Are we still doing “AI is the new crypto” here? I’d like to think that we’ve moved past this by now.
I said that it was likely paying for compute resources that would be a killer use case. Implementing 402s would be that manifest: https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture
Now we’re moving deep into the AI markets, this will be a thing, combining both.
That said, con artists will still try to hustle others.
As if we didn't have ways to pay for compute resources already.
> Now we’re moving deep into the AI markets, this will be a thing, combining both.
Of course it won't.
> That said, con artists will still try to hustle others.
Indeed. By saying things like "innovative ways to pay for compute resources" and "our AI-enabled crypto bullshit is a cuting-edge thingamabob"
Time will tell, but as of now there are still no killer uses for crypto, other than hustling others.
Right now the majority of AI startups are hypeware.
1. dangerous new technology
2. that uses far too much energy (more than the entire country of X!)
3. do we really know how it works?
4. controlled by a shadowy cabal of super-coders
5. followed by a litany of anecdotal stories about victims of AI
6. and increasingly frequent and increasingly negative coverage of those getting rich off of it
they also used the same playbook against the internet, and open source, and mobile/social networking. probably the original cell phones too, at some point.
edit: oh, i almost forgot
7. turning the tables on any goldenboy/girl they previously pumped, then will viciously dump when the going gets tough or the inevitable fraud occurs. (unless of course they donated $40million+ to politicians)
i'm under 40 and i've seen this cycle about half a dozen times.
Also mock what it's been used for, find the "worst" example.
If not mock, as you say, label it as dangerous.
consider, however, that "BUT I'M TELLING YOU IT'S USEFUL!!! WHY WON'T YOU BELIEVE ME!!!" is the exact position the FUDsters want to put you in re: AI.
they're constantly on the offensive, no matter what the target is.
ChatGPT kan be useful or useless and NFT:s would have the same value or qualities otherwise.
NFT:s can be useful or useless and ChatGPT would have the same value or qualities otherwise.
The one playbook that exists here is defending NFT:s in lieu of it defending itself by being actually useful. (Which is not me saying that they are not nor that they couldn't be. Just that shouting that everyone is dumb and that your product is in fact awesome isn't a good look, is it?)
It really hit home to me when I saw something (that I can't find right now for some reason) about ChatGPT-4 being much more complex and would need X times more resources than ChatGPT-3.5 for the same queries (the number I don't actually remember, but I want to say 2 or 3x). Gave me a bit of a pause from me asking it to generate a bunch of sitcom scripts on random silly concepts for my private, personal amusement (Seinfeld in particular seems to work pretty well).
I was able to find an article on Bloomberg[1] talking about how the increase in AI is also increasing its carbon footprint, so yeah, it's coming. Also I saw this article[2] that estimates ChatGPT's usage in January alone to be equivalent to he power used by 175,000 people. And that's before ChatGPT-4.
People who are fans of AI right now reading this, eventually you're going to have to come to terms with it being responsible for a ton of carbon emissions as well, as it takes up more and more resources and scales to billions of people as they use it more and more in their everyday lives and the models and computation get more complex.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-09/how-much-...
[2]: https://towardsdatascience.com/chatgpts-electricity-consumpt...
If the dreams of companies making large sequence models do come to pass, and they really do scale up to where training and running large sequence models is a significant portion of world electricity usage, then of course it becomes a real problem, but the same would be true for any large electricity-intensive industry.
With AI there are strong incentives to make everything more efficient and use less energy. This is already happening: people are finding ways to run AI models on less powerful hardware (see LLaMA etc), and AI providers like OpenAI have managed to run things. Lee efficiently - that's presumably how they could drop the price of an API call by 1/10th for GPT3.5 compared to GPT3.
With Bitcoin efficiencies don't actually help, because the entire system is designed as a competition. The person who burns more energy wins more value. If the tech becomes more efficient the miners just increase their activity, so energy usage doesn't meaningfully decrease.
Then there's Ethereum, which just completed a major upgrade to convert its Proof of Work method to Proof of Stake and now uses a negligible amount of energy compared to other things, as shown in this article on their site[1].
And there are newer cryptocurrencies like Solana, that started as proof of stake to begin with and can handle at least 8500[2] transactions per second (compared to only 4 transactions per second with the much older bitcoin, and 30 transactions per second with Ethereum).
That's a hell of a lot more efficient as well, and also seems to be more efficient than ChatGPT is per query, as Solana's energy use per transaction is 3,290 Joules, or 0.00091 kWh[3], versus the conservative estimate of ChatGPT (3.5)'s estimated energy usage on this article [4] of 0.00198 kWh, or 7,128 Joules.
So I think that overall, crypto is still incentivized to become more efficient. Bitcoin is not, as more people care about the security provided by proof of work there than they do about energy efficiency, which is unfortunate.
[1]: https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
[2]: https://crypto.news/solana-transactions-per-second-hit-an-al...
[3]: https://solana.com/news/solanas-energy-use-report-september-...
[4]: https://towardsdatascience.com/chatgpts-electricity-consumpt...
The grand difference between the NFT craze and ordinary collecting, is that the latter is not primarily driven by cultish behaviour or the want for Internet Money.
I'm sure NFT, just as crypto, apps and The Internet eventually presents new findings or "just" novel ways of doing stuff. But so far, we have people confused by things _they_ don't understand, setting themselves up for a great loss.
The cultishness in it is the incessant: this is the way. This is new and nothing like this has ever existed before.
When it totally has! Manias and scams have come in all shapes and sizes and will continue to do so.
The reason y'all are buying in to this, is because the sucker's goin' up. Just like with crypto. Just like with dotcom stock and a ton of other things. The fact that there _are_ useful things that came out of the dotcom era, is not a proof of the viability of _your_ mania.