The major difference between the 2 is how they're being adopted by customers and the tangible value they return.
AI/ML barrier to entry is far simpler and vastly user friendly compared to crypto. Instant value return or gratification from ML products (GTPs and rest) is far more mainstream friendly.
Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has had their funds stolen or lost using ML products. I understand content creators and those who, unwillingly, contributed knowledge to learning systems did get circumvented but i'm talking about users/customers. Compare that to the negative stigma of crypto frauds and stereotypical association to illegal transactions.
GPTs have had immediate tangible benefits without needing to spend an hour preaching or explaining things.
Crypto's sole usefulness remains in providing money transfers/liquidity in parts of the world where the local systems are failing or off-limits to the users.
+1. I have security cameras at home, and my "DVR" is a collection of shell scripts plus a Python script that uses YOLO to find the interesting parts of the footage. The thing works, helps a lot to review daily footage, was damn easy to put to work, and didn't cost me a cent (not even hardware; I run it in a Mini-PC w/o GPU). I knew nothing about ML before writing this script. So yeah, the value is there.
You are not seeing maybe the numerous consultants and self proclaimed AI experts charging for very dubious solutions. Money is definitely being “stolen”, it’s just a more sophisticated type of stealing. I have yet to see an AI solution that delivers x times the value of simpler rule based models.
> Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has had their funds stolen or lost using ML products.
That is true however I'd say that for example the venezuelian and turkish people who managed to scoop Bitcoin (or Ethereum) didn't do too badly:
Inflation in Venezuela 2022 and estimate for 2023: 210% and 51%
Inflation in Turkey 2022 and estimate for 2023: 70% and 50%
These aren't the only countries.
I personally know a doctor from Iran who tried semi-recently to convert his savings into Bitcoin (and failed: bank didn't let him). And he basically lost all his savings (inflation and bank defaults: double whammy).
From the comfort of countries using strong currencies it's easy to dismiss Bitcoin but there are many countries where shit did hit the fan really hard.
Not it's not a panacea: for example many african countries are experiencing ultra high inflation but cannot use Bitcoin because fees are way too high for these people ($6 USD to move Bitcoin today: I just checked).
> Compare that to the negative stigma of crypto frauds and stereotypical association to illegal transactions.
Seen all the people and exchanges owners busted and going to jail and seen moves like the EU soon de-anonymizing every single wallet out there (as soon as a transaction is made), and seen the public ledger, I don't even know if that bad bad reputation is going to stay for long.
IMHO they're symbiotic. Generative AI destroys trust; crypto lets you function in a trust-less world.
The killer app for generative AI is going to be propaganda. This hasn't entered the discourse yet because nobody wants to advertise that they're running a propaganda mill. I suspect they already exist though - there've been a number of news articles I've read recently where I'm like "I'm pretty sure somebody fed a tweet or police blotter into GPT-4 instead of writing this."
This works now because people are accustomed to trusting what they read. Once the channel has been flooded and it becomes cheap to make it look like your views are echoed by 1000 mainstream news media outlets and millions of people online, people will just stop believing everything they read. Similarly once any idiot can have ChatGPT write a college-level term paper, the skill of writing at the college level won't be worth anything. When you can have ChatGPT write a recommendation letter with a 15-second prompt, it ceases to be a useful signal for how much you believe in the person you're recommending. When you have GMail expand your one-sentence e-mail into 4 paragraphs with generative AI and then the recipient summarizes the 4 paragraph e-mail back into one-sentence, maybe you should've just written the one sentence to begin with.
The value in blockchain technologies is in unforgeability, scarcity, and forced consensus. In a world where forgery is trivially easy, content is trivially abundant, and nobody believes anybody else, a technology that ensures that mutually-distrusting computer systems all represent the same data gets quite valuable.
One other way to look at this is “only people who intentionally invested in crypto lost anything, while creators who were ignorant to or against the idea of ML training set-trawling were injured through no fault of their own.”
Of course, this is not quite true because many people were harmed indirectly when criminal theft of their money was facilitated by the low barrier to entry that cryptocurrency presents to the would-be money launderer.
Another major difference between them is that their hype cycles are out of phase by 40 years. The first AI winter was in 1984 and the first crypto winter was in 2014.
For an apples:apples comparison we need to compare the AI of today with the cryptocurrencies of 2063, or the cryptocurrencies of today with the AI of 1984.
