That said, I do think that LLMs, while not the "final form of AI" by any means, are already somewhat of a revolution in human-machine interfaces. Being able to look up facts (or make up convincing lies) is neat, but to me, their real power lies in how good they are in summarizing and translating.

Remember when Siri and Google Assistant were having a very hard time understanding even the simplest commands if they weren't formulated in the exact way they understood, and the "aboutness" problem seemed unsurmountable without AGI?

Now we're suddenly way past that (without any AGI). Even if AI completely plateaus out with LLMs at their present-day strength, I think we could spend years, if not decades, of getting good at meaningfully integrating them into previously very manual workflows. Even an "AI winter" of that shape feels significantly more disruptive than many of the more optimistic crypto scenarios.

We're doing an absolute shit job of it and basing our foundations on piles of sand. We're gonna have to throw it all away and do it right the second time if we ever decide to do something useful.

Really? You can't think of one single practical use for a non-centrally controlled system for sending -basically money- to others without gatekeepers being able to effortlessly interfere or debase? You completely dismiss the very real cases (all bubble hype uses and scams aside) of people using crypto to escape the worst parts of certain countries horrible inept, corrupt banking and financial systems?

If you flatly deny that any of these uses cases do exist and could become larger, I'd argue that you're speaking from ideological blindness against crypto instead of from a reasoned, thoughtful notion of its problems.