Ask HN: Anyone else feel like AI hype is the new crypto hype?
It's all starting to feel really scammy. There are some cool things, but it's overwhelmed by the ocean of scammers / people overhyping what AI can do.
However there’s a marked difference between it and crypto in that it provides immediate value to the lay person with very low risk to them.
Stuff like summarization or scribing audio or text transformations.
The other day I was in a fabric store and overheard the cashier telling her coworker that she likes using ChatGPT to help write emails to vendors. It’s that kind of accessibility that crypto never had that AI hype is banking on.
Now the big issue is scalability. Everyone is showing off these massive models that are still expensive to run. Very little delivers at that quality while being able to run locally for a user. Without being able to run locally, it’s very expensive for the companies.
My biggest worry is that true mass consumer facing generative AI will be orders of magnitude less useful than the expensive cloud backed models.
And yes tons of scams and overhyping by people who clearly don't understand the technology themselves. Those people are always going to be around, they capitalize on excitement, regardless of whether the underlying thing is legitimate.
I've been subscribing to - AI probably won't be as bad or as awesome as everyone thinks.
... I mean, kind of by definition, surely, in that CV as a whole has always been broadly categorised as AI. Computer vision's been around since the 60s, though outside of narrowly-defined problem spaces like OCR didn't really become useful til the 90s.
The current AI bubble is largely based around generative AI, not CV (CV was the _previous_ AI bubble; remember self-driving cars?)
I think the hype itself is a lot of the same hype that we saw for crypto. Trying to find anywhere it can be shoved and just using "AI" having a ton of market power even if what is being done makes zero sense.
However unlike Crypto, which had a technological barrier that blocked any serious adoption by the general population. AI doesn't have that barrier. So I am worried that the hype will continue to grow and the bubble won't pop in the same way since too many people have just accepted it even though it is severely flawed and being shoved in places it doesn't belong.
Edit:
Also I really wish when we talk about "AI" we can be specific on if we are talking about "LLM's" being shoved everywhere or if we are talking about more traditional AI that was more commonplace and almost invisible just a couple years ago. Above I am referring to LLM's and the image/video generation tech.
I still see it as a serious bad sign that anybody mentions crypto and AI in the same sentence. For one thing they are diametrically opposite in economics. A blockchain uses 10,000 computers to do the work 1 computer could do (one reason why nobody showed up at a CS conference with the idea until Bitcoin mania hit) whereas AI models need a lot of computation and significant amounts of data such that there is no way you are going to do the computation on a blockchain and if you are extracting data from a blockchain it is going to be “small data”.
After one year, hard to find anyone who hasn't used ChatGPT.
So no they're nothing alike, one being useful.
These tools actually push capabilities forward and can be used basically for a few $ of GPU time on Hugging Face or another cloud provider.
Sure, there are still loads of people trying to sell "AI Headshots" etc but this to me feels entirely different.
I think the same conditions also product a lot of _accidental_ scammers; people who aren't intentionally selling something impossible, but are merely too incompetent to realise that what they are promising is impossible (I think someone linked an LLM tool that claimed to _do your taxes for you_ here recently...).
That's not to say there's nothing to it, but it is a near-perfect playground for grifters.
Where there's money, there will be scammers, unfortunately.