There are many things to criticize crypto for, but at least it will never go all Skynet or paperclip maximizer on us and exterminate the human race. The worst case scenario of one is not like the other.
Crypto was being adopted by consumers though, there was a boom at one point that it was incredibly common to see bitcoin ATM's or signs that stores would accept bitcoin. I even remember a bitcoin credit card or something that lets you use your bitcoin anywhere. That stuff wouldn't have been done if it wasn't being used.
The problem with AI is that it is being shoved into places without any thought of what the benefit actually is or wether or not its actually works.
As someone else said, I feel like much of what is coming out of this AI boom is basically a scam.
For example I was looking at task management app and I was intrigued by some "AI" powered ones. All it really was, was being able to make a task and it asks chatgpt to generate subtasks. The subtasks it generated were basically useless.
No "AI" to help manage my schedule or any other benefits. We are automating the easiest parts of the task with unhelpful content. This is because chatgpt is limited, it doesn't have api hooks into your application so it can't really provide any real benefit.
Some of the uses if AI are real and beneficial (like Amazon using AI to summarize reviews). But the vast majority are just shoving AI somewhere it doesn't need to be (or at least chatgpt doesn't need to be since its just a LLM at the end of the day).
This bubble is going to burst once people finally realize that ChatGPT is not an "AI" as science fiction has sold us, but it is being used as a general smart AI when its honestly dumb as nails except for certain use cases.
We have been using AI for various tasks for decades now. In fact, every day things you take for granted are powered by machine learning, and most people don't even realize it.
Is OCR "a scam just like crypto"? How about voice recognition, used daily all over the world? What about spam filters? Clearly useless over hyped technology right?
Even if you wanted to limit the term AI to large language models, which by the way, would make your use of the term incredibly wrong, it STILL has many common and useful application. You can use LLMs to classify text (sentiment, toxicity, etc), they can be paired with voice models to improve speech recognition or improve translation services, and so on.
I think it's better to ask what you think the major similarity is between AI and crypto, because it's hard to find any other than a subset of the crypto fanatics now jumping on LLMs as the solution to every problem. But this group isn't actually part of the AI community.
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.
I completely agree that there is no relationship at all between the two. Hucksters are gonna huckster no matter what the medium is.
If you want to ask "are LLMs the next metaverse" or something.... implying LLMs are over-promising on their utility and the hype is all driven by the companies controlling the tech.... even that is a stretch but makes more sense.
Anyone selling you AGI, or "make money on youtube by typing a sentence into this prompt" is probably a crypto scammer who found a new group of people to scam.
> How about voice recognition, used daily all over the world?
Yes, absolutely. The money is in selling companies an excuse to keep customers on hold until they give up and stop trying to get the refund they're legally entitled, "voice recognition" is valuable only because it's a legally acceptable smokescreen.
That is like saying “we been using crypto for years: see SSL”
Clearly the AI being compared here is the recent boom in generative AI. OCR didn’t have companies chucking billions at experiments and make chip manufacturing stocks soar.
The cycle of these technologies is always the same:
1. Initial introduction or release
2. Major hype and influx of greed money. <- AI is here now
3. Failure to live up to the hype, resulting in the tech becoming a punchline and gobs of money lost
4. Renaissance of the tech as its true potential is eventually realized, which doesn't match the original hype but ends up very useful
5. Iteration and improvement with no clear "done" or "achieved" milestone, it just becomes part of society
The bombardment of charlatans taking advantage of the term, coupled with commercials everywhere suggests we will soon hit stage 3 for AI. The Super Bowl commercials are usually the tipping point.
Crypto is at stage 3 now.
Not all technologies make it to steps 4-5.
Hell, I remember when social media followed the same path. And ecommerce before it. Or the web in general before that. And on and on it goes.
> In 2021, at the height of the investor frenzy for crypto startups, entrepreneur Chris Horne raised $2 million in seed funding for Filta, a marketplace on which customers could buy and sell custom nonfungible token face filters that could digitally augment their face, say, by adding cat whiskers or a block head. But by the time the company launched in late summer of 2022, enthusiasm for crypto had waned and Filta was faltering.
