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and yet AI has actual use cases %)

Most of them hinge upon incredible yet highly nebulous improvements to the technology to solve as-yet unsolved problems based on a lot of extrapolation based on hype and "dude trust me the next thing is gonna be great"'s from AI companies, and a generally poor understanding of how the technology works and what its limitations are.

The central logic error is something along the lines of "I don't understand the limitations of this technology, therefore it must have no limitations".

There is enough non-nebulous problems it will solve.

The operative word in hype cycles is always will. Blockchains will revolutionize this, web3 will revolutionize that, stable diffusion will do this, ChatGPT will do that.

Talk to me about what it actually has changed and you may convince me.

I had to write 40 individualized reports this weekend. I fed my notes into GPT, along with a few directions about style, and it spit out competent reports that mostly only required tweaking. It saved me from losing my Sunday too.

I see people saying things like this online, and I have to wonder what their standards for "good" or "competent" or whatever are. I'm not going to ask you to post those reports so I can "judge" them. You shouldn't and none of us cares that deeply anyway, but I'm still waiting for a good example of actual useful work done by these things. I'm replying to you randomly, there are other posts like this in this thread.

On the art front, every single piece of art that I see is bad. Not bad like a human not being able to draw, but bad in a different but still obvious (to me, at least) way.

On a personal front, I had a lot of fun generating funny pictures based on inside jokes with my friends a few weeks ago, but lately it barely makes us smile. I think the novelty is wearing off, so even that is gone.

Ultimately, it's not going to matter what I think, enough people think this is good content that it will be flooding the internet soon. It's all so tiresome.

> Not bad like a human not being able to draw, but bad in a different but still obvious (to me, at least) way.

Uncanny valley.

Automated stupid and poorly planned tasks will just ossify whatever system forced you to work a stupid and poorly planned task. All you are doing is making your future life harder.

I think you're misreading the situation with AI. It's already doing extremely useful things, and will continue to pop up all over the place, I expect.

* I already talk to my phone to type more than I actually type on it. This is finally made my phone roughly as efficient as my laptop for simply inputting English text.

* An artist named darknut worked for years in the Morrowind community to retexture Morrowind and creating a new higher resolution texture pack. ESRGAN upscaling lapped his work in a matter of weeks. I love his work, but the change in efficiency was a change in kind.

* I haven't done it myself, but I've heard countless reports of programmers simply asking for a program with a given set of specifications to be written, and having the resulting source code available seconds later.

* I wanted character sheet portraits for a role-playing scenario I was creating, and stable diffusion was able to generate half a dozen portraits in about a half an hour that were perfectly suitable. This just wasn't possible a year ago.

I never got on the web3 hype train, but I'm already finding AI useful, and I don't expect it to play a less useful role over time.

Just because those are close to me or my work, regarding ChatGPT:

- I started using it as a programming co-tutor, it's amazing. Not perfect, but good enough. https://twitter.com/any_other_you/status/1607116905919152128

- I could use it as is for customer service chatbots if I could trust it (hard nut to crack, but I see it coming. You.com already has a nice factual chatbot that usually delivers sources to its claims.

- I use it to sum articles or rephrase silly "philosophers speak" to me

- It could easily write business email fluff for me (just don't need that too much luckily)

Non ChatGPT:

- Even plain intent detection is great to replace these "press n for X" machines on the phone

- audio clean-up is amazing ("imagines" a HQ recording from a noisy one)

- neural speech to text is amazing (the tik-talk voice is a good popular example, but there are even better ones)

- Protein folding

- Image classification for science and military

- Image generation is amazing for projects that traditionally employ concept artists. Like a mood board ( https://www.thefilmfund.co/what-is-a-mood-board-and-are-they... ) but better.

there is a lot...

This just isn't the case. People are being productive with AI right now.

Crypto ran out of excuses for having no actual products outside of itself a long time ago. That is, apart from the money laundering and grift that it was used for from day one.

Most of what AI's produced so far is features. Mostly some thing that could be done before that's now slightly more convenient or streamlined.

I've yet to see any actual coherent products come out of the 2020s AI "boom".

You can call the productive activity what you will. Crypto has no "features" any more than it has "products".

Copilot works. GPT is helping me write more coherently. Stable Diffusion is entertaining my nieces with silly pictures. Biotech AI-based drug discoveries are being announced every day.

Bitcoin's raison d'etre is to serve as a decentralized currency free from the constraints of central banks or governments, and it fulfills this purpose admirably.

It's neither effective currency, nor effective store of value.

it's potential as a currency and store of value should not be dismissed based on its current limitations. Its adoption and value will likely continue to grow as more people become aware of its potential, particularly with the implementation of the Lightning Network which aims to improve scalability and transaction speeds

It's had ten+ years. The Lightning Network has had 6+ years. Other layer 2 protocols have had longer.

I've worked on first layer blockchain projects as well as Ethereum projects: it's not as complex a technology as people make it out to be.

Sorry, but there's no there, there.

the LN launched in 2018 an took off 2020.

What do you define as takeoff? The transaction numbers are minuscule.

I personally think crypto transactions are a dead use case. El Salvador recently released numbers that said crypto remittances were in the 1% range in 2022, despite all the hype. Coinbase actually shutdown there remittances product after a couple of years and a couple of thousands of transactions.

The people don’t want it.

Except that these deep learning models are currently useful, we've demonstrated that brute force scaling alone has the potential to improve them significantly, and there is a lot of room for architectural improvements to make them more efficient.

What's more, we're starting to see people stack/chain specially trained models to achieve very impressive workflows.

This is still very much fantastical extrapolation in the absence of a good understanding of limitations-territory.

You didn't read the thread.

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