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elektor

It's interesting to see how quickly the public interest (and money!) has shifted from cryptocurrency to AI.

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Heh, cstross even has a "conspiracy" theory about that sudden shift:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/02/place-y...

(Which I don't buy)

There are some pretty interesting ideas there. I had a conversation with a friend the other day and the whole blockchain then, AI now thing reminded me of a saying about shelling “Picks and Shovels during a Gold Rush”. I think it is intriguing that GPUs are the “picks and shovels” of both the Blockchain Rush and the AI Rush. One could point out conspiracies and PR, another could point out that the as GPUs become more general compute tools, new applications will emerge.

It takes about 5 minutes playing with ChatGPT to realize it has real time saving value, seems like author hasn't really tried to use it in their work.

While I agree there is a hype bubble forming, I disagree with the premise that it only produces garbage.

That's my beef with most of the critical takes. Yeah, it has some warts, but an hour playing with the thing, for both broader chat interaction and writing code, make the value evident, and startling.

The obvious thing is that we'll finally get voice assistants that can do more than pre-programmed tasks.

Right now I can basically ask my home assistant "what's the time/weather" and "play some music". Anything else returns "i don't understand".

I can see ChatGPT has huge potential here to give at least somewhat sane voice assistant responses.

That's not because voice recognition doesnt work. It's been working quite well for 15 years now. Just ask the Deaf community.

The issue is even if the error rate is 1 in 100 and you scale that up to a billion users supporting thousands of use cases, you then need to maintain a large army of people to manually handle those errors.

Its a huge cost to even the largest firms. Very similar to what Facebook/Twitter/Youtube end up doing to handle content moderation. The faster systems scale the faster you get swamped with bugs you don't have bandwidth to fix. The consequences begin to multiply. Your basic Jurassic Park story plays out.

I mean it returns "i don't understand" in terms of context.

"Who played bond in that film Goldensomething?"

"I don't understand."

ChatGPT on the other hand returns "you're thinking of Goldeneye, where Bond was played by Pierce Brosnan"

I think indeed it’s not a conspiracy theory but just an observation of what might be happening that requires no collusion, just individual greed.

(I hence appreciated the quotes).

I am also not sure it’s so simple; the tools are so much more powerful than I would have believed just a couple years ago. But there’s value and then there’s perceived value; the fact that there’s so much nontechnical interest is perhaps suspect.

That’s not conspiracy theory, that’s Occam’s Razor in action. It is very obviously the same people pumping this.

I mean, one of them has millions of users and is poised to revolutionize the entire digital economy (and perhaps the non-digital one as well) and the other one is electronic chuck-E-cheeze tokens older than the first iphone and still useless.

I wish I could agree with you, but there's a lot of smoke and mirrors with "AI" right now. These companies are letting people believe these services are thinking machines that are on the verge of consciousness when they are far from it.

There's some people making outsized and unreasonable claims about AI today, sure, but AI is generally useful and valuable right this minute. Crypto never really made it over that hump.

I love how (unintentionally?) ambiguous your comment is.

Crypto bros and LLM bros both monetize via tokens

5+% US treasuries can quickly shift the calculus for USD holdings. And lack of “real” money in the system cascades quickly.

As they say, it's only once the tide goes out that you discover who's been swimming naked.

Given all the economic data + extremely hawkish comments from Powell yesterday/today, it looks like we're going even higher than expected this year.

FFR futures are expecting a +0.50% increase for the March 22nd meeting.

It's essentially the same crowd moving from one hustle to another. There's a new tech buzzword every few years, and it's easy to raise money from clueless investors who don't want to miss out. Remember "big data"? Or the "Uber for XYZ" phase?

It sounds more hip than "gotta go buy some lotto"

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