>
> So Horne pivoted to the new hottest sector: artificial intelligence. He ditched the NFT idea, and this year relaunched Filta as a generative AI-powered digital pet, one that talks and can offer its owner emotional support. The technology behind his new company is OpenAI’s large language model, ChatGPT. And Horne is running his new Filta venture off the capital he raised for his original concept.
That is probably the most cynical version of “crypto guy pivots to AI” I have ever read, but even here it’s an obvious improvement. Before, he was going to sell people pictures of cats on the blockchain. Now, he is going to sell people pictures of cats that will talk and offer emotional support and not be on the blockchain. Strictly better!
Interesting analysis. Suprised HN is so negative towards AI (and that the positive:negative ratio to AI is about the same as it was for Crypto a few years ago!)
The obvious difference is that AI has abundant use-cases, while Crypto only has tenuous ones.
Maybe there is added negativity considering it is a technology where there is clearly a potential threat to jobs on a personal level (e.g. lift operators were very negative towards automatic lifts).
There is a lot of negativity about the way it is used I think.
Most people will agree that LLMs are pretty neat, but now instead of every startup being "like Uber but for ..." they are "like chatGPT but for ...".
Everyone is trying to chuck AI into their products and most of the time there is no need, or the product is just a thin fine-tune over an existing LLM model that adds essentially near-zero value. HN is fairly negative on that sort of thing I think (rightly so IMO)
(author here) Yes, I was surprised that AI didn't have more positive sentiment overall!
Subjectively, the two flavors of AI-negative sentiment I've seen most commonly on HN are (1) its potential to invade privacy, and (2) its potential to displace workers, including workers in tech.
I think that (1) was by far the most common concern up until around the ChatGPT release, at which point (2) became a major concern for many HN readers.
I’m not negative towards AI, but I know how hype cycles work - even for genuinely good tech. I’m not looking forward to the coming waves of scammers and grifters and snake oil salesmen in this space.
I'd guess HN is negative towards hype in general. "AI" is very much full of hype.
What happened with previous AI hypes, the term AI was abandoned and the techniques and disciplines were "rebranded".
Probably will happen again. When something works and we start to understand how and when it works (and especially when it doesn't) it stops being "AI" and becomes something more boring.
> The obvious difference is that AI has abundant use-cases, while Crypto only has tenuous ones.
Hacker News comment sentiment is not a reliable measurem of what the average hacker news developer thinks.
For one, only people who are very invested about something will post about it.
For two, many comments are probably not from developers and instead from fake accounts.
It does not seem surprising to me that both of these factors would be in favor of a more positive sentiment for crypto. People that like it seem to really like it and talk about it a lot, and there is a large financial incentive for numerous actors to create fake accounts and comments.
> Surprised HN is so negative towards AI (and that the positive:negative ratio to AI is about the same as it was for Crypto a few years ago!)
I'm not. AI tools will have huge benefits in some industries. But the main use case that people will experience (at least, the use case they recognize) on a daily basis will be scams and frustration. That's why people are negative. Not because the technology is bad or does not have uses, but because the average experience that people will consciously have will be negative.
It's already impossible to know what's real and what's not. Customer service is already majority bots. You'll never be able to talk to a human again if you have an issue with something. Blackmail and ransomware scams are going to get dialed up to 11. Everything is going to be automated in the most annoying ways possible. People are going to lose their jobs. Most of the jobs that will be lost are "meaningless," but our society revolves around meaningless jobs because they provide order, income and—as a consequence—dignity. All of that is going out the window.
Crypto had a purpose that no one actually cared about. No one cared until people started to see the scam potential and then it took off. AI is going to do the same thing.
AI tools will revolutionize medicine, engineering, manufacturing, and logistics. There will be huge benefits for all of humanity. But you won't think about this day-to-day. You'll just be bombarded by more (and better) scams more quickly.
I am amazed at what AI tools can do already. Had these tools existed 10 or 15 years ago my entire life would be different. Better? I have no idea. Maybe, maybe not. But even if it would have been better I know enough to know that I would not recognize that.
It sucks because that's impressive field, but over decade of hype on self-driving cars and now naivety of experts being replaced by chat bot is annoying
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying those things don't work, just not as good as people try to convince us
It's not obvious to me whether we've actually found a good killer app for generative AI yet, unless you consider chatgpt or sites like midjourney the killer apps. A lot of the new wave of ai startups are just wrappers for gpt. I don't think that adds a ton of value over just asking gpt-4 your query as opposed to subscribing to a billion different ai services. I also question the value of ai art in general when everyone involved in creative labor thinks you're a piece of shit for using it.
