Is AI the New Crypto?

There have always been two AIs, the same as there have always been two cryptos (three if you count cryptography).

The academic "crypto", distributed consensus etc. was always legit, and unfortunately didn't have many applications. The NFT, pooCoin, ponzi world crypto and the (to be charitable) naive VC investors s an pretended to understand the tech, was just a silly bubble and some bros having a moment (like those mortgage brokers in The Big Short.)

Anyway, AI is the same, and has all the second part, the VC bro bullshit from people pretending to be visionary, and no doubt the scammers and charlatans are moving in.

But there is so legitimate ML technology (not the current shiny stuff) that has economic value that will endure when the hype goes away.

So the difference is "crypto" is essentially worthless, AI/ML has a valuable baseline, it's just going through a silly bubble. When the dust settles, chatgpt8 will be the butt of some jokes, and we'll get on with the actual value of using gradient descent to find patterns in data

Not really because there are true tools with very real productive capabilities which are just being lightly showed in the "trendy" generative apps you've heard of.

One incredible thing is whisper, a model that you can download and use in a laptop with a GPU probably, and it can be ran from a simple command line.

The model could be used to "hear" ambiental voices and transcribe them to text in realtime, or to convert to text the voices in thousands of videos (and you could use the output directly, as subtitles, or you could throw it into a database to allow string search into thousands of videos, etc.). You probably could do it in a matter of hours. This was probably impossible just a year ago.