. Other than buying it with cash, people could also receive crypto as payment for their work.
16:45 He is comparing the energy consumption required for global usage of Bitcoin to local energy usage of a small country. This is not a valid comparison. He should have compared it to other global industries like banking or gaming.
17:10 He says that banking also requires a lot of power, but can handle more transactions. That is true, but Bitcoin is probably the slowest cryptocurrency. The other ones are still slower than VISA, but he should have mentioned that other coins are better in that area, because it’s not 2009 anymore and technology keeps progressing. So his argument is correct here, but he forgot to mention other relevant facts.
17:45 He calls cryptocurrency users gambling addicts, which shows his bias. He doesn’t understand that this technology can be used for online payments or for sending money to your friends. Bitcoin does use a lot of electricity, but so does gaming and that’s just entertainment. That doesn’t mean we should get rid of it.
He also completely forgot to mention in both his Bitcoin and Etherum chapters that proof of work is not the only used algorithm. Etherum doesn’t use proof of work anymore, so it doesn’t use as much power. This shows that the problem of power usage can be solved. Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency and technology keeps improving. But this didn’t stop the author from saying that Etherum doesn’t solve any problems with Bitcoin at the end of Etherum chapter (24:17). The switch to proof of stake algorithm happened after the video has been released, but he knew it was gonna happen, which he mentioned at the end of chapter 8 (1:31:29). Yet he refused to believe that it would happen, because of his bias. His prediction has failed, since it did eventually happen.
Chapter 8 “There Is No Privacy On The Chain” (1:25:36) is equally ridiculous. The author apparently hasn’t heard of Monero. He also doesn’t even understand what it means that something is decentralized.
Thanks for the reply, just wanted to let you know I did see it but I’m at work atm so can’t address it. But I will come back and give a proper response, just wanted to say thank you for your effort 👌 I appreciate good discussions!
No problem, take your time :).
Yeah I was going to say VC throwing money at the newest fad isn’t anything new, in fact startups strive exploit the fuck out of it. No need to actually implement the fad tech, you just need to technobabble the magic words and a VC is like “here have 2 million dollars”.
In our own company we half joked about calling a relatively simple decision flow in our back end an “AI system”.
crypto and nft have nothing to do with AI, though. Investing in AI properly is like investing in Apple in the early 90’s.
ultimately it won’t matter because if we get AGI, which is the whole point of investing in AI, stocks will become worthless.
“stock will become worthless”
I’m thinking the opposite might happen.
If big companies succeed in capturing the knowledge workers market share and transferring all those salaries into their own profits then it will be reflected in the stock prices of those big companies. People, mostly currently rich people, who own those stock will benefit.
Same as it ever was for other forms of automation or job outsourcing. Why would this be any different?
They meant in the sense that crypto/nft was the last fad that VCs were throwing money at.
It’s actually hilariously transparent how dumb VCs are and how much tech companies exploit that. Every now and then they randomly get hyped by some big tech company over some ‘new’ Y idea, then suddenly they throw money at any company suggesting they are doing Y thinking they will be the next Google or Meta. Then they inevitably doesn’t materialise and they move onto the next fad.
Through the years I’ve been in the industry we’ve had Big Data, followed by AI, followed by Cloud, followed by blockchain, followed by nfts, followed by metaverse and now back to AI again. And the tech companies don’t even need to implement any of this they just have to find a way to spin what they are doing to make it sound like the fad is what they’re doing.
Pro tip: when you start to see articles talking a bout how something looks like a bubble, it means it’s already popped and anybody who hasn’t already cashed in their investment is a bag-holder.
There’s a lot of similarity in tone between crypto and AI. Both are talking about their sphere like it will revolutionize absolutely everything and anything, and both are scrambling to find the most obscure use case they can claim as their own.
The biggest difference is that AI has concrete, real-world applications, but I suspect its use, ultimately, will be less universal and transformative as the hype is making it out to be.
The AI sphere isn’t like crypto’s sphere. Crypto was truly one thing. Lots of things can be solved with AI and modern LLMs have shown to be better than remedial at zero shot learning for things they weren’t explicitly designed to do.
Eventually it absolutely will be universal.
But modern tech isn’t that and doesn’t have a particular promising path towards that. Most of the investment in heavily scaling up current hardware comes from a place of not understanding the technology or its limitations. Blindly throwing cash at buzzwords without some level of understanding (you don’t need to know how to cure cancer to invest in medicine, but you should probably know crystals don’t do it) of what you’re throwing money at is going to get you in trouble.
Hm. Maybe I’m missing something but I’m not seeing a million ‘successful’ AI startups pop up overnight like during the Dot Com Bubble. Most of the AI investments I’ve seen have been from major corporations that can pivot and eat a little loss. I do see several resume and business-plan writing services but it just doesn’t seem like much of a parallel, to me.
The article doesn’t address this disparity, it just pretends like it’s an equivalency - citing only megacaps like GOOG, MSFT, etc. Clickbait headline, I guess.
Im just seeing already failing companies grasp straws called AI and hope no one notices.
“Our AI designed eyeglasses.” “This AI formulated workout routine.” “And Techno Wizardry will calculate the value”
All tells me that these companies would be better ran by AI and the marketing department should be changing careers.
TikTok and Reels with their influencers too. “If yOu ArE NoT uSiNg THesE 10 AI ToOls, yoUr …”. Granted though, some of them are actually educative. But, the ones with quick transitions, short don’t seem very authentic.
Where’s all the “NoOoOoO this isn’t like crypto it’s gonna be different” people at now?
That’s an incredibly bad comparison. LLMs are already used daily by many people saving them time in different aspects of their life and work. Crypto on the other hand is still looking for it’s everyday use case.
Yeah, I assumed the general consensus was “alt coins” in crypto or the scams themselves are the “bubble”. But, Ethereum and initial projects that basically create the foundational technologies (smart contracts, etc) are still respected and I’d say has a use case, but is not “production ready?”. So for AI/ML in LLMs at least, things like LLaMa, Stability’s, GPT’s, Anthropic’s Claude, are not included in this bubble, since they aren’t necessarily built on top of each other, but are separate implementations of a foundation. But, anything a layer higher maybe is.
Right, but how much time is it actually saving when you have to fact check everything you put into it anyway?
We’re too busy automating our jobs.
Really though, this was never like crypto/NFTs. AI is a toolset used to troubleshoot and amplify workloads. Tools survive no matter what, whereas crypto/NFT’s died because they never had a use case.
Just because a bunch of tech bros were throwing their wallets at a wall full of start ups that’ll fail doesn’t mean AI as a concept will fail. That’s no different than saying because of the dot.com bubble that websites and the Internet are going to be a fad.
Websites are a tool, just because everyone and their brother has one for no reason doesn’t mean actual use cases won’t appear (in fact they already exist, much like the websites that survived the internet bubble.)
The dotcom bubble was different. Now, everything related to actual AI development is hyped but the dotcom bubble inflated entire indexes, “new market” indexes were setup comprising companies nobody had ever heard of. It was orders of magnitude worse.
An apt analogy. Just like the web underlying technology is incredible and the hype is real, but it leads to endless fluff and stupid naive investments, many of which will lead nowhere. There were certainly be a lot of amazing advances using this tech in the coming decades, but for every one that is useful there will be 20 or 50 or 100 pieces of vaporware that is just trying to grab VC money.
No! Really, what a shock!!