> Maybe there is added negativity considering it is a technology where there is clearly a potential threat to jobs on a personal level
I'm not worried about this on a personal level, but I'm very worried about the wider risk of too many people being put out of work too quickly. That's my biggest concern with these tools.
One perspective I've been thinking about lately is how the rise of Crypto has been hugely beneficial for AI, in the same way that the dot-com bubble was hugely beneficial for the internet.
Essentially Crypto lead to huge investment into GPUs and GPU technology, and then once Crypto collapsed lead to a huge capacity of compute power which then decidedly was put into AI.
I doubt that investment into GPU technology would have been driven by the idea of AI alone. Something manic like Crypto had to drive it initially. Without Crypto, I imagine the AI revolution we're seeing today would not have taken place.
AI feels more like the .COM bubble. There was a lot of hype and nonsense but the underlying tech really changed the world. I feel the same about AI. Crypto was always a solution that looked for problems it could solve.
That is a succinct and well-stated expression of my opinion at present, so here's an upvote. I like that it also leaves the door open for the corrollary that it's going to change the world, but we barely know how, and we have no idea about the second- and third-order effects yet.
AI, specifically ChatGPT is the first thing since maybe my Google/Stackoverflow that has fundamentally changed my day as a developer.
It's a constant conversation now, with ChatGPT, over hard problems. The AI doesn't always get it right, but it's a great partner, with so many great suggestions.
Interesting sentiment analysis, but hard to put into context without a baseline for the sentiment of average HN comments. In my experience, HN can be impressively cynical on just about any topic that gets posted. Some times a great article will get posted and people will find creative ways to complain about everything from the color choice of the website to unrelated complaints from loosely related topics. It gets negative very quickly in here.
It’s also interesting to see sentiment trending downward in time for both topics, even as the real-world benefits of AI become more obvious. My gut feeling is that this shows some of the contrarian bias on HN: Comments here are more optimistic about things that aren’t yet mainstream, but lean negative as soon as something becomes too popular or mainstream.
Interesting article. Thanks for including the details about fine tuning your own model.
I'm interested in the last bit. That sentiment towards anything on HN has become steadily more negative over time. Would be interested to see if this trend exists on other websites and the internet as a whole. It could be a way to measure the optimism/vibe of all of humanity. Is the entire internet becoming more cynical/skeptical/mean?
Can you add some normalisation topic (or combination / average of several topics) like "linux" or "javascript" or something that's been around for a long time and hasn't really had a hype cycle recently?
It's interesting to see how AI/Crypto relate to each other, but e.g. for sentiment analysis we would need to check if maybe HN got more negative _overall_ or if it's actually dependent on the two topics you chose
Crypto is fun as a concept but after more than a decade it doesn't seem to be useful for much, apart from speculation. And I say this as someone who has fooled around with crypto a lot.
AI has plenty of use cases. Just ChatGPT alone is helping me everyday in many different ways. I don't think it's remotely comparable.
The one thing that stands out really clearly in the sentiment graph is how, prior to the AI sentiment trough around 2022, AI and Crypto sentiment were highly correlated in their movements.
It would be interesting to see a broader analysis across subjects and see if that shared movement wasn't about AI and crypto, but largely just sort of a fluctuation in general tone across HN, or if instead relative to general HN sentiment, sentiment on Crypto an AI movements were correlated prior to the recent divergence.
Although I'm generally favorable towards crypto, the biggest difference is that unlike crypto, AI, especially in the form of LLMs and image models are extremely idiot-friendly.
No, I don't mean it in a derogatory way: crypto leaves a lot of loose ends to be tied up by everyday humans who just want to be left alone - oh, and if anything goes wrong once, your fortune could be lost and there's no one to complain to.
AI, on the other hand, is already making its way into browsers like Microsoft's Edge where I can ask it to generate all kinds of ideas, images, summaries, etc. via the chat format everyone is already friendly with. Likewise, GPT3 & 4's first major applications that took off was ChatGPT that brought AI chat to noobs and you don't need to be a hacker bro to use that.
In contrast, the first time I downloaded Metamask and tried to buy USDC, I quickly found out that there are different versions (correct me if I'm wrong) of this single cryptocurrency hosted on the Polygon, Ethereum, Avalanche, etc. blockchains.
