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!
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.
I'm a crypto sceptic but I wasn't always like that. There was a time many years ago when Ethereum was brand new and I was an eager early adopter. I tried creating wallets, tried running a node to see what it does, put in some money through an exchange, and then... Nothing. There was nothing to do after jumping through all those hoops. In fact, turns out the only thing to do with the crypto wallet was to wait for its value to maybe increase over time. (Hence the "number go up" meme.) And for that to be realized, I would need to sell the coins to a new sucker to get real money out again — suspiciously pyramid-like.
And it's still like that today. There's no reason for me to ever open those old wallets again (and surely I don't even have the passwords anymore because self-custody is such a terrible idea UX-wise). And there's no reason to try any of the new stuff because it still obviously does nothing I'd need.
The early Internet wasn't like that. There was plenty to see and try, and interesting people to interact with. Once you tried it, you probably wanted to go back.
Today's early AI is like the early Internet in all the ways that crypto isn't and never will be. There's plenty you can do with ChatGPT and other models, right off the bat. You can install interesting stuff locally or run it on somebody else's server. You don't need to run the crypto-style terrible UX gauntlet and buy coins from a shady operator. AI is already so much easier and more useful and more powerful than crypto-web3-anything, it's competing in a completely different race.
OpenSea has lost 99% of their transaction volume in the past year, and even more of their revenue. I'd be shocked if the same happens to OpenAI. One was a fad, the other isn't.
A chatGPT user could just be someone who popped onto the website and submitted the chat form.
Most of "AI startups" are close to scams, i.e. they are oftentimes just interfaces to proprietary APIs that monetize on impressiveness of LLMs.
Meanwhile millions of people pay for tools that are now integrating AI to enhance their value add.
Free ChatGPT is just a loss leader for API and paid acct and a way to better train the model.
Marketing terms vary, before it was "big data", now it's "AI".
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.
You need exchanges to do anything useful in crypto. And as we've seen most recently in the FTX case, all the exchanges are wretched hives of scum and villainy.
Personally I don't partake - but they get a value in it, I guess. Who am I to judge?
"VCs have entered the chat"
The trail of broken crypto startups serve as counter evidence. There were plenty of merchants initially dragged in by the appeal of cutting out at least Visa/Mastercard's cut, and in many cases governments too.
And then the consumer adoption wasn't there, and the prices for merchants were also too high, so many ripped them out again.
Maybe I am wrong, but it seemed like there were a lot of people talking about it and in it (same with NFT) and then it plummeted.
That’s why I kinda felt like AI is the same. The bubble is going to pop as we hit limitations on what this can actually do.
But I will also admit that some of this could be living within a tech bubble.
OpenAI cannot make every product and market them to every segment. If you wrap their API and provide a novel UX with precise positioning, there's value there.
OpenAI can copy the underlying collection of features tomorrow morning, but if the positioning is precise enough, you will easily outcompete them.
For an example developers can understand, see managed SaaS: which is a collection of companies raking in billions in revenue from simply wrapping AWS/GCP/Azure in ways that the underlying platforms even end up copying anyways but succeeding because their developer experience is better, or their feature set is better focused, or they're just plain nicer to work with.
Not really. There are plenty of decentralized exchanges which are proven, reliable, auditable, generally used by many without issues.
see: https://uniswap.org https://curve.fi/ https://1inch.io
It's the centralized exchanges, which are more akin to traditional financial institutions whose records are not on a publicly visible blockchain but rather private databases or... apparently spreadsheets... which fall victim to the same issues we have seen in the past in the traditional financial world.
Even if OpenAI doesn't, if its a thin wrapper with no deep proprietary edge, someone else can; your offering is ripe for commodification, even if that doesn't come from OpenAI themselves.
If that's not possible, it's useless for the proposed use case: "send and receive money globally without any intermediary".
I ran full nodes, wrote smart contracts, even had 200 GPUs mining ethereum at one point. I still have a bunch of wallets, exchange accounts, ENS names, you name it. Interesting, kind of fun, but then a big "Ok, now what?". Turns out not much other than writing some crypto thing to do another crypto thing that does another crypto thing.
Since getting generally disgusted with the sleaze I saw from the inside I haven't touched any of it in years.
How much difference has this made in my life? Zero (other than not being grossed out on a regular basis). How many times have I had to dust off a wallet or write a smart contract to do something I couldn't do better, faster, and cheaper elsewhere? Zero. How many times have I wanted to buy something and needed crypto? Zero. My experience is an anecdote for the entire space - a lot of time, money, and energy spent with no tangible value and nothing to show for it.
