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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

Huge crypto vibes

  Every single person I know working in AI these days ... has been sparked by the ChatGPT moment.

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I'm curious why you draw the parallel - did crypto ever have a ChatGPT/iPhone moment? As an observant outsider, my impression is that every "moment" of note in crypto has been about some price going way up or way down - there has never been a "this is the use case" moment.

You're forgetting the "free money" gold rush of late 00's, Just buy lots of computers and try not to cook yourself in your own room.

Theoretically ethereum is that for crypto, if you believe the crypto bros.

Ethereum is the tech though, not the use case. It's the touch screen, not the "audience gasps when Steve Jobs scrolls to the bottom of the list of artists" moment.

If Ethereum was that, we wouldn't still be waiting for real world use cases. GPT is already making me more productive.

I see what you mean; but as external observer to both, I see crypto as having failed to provide or prove any particularly productive use; and chatGPT, for all its flaws, has been useful to me daily for last 2 months - and not in some crazy make-money-in-suspicious-ways sense, but like learning french and python and figuring out new concepts and stuff. But that's sample n=1 I suppose, there are both people that believe in crypto and those who believe chatGPT is useless.

I wonder how much of usefulness of ChatGPT that some report is caused by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_effect Because it is new, and cool, and fascinating people are spending a bit more time with a bit more focus on the task with it compared to the old ways, hence the productivity increase. Once the novelty wears off…

It has helped me learn things more interactively because I can ask questions and get answers without having to read 10 blog posts or a book before understanding things. For my personality, it would be hard to recreate without having a living mentor available 24/7 that had knowledge of everything I wanted to ask of it.

Does it get things wrong? Sure. But generally the subtle ways it might get stuff wrong would be the way I would subtly misunderstand things while learning. So, it's definitely not perfect, but "not letting perfect be the enemy of good" and all that.

You must have missed the article posted this morning where ChatGPT complexity invented a sexual allegation against a law professor including citing a fictional news article that never existed. I wouldn’t call that a subtle misunderstanding.

I'm not asking for lists of sexual allegations, I'm asking about technical concepts. Very different.

Yes, chatGPT hallucinates facts and is not great at causal inference chains. The interactivity is the real boon as what I can do is query the chat bot, and then explore the results either with traditional research or with more queries and exploration. It's a really fun and productive way to learn.

So it's the Weekly World News... And yea, we've had rags before AI was made too.

It's shocking to me how many people are treating chatGPT as a reliable source given how much we know it hallucinates.

Because very few people ever stop and take account of how monstrously unreliable people are.

At the same time I can ask GPT to write a script, reflect on its output, and it takes about 95% of the work I need to do out of script writing.

But... How much does it hallucinate? Are there safer areas or ways of asking questions, than others? Genuine question. I found that when I ask simple factual questions in a... "non pushy non presumptive" manner, it gives accurate basic answers in areas I'm familiar with. I ask it simple things about basic French or basic Python or basic music theory and so far it's been... brilliant!

I found most examples of hallucination on the web to be pushy or presumptive or edgy I. E. "tell me the ways in which vaccines cause male pattern baldness" and then manipulate prompts.

So I assume there are areas and approaches that are safer and more useful, and areas and approaches that are riskier?

It's shocking to me how many people are treating Google Search as a reliable source given how much we know it silos people into extremist sites, and has been extensively gamed by SEO professionals.

possibly. But I find it the opposite - there's more and more use I find in it as time passes. I am encouraging my friends to play with it, to figure out for themselves when it's useful and when it's not.

For me, It's like having a learning companion, and it makes it easier for me to tackle new things when I can "brainstorm" and ask random (basic) questions.

I think it's less about the usefulness and more about the fact that everyone is racing to add ChatGPT to their products (or start a new product off the back of it), whether or not it's useful or adds value. That feels a lot like everyone tacking on blockchain or launching an ICO.

But with you - I've found ChatGPT very useful!

It's like an improved search engine that sometimes invents plausible results.

So far, crypto provides exactly one genuinely useful ability: transferring money outside of regulatory frameworks. If, say, you need to buy some things that aren't legal in your country on the black market, or your family lives in a country that's under sanctions and they need money quick, that might be very productive use of it.

It's the inverse of crypto.

Many of us have already learned stuff / achieved stuff / built stuff with the help of ChatGPT and the OpenAI API that would have taken us MONTHs to achieve.

It's the inverse because crypto was tools and business models in search of a problem, while LLMs are problem solvers in search of a business model.

Building LLM products is fun but... any day you could be wrecked by an OpenAI update.

Popular things = crypto ?

I’d say the differentiator is that in addition to hype scammers, you have people like Stephen Wolfram excited.

The absolutely-not-hype-susceptible man who has been claiming for the past 20 years to have produced a fundamental theory of everything based on his research into finite-state automata?

Alright man if one guys obsession of his own work is hype, too, then hype now encompasses short-lived popular things as well as long-lived unpopular things, so in that case yes AI is hype and only hype, everything bad to you is hype and I’m hype too.

I’ll continue to use AI where it’s helpful, at very low cost, and know deep down that it’s hype.

Sshh or he’ll release A New Kind Of AI. He’s supporting others’ work for now, let’s just be happy.

Crypto had the disadvantage of being a natural conduit for MLM-ish pyramid schemes and a lot of nefarious activities. That gave it some wind, but it was bad wind. Notably, it turned out to be not very useful. AI will be useful, and it's just regular tech, so there's good reason to be optimistic this time.

If you think crypto is a natural conduit for scammers and frauds, then wait til you see what LLMs will cause in that area...

It will be a tool for fraudsters, like computers or anything else are tools, but the space itself is not inherently oriented towards MLM.

Just wait till crypto merges with language models and you have AI-powered botnets and DAOs with ransomware.

Alternatively, huge internet vibes.

Not everything that catches fire is destined to leave nothing but ashes in its wake.

Maybe in a certain sense. These are full fledged products from large companies at this point however with paying customers and real world daily usage in all aspects of life.

Pretty much, you can take any article hyping up AI/ChatGPT/etc and replace those words with crypto stuff and it's virtually indistinguishable from the crypto spam of yesteryear.

I wonder what the next "get rich quick" techbro fad will be.

Honestly, it's different. ChatGPT is a consumer product that is used by end-users, with low barrier to entry. The "Bitcoin as the new money for regular people" moment never came.

With crypto, my 70+ Korean mother in law asked me how she could make money with it. With ChatGPT, she's using it daily.

Replace crypto with cloud

replace cloud with big data

replace big data with web scale

It's all just a hype and crash cycle

I'd say more like plateau?

Cloud is still around and going strong, just not sexy anymore. I use Vercel and Cloudflare and other stuff every day.

No idea about big data or web scale though, was never successful enough to achieve "big data" or "web scale" haha.

The cloud crashed? I'm sure AWS would like to know about that.

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