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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.