There was hype around Crypto because people were making large sums of money from it, despite unclear "real" uses beyond easily moving large sums of money around.

There is hype around AI because hundreds of millions of people (including me) are using AI tools every day to help them with their work. In contrast to crypto, random people are not making enormous amounts of money; there are no 18 year olds in AI stumbling into hundreds of millions of dollars. Even OpenAI is not particularly profitable and is mainly sustained through its close partnership with Microsoft.

I think this reversal of the money <-> utility relationship makes these technologies fundamentally different, and lumping them together into the category of "just another hype cycle" is unfair.

It's hype for sure but for AI I can think of a ton of real-world use cases whereas all crypto use cases sounded pretty contrived. I think AI will be a revolution of the scale of the internet or even bigger. Maybe the current version of ChatGPT is flawed but the possibilities are there. I am thinking analyzing long contracts, writing letters, verifying system requirements and tests and so on. The potential seems endless.