What's that even supposed to mean to a beginner who wants to send money to a third-world country in minutes? And, remember: one wrong step and you could possibly lose everything.
Yes, most projects are pure hype. The amount of AI peddling on Twitter and YouTube is unprecedented. I wish the community were a lot more humble in that regard. That being said, there are a lot of legit use cases and customers in need of solutions that cannot be done quickly via a few API calls to OpenAI and require a lot of customisations and hand-holding. AI is hyped a lot, but there are companies out there, and I like to consider us being one of them (bias, I know), that think about how to enable customers to solve/improve real problems with the help of AI instead of making a quick buck by peddling the latest doc-chat solutions.
From that perspective, AI is not the new crypto. If you ignore the noise and focus on the actual work, you will find a lot of good things about this field, and I might say even breakthrough advances, that help us reconsider what intelligent life really means.
Disclaimer: we are one of the first "chat to your docs" companies that came out as soon as ChatGPT was released when all we had at our disposal was text-davinci-003 and basic vector stores. Now, we do mostly other things.
Crypto requires explanation, AI merely demonstration.
The only demonstration crypto has is 'look, more money today' and that only works sometimes.
AI's demonstration is followed by explanation of how it will kill us all, or why it won't work in context X, or take our job, etc, but you can kind of just ignore that and use it.
AI/ML is certainly going to get integrated everywhere ultimately and in a lot of things that will get hidden to the average consumer, like medical imaging.
What is really hype right now is how AI is going to upset all our day to day lives and earn billions for startups.
It is probably going to be a bit more incremental than the hype right now, and most of the profits will likely go to the already established tech companies.
ChatGPTs AI assistants are already seen as a sign that a good number of AI startups that are a thin layer around someone else's LLM will collapse due to zero moat.
It also isn't even clear where the profits are going to come from GPT/LLMs other than from NVIDIA selling shovels to the miners. Beyond that it will probably be the existing tech companies and they may be running them at a considerable loss for a long time to come.
Well, I've never really used crypto, save for mining a few bitcoins way, way back in the day. The idea was really appealing and initially seemed revolutionary - but also a bit of a tempest in a teacup.
LLMs -- I've gradually been using them more and more, with tangible benefits (less effort to complete a task / quicker turnaround on projects). Some workflows that were unimaginable are now possible, because of this bi-directional bridge between structured information and human language.
One is a pyramid scheme, the other is a digital exoskeleton / ironman suit. It really doesn't compare.
[+] [-] bamazizi|2 years ago|reply
AI/ML barrier to entry is far simpler and vastly user friendly compared to crypto. Instant value return or gratification from ML products (GTPs and rest) is far more mainstream friendly.
Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has had their funds stolen or lost using ML products. I understand content creators and those who, unwillingly, contributed knowledge to learning systems did get circumvented but i'm talking about users/customers. Compare that to the negative stigma of crypto frauds and stereotypical association to illegal transactions.
Apples vs. rotten oranges in my opinion!
[+] [-] hipadev23|2 years ago|reply
Crypto's sole usefulness remains in providing money transfers/liquidity in parts of the world where the local systems are failing or off-limits to the users.
[+] [-] epx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kfk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klntsky|2 years ago|reply
Most of "AI startups" are close to scams, i.e. they are oftentimes just interfaces to proprietary APIs that monetize on impressiveness of LLMs.
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|2 years ago|reply
That is true however I'd say that for example the venezuelian and turkish people who managed to scoop Bitcoin (or Ethereum) didn't do too badly:
Inflation in Venezuela 2022 and estimate for 2023: 210% and 51% Inflation in Turkey 2022 and estimate for 2023: 70% and 50%
These aren't the only countries.
I personally know a doctor from Iran who tried semi-recently to convert his savings into Bitcoin (and failed: bank didn't let him). And he basically lost all his savings (inflation and bank defaults: double whammy).
From the comfort of countries using strong currencies it's easy to dismiss Bitcoin but there are many countries where shit did hit the fan really hard.
Not it's not a panacea: for example many african countries are experiencing ultra high inflation but cannot use Bitcoin because fees are way too high for these people ($6 USD to move Bitcoin today: I just checked).
> Compare that to the negative stigma of crypto frauds and stereotypical association to illegal transactions.
