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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

> Is OCR "a scam just like crypto"?

OCR is a technology.

Cryptocoins are a community. The _SAME_ people who pushed crypto have now moved into the AI sphere and are hawking AI.

Its like all the snake oil salesmen of the 1800s suddenly discovered that cars are selling and have become car salesmen. That doesn't mean that cars are a scam, it means that many, many people trying to sell cars to you are scammers.

Having our guard up against hucksters, especially when the great community of hucksters are obviously moving in lockstep to say the same thing (and coordinate their arguments thanks to the internet / meme culture), it makes it easy to pick out when to be on guard.

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>That doesn't mean that cars are a scam, it means that many, many people trying to sell cars to you are scammers.

But AI isn't a scam, that's their point. The more opt comparison here may be to horse buggies instead of snake oil. We probably will inevitable move more towards generative content, and everyone's trying to find their place as livelihoods are being impacted.

And of course there's the legalities of what's used to train AI. Crypto was completely decoupled and economic concepts aren't exactly copyright to begin with. So this doesn't apply much here.

> But AI isn't a scam, that's their point.

Anything can be a scam when a scammer is saying it. Its not so hard to make an AI scam.

Step 1: Say that you're an AI specialist.

Step 2: Take people's money.

Step 3: Done. You now have their money. Don't even "profit", just take their money.

As long as dumbasses give their money to the latest-and-greatest crap and "technological fashion statements", this scam will continue over-and-over again. I mean, at least the cryptocoin community had a word-babble of blockchain technologies and hashing. AI is so new that they barely have any language for this scam and people are still forking money over. Its almost laughable at how little defenses people have against this.

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The SBF and FTX saga is your template. Just do the same thing except with AI-like words and you'll get pretty far these days.

The difference is, with crypto, the scammers were approximately the entirety of the field, and were scamming people with bullshit product tailor-made to be a vehicle for scamming. With AI, those same scammers are just a small fraction of the overall market, and they're overhyping a real thing with real value. There's a qualitative difference here across many dimensions.

> With AI, those same scammers are just a small fraction of the overall market

Are they really?

A lot of these fly-by-night operations are just glorified SASS apps sticking a few tokens in front of your text before it goes to ChatGPT and calling the whole thing a new AI application.

There's definitely a low of low-effort crap in the market today in "AI". There's some real gems out there for sure but... my guard is up. Some of these businesses have no actual business model and are coasting purely on hype.

And that's probably the _better_ of AI startups these days, in that it actually has a product, actually has a businessplan (a crappy one but one exists). There's even worse crap than this out there.

But what proportion of the market are they? I don’t expect anyone knows, but consider that Apple has purpose built ANN circuitry in every CPU they sell, or consider the revenue Nvidia is making selling H100s. My guess is that is a bigger slice of the pie than the shady vendors.

I don't think anyone was criticizing "AI" when M1 came out, or when such applications were given to Google Pixel to improve camera stuff or whatever.

The issue is that this LLM boom, coinciding with the crypto-bro crash, has caused a lot of scammers to pivot out of cryptocoins and into AI.

There's a real subset of R&D happening with AI no doubt. But keep your guard up, there's also a flood of cryptobros who have lost everything after FTX who are trying to pivot into another field. That's all that I'm saying.

OCR is a technology. Users of a particular OCR software form a community.

Cryptocoins are a technology. Users of a particular cryptocoin protocol form a community.

> Cryptocoins are a technology. Users of a particular cryptocoin protocol form a community.

Nah. Cryptocoin users fluidly switch between cryptocoins. You could be into... I dunno... Lunacoin... and by next week you'd have changed all your money into Mooncoin before anyone notices. In fact, I can pump Lunacoin while I'm selling it and no one would be wise to my tricks.

OCR users don't really. Its a lot of friction.

There's a reason why cryptocoins were so good at scamming. They were fluid enough that you could be a dishonest snake. But if you write like a 10,000 line codebase using tesseract-ocr, you ain't switching off of that without some serious amounts of effort. (Certainly not a week's worth of effort IMO).

I don't really know what you're arguing against. Are you arguing that cryptocoin users don't form communities?

> the _SAME_ people

It's never "the same people".

You're telling me that no one has Blockchain on their resume and suddenly pivoted to AI this year?

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