Ethereum is over eight years old, bitcoin nearly 15. ChatGPT has been out for less than a year and I use it on a daily basis to save time and come up with fairly novel things I'm not sure I could on my own. Of course the roots of ChatGPT go back quite far but then again so do merkle trees.
I wish I would have saved the time, money, and grey hairs on crypto for "AI" - I have way more fun with Llama, Whisper, and dozens of other models with immediate and real use cases on a daily basis.
They also seem to work very well for summarizing large amounts of data, for automating the generation of basic legal texts, for extracting key data points from paperwork (invoices, mortgage applications, bank statements, etc).
It's useful to separate whether there is a lot of dubious hype (true of any new foundational technology) from whether useful things are being done. Both can be true at the same time. Lots of fraud and stupidity, but also lots of valuable work happening. With crypto, there was none of the latter, other than criminal applications.
The internet also attracted lots of hype and poor ROI consulting projects...but here we are.
If I want to send someone money, I can send anyone in the world BTC securely and instantly without any intermediary.
If other party wants to convert to fiat then they can do so through an exchange, of which there are many.
Most people who own crypto exchanged dollars for it.
That's why "technical novelty" ranks ridiculously low on scale of things that make most successful software businesses these days: if anything technical novelty is more of an albatross on most software businesses than a saving grace.
Building traction in software is more about the 100s of other concerns that apply to every business: brand recognition, communicating your value proposition effectively, being able to sell to the target customer effectively, having the correct UX, the right proofs, the list goes on.
Copying that is just as hard as ever, if not harder.
Or you could simply use a traditional wire transfer and currency would be converted automatically. USA and Italy exchange millions of dollars every day - it's nothing special.
Not a single avg human I know even tried crypto...
And when you played around with something the next and better version is already around the next corner!
I never seen something like this :)
Gold, shares etc.
I believe the criticism is correct as the current driver of crypto is either a 'i put that much money in I'm not selling until it increases again' or gambled los.
After all the miners want to get paid.
But hey binance and others struggle let's see if there is a collapse soon
- You will need to get permission from your bank to send international wire transfers (sign forms/agreements). - takes a long time (in the order of days) - expensive (~$50-$75 for outgoing international wire, and $25-$50 to receive it).
crypto was booming as investment vehicle, buying one was trivial, many people received very tangible value.
I remember that in the beginning people were dreaming about self-contained crypto economy where exchanges would not be needed - that didn't really work out.
The forms are for KYC activity, and agreements on what the limitations of liability are. The delays are to validate that the transfers are handled and secured, and ideally can't be charged back. The fees are to cover the costs of the people who do the work for that.
It's not perfect, but it's quite a bit better than the checks and balances that exist for folks who get hit by a scam and are convinced to go to a crypto kiosk and pay a scammer because they have been frightened by a threat to a loved one, or are taken in by a scammer about services being cut off, or desperately paying off a ransomware demand in the hopes that your business or personal records won't be leaked or published.
Within the eurozone (the 20 countries using the euro), there’s SEPA instant credit which clears in less than ten seconds, is available 24/7, and costs practically nothing (a few cents). It’s a fine example of how thoughtful regulation can enable a system that is better than any crypto solution.
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.
Look at venezuela and turkey inflation rate these last two years (and the estimates for the coming years). Look at the SNAFU that happened in Iran and banks defaulting and now inflation kicking in.
It may be an ultra risky bet (and there are serious opsec risks too) but when your savings are going lose 90% of their value in two years anyway, why not take it?
Bitcoin was, after all, created as a gigantic middle finger in response to infinite money printing.
The world is big and there are average consumers in countries other than the US or the EU.
FTX was also a $32B company until it wasn’t.
It'll be interesting when there is more distinction between the two in utility. LLMs already have a fair amount of utility in their relatively early stages and I've certainly seen meaningful adoption of diffusion model generated images to replace stock photo usage.
I don't think we'll ever even know how many NFT projects there were out there, all taking up space on the various chains, all shilling garbage artwork, all promising all manner of shit from video games to magazines to comics to television series, many of which raised huge sums of money, virtually all of which is now gone. And it's easy to point and laugh at the people who thought these things were anything but scams, but also, in a better world, we wouldn't let tons of people be scammed like this. Being vulnerable to certain kinds of hype shouldn't give other people permission to rob you blind.
Not convinced. Why did Google beat Yahoo? Why is Facebook huge while Friendster and Myspace are jokes? At some point - perhaps further down the line than most of us are used to thinking of - technical ability matters.
were volumes and convenience(e.g. liquidity, automation, etc) comparable to crypto?