Seen all the people and exchanges owners busted and going to jail and seen moves like the EU soon de-anonymizing every single wallet out there (as soon as a transaction is made), and seen the public ledger, I don't even know if that bad bad reputation is going to stay for long.
[+] [-] nostrademons|2 years ago|reply
The killer app for generative AI is going to be propaganda. This hasn't entered the discourse yet because nobody wants to advertise that they're running a propaganda mill. I suspect they already exist though - there've been a number of news articles I've read recently where I'm like "I'm pretty sure somebody fed a tweet or police blotter into GPT-4 instead of writing this."
This works now because people are accustomed to trusting what they read. Once the channel has been flooded and it becomes cheap to make it look like your views are echoed by 1000 mainstream news media outlets and millions of people online, people will just stop believing everything they read. Similarly once any idiot can have ChatGPT write a college-level term paper, the skill of writing at the college level won't be worth anything. When you can have ChatGPT write a recommendation letter with a 15-second prompt, it ceases to be a useful signal for how much you believe in the person you're recommending. When you have GMail expand your one-sentence e-mail into 4 paragraphs with generative AI and then the recipient summarizes the 4 paragraph e-mail back into one-sentence, maybe you should've just written the one sentence to begin with.
The value in blockchain technologies is in unforgeability, scarcity, and forced consensus. In a world where forgery is trivially easy, content is trivially abundant, and nobody believes anybody else, a technology that ensures that mutually-distrusting computer systems all represent the same data gets quite valuable.
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riku_iki|2 years ago|reply
crypto was booming as investment vehicle, buying one was trivial, many people received very tangible value.
[+] [-] singleshot_|2 years ago|reply
Of course, this is not quite true because many people were harmed indirectly when criminal theft of their money was facilitated by the low barrier to entry that cryptocurrency presents to the would-be money launderer.
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|2 years ago|reply
For an apples:apples comparison we need to compare the AI of today with the cryptocurrencies of 2063, or the cryptocurrencies of today with the AI of 1984.
[+] [-] dylan604|2 years ago|reply
Interesting turn of phrase as rotten apples vs oranges would be much more natural to my ear
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdjon|2 years ago|reply
The problem with AI is that it is being shoved into places without any thought of what the benefit actually is or wether or not its actually works.
As someone else said, I feel like much of what is coming out of this AI boom is basically a scam.
For example I was looking at task management app and I was intrigued by some "AI" powered ones. All it really was, was being able to make a task and it asks chatgpt to generate subtasks. The subtasks it generated were basically useless.
No "AI" to help manage my schedule or any other benefits. We are automating the easiest parts of the task with unhelpful content. This is because chatgpt is limited, it doesn't have api hooks into your application so it can't really provide any real benefit.
Some of the uses if AI are real and beneficial (like Amazon using AI to summarize reviews). But the vast majority are just shoving AI somewhere it doesn't need to be (or at least chatgpt doesn't need to be since its just a LLM at the end of the day).
This bubble is going to burst once people finally realize that ChatGPT is not an "AI" as science fiction has sold us, but it is being used as a general smart AI when its honestly dumb as nails except for certain use cases.
[+] [-] tensor|2 years ago|reply
Is OCR "a scam just like crypto"? How about voice recognition, used daily all over the world? What about spam filters? Clearly useless over hyped technology right?
Even if you wanted to limit the term AI to large language models, which by the way, would make your use of the term incredibly wrong, it STILL has many common and useful application. You can use LLMs to classify text (sentiment, toxicity, etc), they can be paired with voice models to improve speech recognition or improve translation services, and so on.
I think it's better to ask what you think the major similarity is between AI and crypto, because it's hard to find any other than a subset of the crypto fanatics now jumping on LLMs as the solution to every problem. But this group isn't actually part of the AI community.
[+] [-] dragontamer|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] code_runner|2 years ago|reply
If you want to ask "are LLMs the next metaverse" or something.... implying LLMs are over-promising on their utility and the hype is all driven by the companies controlling the tech.... even that is a stretch but makes more sense.
Anyone selling you AGI, or "make money on youtube by typing a sentence into this prompt" is probably a crypto scammer who found a new group of people to scam.
