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Comment by negamax | Hacker News Reader

AI is the new blockchain. The only difference is that Blockchain now beginning to look ready for real world applications having gone through its wild west days. AI is still in that phase. Lots of talk, little to no substance. Yes, Google Maps, Translate, Siri and countless others are great examples of AI. But there's definitely a lot of snake oil being peddled through it. And unless we as an industry get past it, AI is not going to go anywhere as a tool

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> The only difference is that Blockchain now beginning to look ready for real world applications having gone through its wild west days

Hold on for a moment, and name three. Because I honestly haven't seen a blockchain that isn't either a) scam, b) naive mistake, or c) an ecological disaster if ever scaled up (therefore unworkable).

AI, for all the hype and nonsense around it, isn't even approaching the blockchain levels of bullshit.

These are my three favorite use cases (which I use personally)

1. Bitcoin - I have hedged currency successfully using Bitcoin

2. Maker - Check it out. It really does show power of smart contracts

3. Oracles - Although, I am not familiar with the tech but they are beginning to show real world adoption. Maker uses Oracles for e.g. Check Chainlink

Edit: Telegram? I use it

Most "AI" is a scam but "blockchain" is far worse of an offender. "Blockchain" has zero utility in the business world. Its only use case is decentralized, censorship-resistant protocols. No one is trying to censor a shipping company's supply chain manifest. No one is trying to censor JP Morgan's bank transactions. The people who need it are dissidents, deplatformed people, people who cannot get bank accounts, or people trading contraband. Not exactly areas to extract an industry from.

Half of these altcoins do not have working software. In 2017 the ICOs did not have any software at all, just a promise on a homepage with a button to send money. The other half do not scale or do not meet their own basic requirements. The oldest, most venerable project Bitcoin had an inflation bug a couple years ago that would have let anyone counterfeit an unlimited amount of coins.

At least the AI scammers show up with code.

I loved all the hyped Blockchain companies 3 years ago where I would always think "what does this do that a small MySQL instance doesn't already do better for a real business?"

Hey - you can save your customer database in a really cool convoluted and slow database. Because bitcoin. Plus your clients can run this fun app that drains their batteries.

Bitcoin is the ecological desaster that OP talked about.

Smart contracts have the fundamental problem of people having to write perfect, error free code (as it can't be changed later), i.e. an impossibility. Often these smart contracts deal with a monetary value (as people strangely assign value to those "coins"), so something like the DAO hack on the Ethereum blockchain is inevitable. Also to do anything on a blockchain, even just add 1+1, on any hardware, no matter how expensive, no matter how far in the future, has to work at full capacity to hack some crypto. Your laptop will heat up and the fans go on full. Sounds trivial but if you've experienced it it's weird.

Oracles are a fundamental problem of blockchain: If you trust an outside source of truth, why need the blockchain? Go straight to the oracle.

In my estimation it is precisely the other way around. There are hardly any applications of blockchains that are not equally well solved by other methods, whereas computer vision alone has a huge number of applications and “neural network” based solutions are now undoubtedly the best approach to a huge number of hard computer vision problems.

I’m glad you scoped it well computer vision is a somewhat narrow field and therefore say for a logistic company AI can be applied to some but not all businesses processes. It’s an improvement but not a revolution.

Yes but computer vision is not what people mean when they are talking about AI. Many of the great AI advantages are available as cloud services. But that's not what people mean by AI. Or they hide those use cases and services. Focusing more on pie in the sky narratives. And that's okay if coming from Google/Facebook etc. But this is mostly management/consultancy speak now.

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