Investments is huge market, it is hard for me to track what are the current volumes of crypto tradings and holdings, but it still can be significant.
I think being able to spot where these diverge is really important to understanding the world and where we should spend our limited time on it.
It’s not a money printer when everybody else also thinks it’s going down.
I don’t think AI as a general computing platform or as a replacement for coders is particularly close but there are lots of game changing incremental things LLMs do extremely well today. Something I could never find with crypto.
I do think we’ll find a lot of these aren’t defensible companies (like Lensa) but sometimes you get instagram even when the value prop seems slim.
It’s also really quite good in transforming language A to language B if you’re learning a new programming language
So the question becomes, what information are you interested on proving to someone on the internet? Say you want to ask an Israeli on Twitter about some bomb stuff and you want to prove you are a reporter. Say you want to prove in a comment on HN, that a repository on github is yours.
However one problem arises. The digital identity or identities, have to be stored somewhere. What happens if there is an outage? OpenAI had a multiple hour outage just today, and an ISP in Australia had a 12 hour outage yesterday. In that case, people cannot prove digitally their identity or identities (hundred of them if they like), even in real life.
The Greek government requires for the digital identity to be proven, access to internet[1]. I was just researching that right now.
Last, Estonia tries to secure the digital identities of their citizens on the blockchain[2]. Why digital identities need to be secured on a blockchain? Just a server or two, in a government building are not enough? How could a globally competitive network of miners, each one holding the digital information independent of any other, be more secure than the one or two servers solution?
[1] https://wallet.gov.gr/ [2] https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/legal/tech/assets/estonia...
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.
Its secondary value is buying and selling legal goods and services on the internet without having to deal with credit card companies, but only for techbros.
The article was a pretty good demonstration of this, I thought. That kind of sentiment analysis would be very difficult using a rule based model.
Nah. Far more people use crypto for speculation than for actually illicit purposes.
Interesting turn of phrase as rotten apples vs oranges would be much more natural to my ear
Your opinion on the validity or ethics of that utility has no impact on the fact that for some people they have utility.
And even Facebook definitely didn't win because if some technical choice... no one cared what tech stack powered a social media site, and if anything Facebook was less advanced than MySpace as far as users were concerned.
—
If you're talking about how it matters further down the line, then you're walking away from the wrapper thesis too: the whole line being parroted is that it's just an API wrapper ripe for the copying. Good luck getting to the "further down the line" reliably as a company, let alone down the line and then killing your competitor with a game plan that mostly consists of copying them.
The camera that was pointing down at an angle was the worst. Both models would only identify a dog and a person correctly about 15% of the time (missing me or my partner as I walked by and waved), with an actual object detection about 80% of the time even when there was nothing in its ground truths in-frame!! (usually as desks, beds or chairs, i don't recall exactly but it was furniture - and it was pointed at my empty back lot). It had just as many shadow/sunspot/tree failures as Motion. The other camera at eye level did a great job with cars, but not so much with people's side profiles, only head-on.
It was laughably bad. And I have no intention of training my own models on my datasets because I don't have time to label. I did this in 2018-2019 so I don't know what the state of the art object detection models are like today, maybe they got their shit together for non-canonical angles.
I eventually switched back to full-time recording on a 2 TB HDD and if I need to scan back i can jog the livestream because it saves weeks of data.
I have coworkers with family in Turkey (and Lebanon, Iran, Argentina...): they want USD. They don't care about Bitcoin, they want stablecoins. Most stablecoins are inherently dangerous, because you need to trust sketchy (when not outright criminal) and centralized entities to issue quasi-dollars that can get shut down by the US DoJ at any time. If they don't collapse on their own before that.
Venezuela is an exception because a few people manage to mine Bitcoin illegaly, given that electricity is virtually free. Other than that it seems the most practical currencies in Venezuela right now are contraband gasoline sold in Colombia, drugs, kidnapping, prostitution, ...
There is no moat. Anything even moderately profitable will be implemented in 4 hours by the whales.
the majority of people don't have formal training in probability and statistics, not to mention limit theorems and finance, so who cares how they view the stock market? I mean, I care, in the sense of educating people but most people don't really want to put the time in.
stocks and gambling both have risk, but only stocks reward many/most types of risk; gambling does not. The expected value of stocks is positive; gambling is not.