[+] [-] lmm|2 years ago|reply
Yes, absolutely. The money is in selling companies an excuse to keep customers on hold until they give up and stop trying to get the refund they're legally entitled, "voice recognition" is valuable only because it's a legally acceptable smokescreen.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|2 years ago|reply
Clearly the AI being compared here is the recent boom in generative AI. OCR didn’t have companies chucking billions at experiments and make chip manufacturing stocks soar.
[+] [-] baggachipz|2 years ago|reply
Crypto is at stage 3 now.
Not all technologies make it to steps 4-5.
Hell, I remember when social media followed the same path. And ecommerce before it. Or the web in general before that. And on and on it goes.
[+] [-] stock_toaster|2 years ago|reply
~~~
~~~Seems like maybe a little bit?
[+] [-] quickthrower2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Closi|2 years ago|reply
The obvious difference is that AI has abundant use-cases, while Crypto only has tenuous ones.
Maybe there is added negativity considering it is a technology where there is clearly a potential threat to jobs on a personal level (e.g. lift operators were very negative towards automatic lifts).
[+] [-] mattlondon|2 years ago|reply
Most people will agree that LLMs are pretty neat, but now instead of every startup being "like Uber but for ..." they are "like chatGPT but for ...".
Everyone is trying to chuck AI into their products and most of the time there is no need, or the product is just a thin fine-tune over an existing LLM model that adds essentially near-zero value. HN is fairly negative on that sort of thing I think (rightly so IMO)
[+] [-] kcorbitt|2 years ago|reply
Subjectively, the two flavors of AI-negative sentiment I've seen most commonly on HN are (1) its potential to invade privacy, and (2) its potential to displace workers, including workers in tech.
I think that (1) was by far the most common concern up until around the ChatGPT release, at which point (2) became a major concern for many HN readers.
[+] [-] jl6|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jampekka|2 years ago|reply
What happened with previous AI hypes, the term AI was abandoned and the techniques and disciplines were "rebranded".
Probably will happen again. When something works and we start to understand how and when it works (and especially when it doesn't) it stops being "AI" and becomes something more boring.
[+] [-] adverbly|2 years ago|reply
Hacker News comment sentiment is not a reliable measurem of what the average hacker news developer thinks.
For one, only people who are very invested about something will post about it.
For two, many comments are probably not from developers and instead from fake accounts.
It does not seem surprising to me that both of these factors would be in favor of a more positive sentiment for crypto. People that like it seem to really like it and talk about it a lot, and there is a large financial incentive for numerous actors to create fake accounts and comments.
[+] [-] greenthrow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themagician|2 years ago|reply
I'm not. AI tools will have huge benefits in some industries. But the main use case that people will experience (at least, the use case they recognize) on a daily basis will be scams and frustration. That's why people are negative. Not because the technology is bad or does not have uses, but because the average experience that people will consciously have will be negative.
It's already impossible to know what's real and what's not. Customer service is already majority bots. You'll never be able to talk to a human again if you have an issue with something. Blackmail and ransomware scams are going to get dialed up to 11. Everything is going to be automated in the most annoying ways possible. People are going to lose their jobs. Most of the jobs that will be lost are "meaningless," but our society revolves around meaningless jobs because they provide order, income and—as a consequence—dignity. All of that is going out the window.
Crypto had a purpose that no one actually cared about. No one cared until people started to see the scam potential and then it took off. AI is going to do the same thing.
AI tools will revolutionize medicine, engineering, manufacturing, and logistics. There will be huge benefits for all of humanity. But you won't think about this day-to-day. You'll just be bombarded by more (and better) scams more quickly.
I am amazed at what AI tools can do already. Had these tools existed 10 or 15 years ago my entire life would be different. Better? I have no idea. Maybe, maybe not. But even if it would have been better I know enough to know that I would not recognize that.
[+] [-] tester756|2 years ago|reply
I feel like it is overrated and overhyped
It sucks because that's impressive field, but over decade of hype on self-driving cars and now naivety of experts being replaced by chat bot is annoying
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying those things don't work, just not as good as people try to convince us
[+] [-] __loam|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply
I'm not worried about this on a personal level, but I'm very worried about the wider risk of too many people being put out of work too quickly. That's my biggest concern with these tools.
[+] [-] dottjt|2 years ago|reply
Essentially Crypto lead to huge investment into GPUs and GPU technology, and then once Crypto collapsed lead to a huge capacity of compute power which then decidedly was put into AI.
