It isn't. There's a fundamental difference between hype around something useful and hype around something that isn't useful.
On the another hand after years of deep learning, there is still no viable efficient methods of training, fine tuning or inference without needing more data centers as the data and the AI model scales and its hype is currently contributing to the increased wastage of water and resources all for the sake of incinerating the planet to produce broken and hallucinating black-box AI models.
Being ‘useful’ isn’t an excuse for not finding greener efficient alternatives that significantly lower emissions rather than continuing to burn the planet over the new ‘hype’.
You're telling me right here that absolutely 'no-one' is using Ethereum? Surely you are not at all serious about what you said. There are many companies like Moneygram, Stripe, Ticketmaster, Checkout.com, etc that are using crypto currencies like Ethereum which are on greener consensus models.
Ethereum made it possible to switch from a wasteful consensus model like proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and it significantly reduced its emissions by 99.992% [0]. Even if your ludicrous claim of absolutely 'no one uses it for anything either', it is not incinerating the planet or wasting as much resources and energy unlike AI (deep learning) that is currently doing today.
After a decade of deep learning there have been no efficient alternatives to their existing operations and it brings in more resource waste and continues incinerates the planet. Being 'useful' is not a great excuse to justify burning the planet.
[0] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain...
I'm not a crypto or AI advocate, but it's easy to see how "technology with overestimated social consequences" could get tiring for everyone who isn't an investor. The "fundamental difference" between cryptocurrency and AI is that one is built on reproducible and accountable logging and the other is guesswork. Trying to champion one or the other feels like pointless virtue signalling really.
I also have to admit I really don't like Cory Doctorow's other works (I especially despise the reductive theory of "enshittification") but his thesis is 100% the truth. People need new buzzwords to cling to, and AI is the one with the most popular demo. The usefulness is an accessory to the marketing and positioning of AI-powered products.
To most people the main use of AI is:
Code suggestions
Code analysis
Document summarization
Document creation
Clipart generation
Audio transcription
Audio synthesis
Realistic chat bots
...
These are not dubious use cases.
The number of people who have been defrauded by crypto number in the millions. The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero.
Even if AI is wrong 90% of the time, 10% of the time it makes someone's job easier. Making someone's job easier is objectively more valuable than making someone's bank account number go up. One adds wealth to society. The other redistributes existing wealth.
I can go on about the differences but I'll let you tell me about how Ethereum has a really good logging system first.
> The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero.
What's the number of people who have been murdered by AI? It's a much more dubious figure, but a larger one to be sure. If you want to move the goalpost to which one is more harmful, I still think you hamstring your attack on cryptocurrency.
Why do people keep saying their opinions as if they are fact? Whether or not I refuted your point is independent from your assertions of such.
> Both technologies provide utility that is not all-encompassing.
No. Crypto provides no utility. At all. AI provides a lot of utility, some of the time. And you know what, you're wrong. AI is a panacea. It's called general purpose transformer ffs. And not by marketers, but by actual engineers who developed the Transformer architecture. (Obviously I'm being a little facetious but AI is infinitely more of a cure-all than crypto)
> What's the number of people who have been murdered by AI?
The second most common use case of crypto is for anonymous transactions for illegal drugs and weapons. So that's all I'm going to say on that point.
That's just blatantly untrue. If there is anything you cannot do with normal money, cryptocurrency has utility. You can argue that it's overall negative utility or insignificant compared to the glory of AI (you may be right) but utility is inherent to any system of payment with more than 1 participant.
> AI is a panacea. It's called general purpose transformer ffs.
That's more than just a little facetious. Our AI generates text - it does nothing other than that. It's admittedly great at manipulating text, but that's where it's "general purpose transforming" stops. It encodes human concepts like emotions and spatial reasoning into words, which are incomplete analogs to how they work in the real world. It has impressive results, but comparing the value of human labor to the work AI can do is startlingly parallel to comparing the value of a database to the work a blockchain can do. It almost provides the basis for reality-distortion to investors, which is where those "marginal utility" AI/crypto companies come from.
> The second most common use case of crypto is for anonymous transactions for illegal drugs and weapons
The first most common use case of AI is for military purposes.
I will refer you to the Vision Transformer: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929
I suggest you do a literature review on the applications of ANNs, CNNs and attention mechanisms. They are quite numerous but I will concede that they generally 'just' do compression.
AI encodes human concepts like emotions and spatial reasoning into vectors. Which, their analogous-ness to the real world, is more of a philosophical question than a practical one at this point.
> It has impressive results, but comparing the value of human labor to the work AI can do is startlingly parallel to comparing the value of a database to the work a blockchain can do.
I mean 'human labor' is a very general thing, compared to 'database' IMO.
> The first most common use case of AI is for military purposes.
This is true but the AI that the military uses is probably a far cry from what the public is able to access - and not from a technological advancement but a specificity standpoint. The military will want deterministic, non-opaque methods that are probably closer to the policy-gradient recommendation systems of old. Think Netflix and TikTok, not GPT.
I can say from an investor standpoint AI is probably a bubble but only because its entire foundations are open source. There's no money to be made from it, therefore it's a bubble.
Crypto on the other hand always had somewhat dubious foundations. There are few use cases for it, therefore it's a bubble.
Crypto's killer feature is being an open standard for finance that anyone can integrate with. Having a use case in drug and weapons transactions is still utility though, you're disagreeing with yourself
Ai doesn't do anything you couldn't hire a person to do, and you still need a expert person to vet it's outputs, so I think it also provides no utility?
Not true. I’m seeing fake voice scam stories on the news lately, fake kidnapping claims, etc
The closest to fraud AI has done is its hallucinatory outputs. And fair enough, this is enough to hold AI back from being 'it'.
Ai has 1000000x more scam potential than crypto
I don’t understand the comparison
And let's say I was - crypto promises utter anonymity in theory but is actually traceable in practice. So a bit of an academic scam on that front.
So... you mean to insinuate the Sam Altman's current "AI Will Kill Us All Tour" isn't a hype bubble?
> crypto promises utter anonymity
Where?
Cryptocurrency promises a separate ledger for transactions where you don't need to be identified by name. If you identify yourself to buy crypto, then yes, you have defeated the purpose. Cryptocurrency doesn't "promise" anonymity any more than encryption "promises" security, though. If that's academic fraud then I'm Abe Lincoln.
Its CEO did, with Worldcoin. Which is pivoting to be essentially the same with an AI spin.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
Being 90% wrong causes a lot of extra work, severely reducing the gains of that 10%.
Not only is it a bad use case, it is self destructive. The only value a currency might have is if it is used in trade, holding currency "because the value goes up" is making it less useful as a currency.
Also BTC is very insufficient as an actual currency, especially from a purely technical standpoint.
No, I mean something very specific - I can do things at work with LLMs that I couldn't do a year ago without them. I can't say the same about anything crypto related.
If you think that AI is just spitting our word we've seen or that it's guesswork, I don't know how you can even discuss it in good faith.
It's great stuff, and I'd be lying if I said I liked cryptocurrency and don't use AI. The parallels are starkly visible though, and the "overpromise/underdeliver" cycle is already much further along than cryptocurrency ever got. The bubble will eventually pop because people are dissatisfied with the pace of progress, and then everyone will look for a scapegoat. We're already halfway there, judging by the daily deluge of "Ask HN: Why Does It Feel Like OpenAI Nerfed ChatGPT?" posts.