What people are trying to say about stocks is that they are stochastic, and so is gambling.
on the larger topic, Crypto also does not reward risk or offer a positive expected value. It's stochastic nature is driven by the changing opinions people have about it, or secondary effects from how much other stochastic markets might rely on it. Mining bitcoins is stochastic from the point of view of a miner, but not really from the point of view of the market or at any scale, but without a productive use case providing a reward, no postive expected value and the reward for risk ("you got a coin") is not above the cost of mining, at least not for long.
There’s a difference between having competition and having a business that can be trivially cloned. The challenge for a lot of AI startups is to show that they are adding something and are not just a dumb wrapper.
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.
Binance has let go 1000 people in summer and just again 100 in Sept.
Crypto is very likely neither cheaper nor faster, since you can't spend the crypto directly, and need to FX it through an exchange on the sending side and the receiving side, each of which will take a cut (often percentages of the total). You also need to fund the account sending, and you need to transfer from the exchange receiving to a bank account. Both of those transfers could also cost money. You're also doing FX twice (USD -> crypto, crypto -> Yen), rather than once (USD -> Yen).
If you fuck up an international wire transfer, it may take a month or two for the funds to make it back, and you may need to have numerous conversations with both banks (I've been through this pain more than once and it sucks). If you fuck up a crypto transfer you lose your money with no recourse.
All-in-all the wire transfer is the better (and probably cheaper/faster) experience.
And who said I am not addicted? I don't do hard drugs but I am certainly addicted to coffee, sugar and maybe other habits I (moderately) indulge in but I would be very pissed off if someone else would try to take away from me.
This point of view is too simplistic, not everything needs to be a billion dollar idea or differentiated. You can make an absolute good living with no moat and good product senses. Even if you get outgunned, you move on to the next opportunity.
The trust issue is real, china's great firewall is real and the crack down of sec is also real.
And without anyone exchanging your bitcoins no one cares.
And I'm comparison to our fiat a ton of critical features are missing like money laundering.
But outside of a couple of meme articles about how "someone bought a house with BTC!" the only use case I can find for crypto is money laundering or ransomeware.
And how does blockchain make this work? By making authenticity too expensive for spammers, you've made it too expensive for 90+% of the population. The spammers/propagandists have orders of magnitudes more money than me.
The thing about gambling is it's a zero sum game. It doesn't enable any "real" productivity, it's just passing money around (with skimming off the top).
ML/AI isn't necessarily like that, it can be actually useful. Nevermind chatbots, we've already see how "AI" is useful in products for the last decade (e.g. google search results and extracting structured data out of emails, just to name a couple).
The only similarity is the hype/confusion cycle. Lots of crypto people got rich because they were in the right place at the right time, and they want to be there with the chatbot wave next.
The fact that AI/ML can be judged on real utility will limit some of this, and I think these crypto people will be in for a rude awakening if they think they can replicate their success here. With crypto the "game" of gambling / speculating meant that there was a lot of demand for ongoing endeavors, but once people realize that low effort ChatGPT reskins don't deliver anything tangible it'll be pretty obvious the emperor has no clothes.
You can't buy/trade ChatGPT prompts, after all - unless, perhaps, you were to create prompt NFTs?
I suspect that the actual cryptocurrency that wins out here hasn't been invented yet, or it'll be a layer on top of Ethereum. It needs to actually function like a currency, and it needs to give you mechanisms to trade items of value in the real world, goods and services, for future goods and services. None of this "it's just a wildly variable front over USD that you can profit off of swing trades."
AI is way too overhyped and also completely not understood. I think most people here immediately think of some kind of genetic algorithm when they hear AI but even a simple thermostat could be marketed as AI even if all it does is turn on the furnace when some thermometer provides a low signal. The only thing reading AI on a product tells you is that there is software.
I'm unconvinced GPT will remain as a mass market tool. Google Docs got super popular because people don't want to fork out like $50 for microsoft word; they're not going to fork over $15/month to do web searches.
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.
What you saw was probably some light astroturfing, backed by wave after wave of non-tech celebrity sponsors, and a pump-n-dump shill bidding scheme.
"Lihe Pharmaceutical Technology Company, based in Wuhan, Hebei Province, China, was charged with fentanyl trafficking conspiracy and international money laundering, along with Chinese nationals Mingming Wang, 34, who is the alleged holder for three bitcoin accounts shared by sales agents for Lihe Pharmaceutical, and Xinqiang Lu, 40, the alleged recipient of funds via Western Union on the company’s behalf. " [1]
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...
Fiat money derives its value from what you say, indeed. It is traded on exchanges because of that. But fungibility is only one of several factors. Money should also serve as store of value, but how long is highly debatable and the point.