I doubt that investment into GPU technology would have been driven by the idea of AI alone. Something manic like Crypto had to drive it initially. Without Crypto, I imagine the AI revolution we're seeing today would not have taken place.
[+] [-] rqtwteye|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aantix|2 years ago|reply
It's a constant conversation now, with ChatGPT, over hard problems. The AI doesn't always get it right, but it's a great partner, with so many great suggestions.
I cannot imagine going back.
[+] [-] Aurornis|2 years ago|reply
It’s also interesting to see sentiment trending downward in time for both topics, even as the real-world benefits of AI become more obvious. My gut feeling is that this shows some of the contrarian bias on HN: Comments here are more optimistic about things that aren’t yet mainstream, but lean negative as soon as something becomes too popular or mainstream.
Interesting article. Thanks for including the details about fine tuning your own model.
[+] [-] ertgbnm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ritzaco|2 years ago|reply
It's interesting to see how AI/Crypto relate to each other, but e.g. for sentiment analysis we would need to check if maybe HN got more negative _overall_ or if it's actually dependent on the two topics you chose
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|2 years ago|reply
AI has plenty of use cases. Just ChatGPT alone is helping me everyday in many different ways. I don't think it's remotely comparable.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|2 years ago|reply
It would be interesting to see a broader analysis across subjects and see if that shared movement wasn't about AI and crypto, but largely just sort of a fluctuation in general tone across HN, or if instead relative to general HN sentiment, sentiment on Crypto an AI movements were correlated prior to the recent divergence.
[+] [-] churchill|2 years ago|reply
No, I don't mean it in a derogatory way: crypto leaves a lot of loose ends to be tied up by everyday humans who just want to be left alone - oh, and if anything goes wrong once, your fortune could be lost and there's no one to complain to.
AI, on the other hand, is already making its way into browsers like Microsoft's Edge where I can ask it to generate all kinds of ideas, images, summaries, etc. via the chat format everyone is already friendly with. Likewise, GPT3 & 4's first major applications that took off was ChatGPT that brought AI chat to noobs and you don't need to be a hacker bro to use that.
In contrast, the first time I downloaded Metamask and tried to buy USDC, I quickly found out that there are different versions (correct me if I'm wrong) of this single cryptocurrency hosted on the Polygon, Ethereum, Avalanche, etc. blockchains.
What's that even supposed to mean to a beginner who wants to send money to a third-world country in minutes? And, remember: one wrong step and you could possibly lose everything.
[+] [-] _pdp_|2 years ago|reply
From that perspective, AI is not the new crypto. If you ignore the noise and focus on the actual work, you will find a lot of good things about this field, and I might say even breakthrough advances, that help us reconsider what intelligent life really means.
Disclaimer: we are one of the first "chat to your docs" companies that came out as soon as ChatGPT was released when all we had at our disposal was text-davinci-003 and basic vector stores. Now, we do mostly other things.
Edit: fixed typos
[+] [-] yCombLinks|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] npunt|2 years ago|reply
The only demonstration crypto has is 'look, more money today' and that only works sometimes.
AI's demonstration is followed by explanation of how it will kill us all, or why it won't work in context X, or take our job, etc, but you can kind of just ignore that and use it.
[+] [-] lamontcg|2 years ago|reply
What is really hype right now is how AI is going to upset all our day to day lives and earn billions for startups.
It is probably going to be a bit more incremental than the hype right now, and most of the profits will likely go to the already established tech companies.
ChatGPTs AI assistants are already seen as a sign that a good number of AI startups that are a thin layer around someone else's LLM will collapse due to zero moat.
It also isn't even clear where the profits are going to come from GPT/LLMs other than from NVIDIA selling shovels to the miners. Beyond that it will probably be the existing tech companies and they may be running them at a considerable loss for a long time to come.
[+] [-] btbuildem|2 years ago|reply
LLMs -- I've gradually been using them more and more, with tangible benefits (less effort to complete a task / quicker turnaround on projects). Some workflows that were unimaginable are now possible, because of this bi-directional bridge between structured information and human language.
One is a pyramid scheme, the other is a digital exoskeleton / ironman suit. It really doesn't compare.
[+] [-] meowtimemania|2 years ago|reply
Crypto hasn't made me more productive in any way. To me, it's had the same utility as an online casino.