No bubble has deserved to pop as much as AI deserves to
Blockchain and crypto were worse. „AI” has some actual use even if it’s way overblown.
Blockchain has many valuable uses. A distributed zero trust ledger is useful. Sadly the finance scammers and the digital beanie baby collectors attracted all the marketing money.
And yet, every single company that has ever tried to implement a distributed zero trust ledger into their products and processes has inevitably ditched the idea after releasing that it does not, in fact, provide any useful benefit.
The idea has merit, in theory – but in practice, in the vast majority of cases, having a trusted regulator managing the system, who can proactively step in to block or unwind suspicious activity, turns out to be vastly preferable to the “code is law” status quo of most blockchain implementations. Not to mention most potential applications really need a mechanism for transactions to clear in seconds, rather than minutes to days, and it’d be preferable if they didn’t need to boil the oceans dry in the process of doing so.
If I was really reaching, I could maybe imagine a valid use case for say, a hypothetical, federated open source game that needed to have a trusted way for every node to validate the creation and trading of loot and items, that could serve as a layer of protection against cheating nodes duping items, for instance. But that’s insanely niche, and for nearly every other use case a database held by a trusted entity is faster, simpler, safer, more efficient, and easier to manage.
I’m glad you didn’t say NFTs because my Bored Ape will regain and triple its value any day now!
Bro the GME short squeeze is going to hit any day now. We’re going to be millionaires bro, you just wait
Yes. But companies bought into AI way more than they bought into crypto though, in many outlandish and stupid ways. And many AI companies sell it in ways they shouldn’t.
As a counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.
Truly the hardest and most weird buy-in of crypto that happened.
AI is a ridiculous broad term these days. Everybody had been slapping the label on anything. It’s kinda like saying “transportation” and it means anything between babies crawling up to wrap drive and teleportation.
Creating a specialized neural net to perform a specific function is cool. Slapping GPT into customer support because you like money is horse shit and I hope your company collapses. But yeah you’re right. Blockchain was a solution with basically no problems to fix. Neural nets are a tool that can do a ton of things, but everyone is content to use them as a hammer.
Try Venice Ai, free to use, won’t try to censor your topics. Still just a chat bot though (although I think it does image generation too).
I’m sorry, what about their comment made you think they were asking for reccomendations?
The part where they were saying they don’t like the current AIs they know about. Showing disapproval of the trend.
I think all the crypto scams, all the shitcoins, NFTs and other blockchain bullshit were much worse. At least AI companies usually don’t require you to give them large sums of money, they’re only after your data and absolutely fuck the environment by wasting absurd amounts of power, but they don’t try to take away your life savings
Yeah, but the 0.1% remaining will take over the world.
Does anyone remember the era when there were a million search engines? Google didn’t spawn alone.
Same with Amazon. You think nobody else tried to make an online store in the 90s? Lol.
People are trying to vindicate their dislike of AI, pointing to trends like this as if it were supporting evidence. But saying “AI is going to be a big flop because 99% of companies today will end up failing” is as stupid as saying “online shopping will never work because 99% of online stores will close by the year 2010”
Sure, but the difference here was that all those companies were offering something different. Some had better results than others, a better ui, more accuracy in certain niches, etc. But 99% of AI companies now are all effectively reselling the OpenAI API. They aren’t making an effort to differentiate themselves at all. It’s as if Google was the only shop in town, and everyone bought all their search data an algorithms to slap their logo on. That’s just simply not sustainable at anywhere near the scale it is now. This won’t be a 3-5 year decline, it’ll be a 2 month crash.
I doubt anyone is downplaying that. People are just discussing how all companies are pushing A.I into products that don’t need it. Idk about you but I’m tired seeing A.I advertised as a feature on every app/site when it’s just a gpt wrapper.
The rot has even spread into hardware. No one wants die space wasted on a stupid NPU with with less than 1/1000 of the computing power their GPU has and can’t be used for anything other than local LLMs which FTI very few people use and those that do tend to have powerful Nvidia GPUs.
.com websites didn’t disappear after the dotcom bubble burst either. AI is definitely in a massive bubble right now, but something being in a bubble doesn’t mean it’s going to vanish completely. The AI companies with some substance backing them will weather the upcoming storm.
Full disclosure: I don’t hate AI, but I hate that management-types are fellating themselves to the idea of it or the things than it can potentially do, rather than something that is providing them some kind of concrete benefit right now. I’m also mad at consumers for being stupid little sheep and paying a premium for anything that companies just happen to slap an “AI-powered” sticker on. It’s like organic produce 2.0 - you have to have it, but we can’t explain why, nor can we elaborate on what it does better than it’s contemporary.
No one actually thought that they were a good idea it was just a bunch of con artists. It was a bubble for sure but it was an entirely artificially created one. There was no real business behind any of it.
I would argue that this current AI bubble is artificially created by a different type of conmen.
Same with Amazon. You think nobody else tried to make an online store in the 90s? Lol.
Fun fact: the first online store still exists. It’s Pizza Hut. They launched an experiment for online ordering in 1994. The first company to ever sell a product on the web.
I think less restrictive AI that are free, like Venice AI (you can ask it pretty much anything and it will not stop you) will be around for longer than ones that went with restrictive subscription models, and that eventually those other ones will become niche.
New technology always propagates further the freer it is to use and experiment with, and ChatGPT and OpenAI are quite restrictive and money hungry.
As a major locally-hosted AI proponent, aka a kind of AI fan, absolutely. I’d wager it’s even worse than crypto, and I hate crypto.
What I’m kinda hoping happens is that bitnet takes off in the next few months/years, and that running a very smart model on a phone or desktop takes milliwatts… Who’s gonna buy into Sam Altman $7 trillion cloud scheme to burn the Earth when anyone can run models offline on their phones, instead of hitting APIs?
And ironically it may be a Chinese company like Alibaba that pops the bubble, lol.
If bitnet takes off, that’s very good news for everyone.
The problem isn’t AI, it’s AI that’s so intensive to host that only corporations with big datacenters can do it.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/bitnet-scaling-1-bit-transformers-for-large-language-models/ use 1 bit instead of 8 or 16, yay performance gainz
There is so much wrong with this…
AI is a range of technologies. So yes, you can make surveillance with it, just like you can with a computer program like a virus. But obviously not all computer programs are viruses nor exist for surveillance. What a weird generalization. AI is used extensively in medical research, so your life might literally be saved by it one day.
You’re most likely talking about “Chat Control”, which is a controversial EU proposal to scan either on people’s devices or from provider’s ends for dangerous and illegal content like CSAM. This is obviously a dystopian way to achieve that as it sacrifices literally everyone’s privacy to do it, and there is plenty to be said about that without randomly dragging AI into that. You can do this scanning without AI as well, and it doesn’t change anything about how dystopian it would be.
You should be using end to end regardless, and a VPN is a good investment for making your traffic harder to discern, but if Chat Control is passed to operate on the device level you are kind of boned without circumventing this software, which would potentially be outlawed or made very difficult. It’s clear on it’s own that Chat Control is a bad thing, you don’t need some kind of conspiracy theory about ‘the true purpose of AI’ to see that.
