(Spoken a la Tim the Enchanter) I warned you, I warned you but did you listen? No… ohhh no, it’s just a harmless little monkey pic isn’t it now, well it’s always the same thing, I always tell them -
They buried one of the key points in the last paragraph “The financial failure does not even begin to scratch the surface of the environmental devastation wrought by crypto, either.”
"What is it now, Quark? Did Brunt show up on the station again?"
"It's my apes, Odo. They're worthless now."
"I thought the point of NFTs is that they were unique. Irreplaceable. You were so insistent on their enduring value when they were 'stolen', yet now you say they're worth nothing."
The same people - THE EXACT SAME PEOPLE - who promised you that NFTs weren't just the future but they were *essential* to the future are currently promising you that "AI" isn't just the future but is *essential* to the future.
We (rightfully) give game designers like Peter Molyneux shit for promising the universe & delivering a an asteroid or over-hyping fleeting trends that inevitably wither into obscurity but the tech industry at large has been nothing but vague products and/or empty promises. There a Peter every minute
IDK, am cautious -- i'm a fairly senior engineer at this point, and to me NFTs were never more than pointless computational expense. AI isn't much now (and certainly isn't what the dumbros think it is), but I think is definitely going to have a large (and unpredictable) impact on the next 100 years.
Right now AI is just all over academia. Not just "some newbullshit to watch out for" but literally the "hot new thing" which will surely "engage those zoomers". Egads.
Ai isn't going to be replacing artists anytime soon
They probably want to sell that idea so they can hire artists for the cheap because they can threaten them with "being replaced"
all those were absolutely scams but saying LLMs are the exact same phenomenon because they are getting hyped makes you wrong in the complete opposite way. when combined with other NLP tech it'll be revolutionary for specialized archive work, for example. its just they want to use it to destroy labor
My bet is still that the real plan was always to make NFTs into a standard so like if you try to download a picture —any picture — from any source you’d get “this picture is NFT 173671621863812773 — please pay 10 cents for your unique NFT code to download it” and then “please pay 20 cents to upload”
We have lurched from crypto to NFTs to the Metaverse to AIs, each of them a niche technology with limited applicability, and each of them touted as the solution to all our woes.
For a solid decade, the tech industry has been almost exclusively scam-oriented. It's all lies.
The chatbots are real. Machine learning is real, and will change things in our lives in various significant ways—but yes, it is hyped absurdly. The rest of it is total bullshit.
Most of this, around the crash of a BS speculative bubble, was entirely predictable There’s one aspect that I disagree re not solving real problems. The reason artists embraced NFTs, esp young artists of color, was about gatekeeping and lack of access to the marketplace. That issue remains.
But an LLM isn't "all AI" and never was. And many of the AI chatbots are good, in their domain area, of eliminating mindless work.
Scammers may be shouting AI but the premise of getting rid of mindless drone work is antithetical to a good scam. More scammers are in the business of FUD there.
LLMs are not AI (real AI doesn't exist and we're nowhere close) and have fairly limited legitimate use cases. They are meant to produce text that appears human-written, not text that is meaningful or accurate in any sense.
Yes, AI has been and can be extremely useful, if you have reasonable expectations for use cases. It's also been around for a couple decades now, and nearly everyone uses it in some form on their phones. AI did not crop up yesterday just because the average Joe has heard of LLMs now.
Hard agree. And I think that scammers prey on folks who don't understand the tech. But adding "uses bitcoin" or "we have an NFT" signified nothing just scamming because those technologies didn't solve any primary use cases. Same thing with "works in the metaverse". How could you ever check that?
Whereas if someone says "now with AI" even an average Joe will say "okay show me!" When the product doesn't do something innovative they will say "meh".
For better or worse AI is a victim of its own success - folks expect MAGIC which is great for avoiding scams.
See also: everything Tesla has done for the best part of twenty years. It's an endless series of over-promises and empty-promises and insincere promises and bait-and-switches because it's all about ever-increasing expectations of future growth instead of buckling down and making money selling cars.
Eventually, all the big legacy tech giants stopped buying up companies. They'd caught on to the grift. They all watched Yahoo spend a billion dollars on fucking Tumblr, for Christ's sake.
Never mind Elon repeated that same mistake half a decade later. I digress.
Nope. AI Revolution is real. Crypto and NFTs are the same scam. Metaverse is Zuck’s fever dream and most of the smart people in tech didn’t buy it for a second.
I came here to talk shit but then looked at this guy's bio. I wouldn't call it a revolution but AI will change how we do things, much as smartphones did. And @wang.social is the real deal- we use his open source software all the time.
I think they are referring more to the overhyping and over promising that is present with AI discourse right now. It's not bullshit all the way down like crypto and metaverse, but there's a lot of the same talk I feel like
As long as it’s called “AI”, it’s just a hype bubble that will burst. When we call it language modelling and machine learning again, we know it’s just computer science. Science that isn’t a solution to every problem.
Many tech leaders are old enough to have been around for the last VR hype cycle (late 90s, more or less), and don't buy that the vast improvements in hardware and connectivity over the intervening quarter century has created economically viable use cases for mass adoption.
How much did you *use* any of the NFT and crypto stuff, for anything other than speculation?
The difference with AI is that a lot of it is an advancement of prior (very useful, very real) tech that literally powers every facet of the modern world.
all i know is that tech-fuckers keep trying to replace things like suicide hotlines with AI and shit like that is more harmful than crypto and NFTs ever were
It's overhyped, sure, but does have its use cases. I use it to streamline website work by re-writing blog posts (I have a lot of days where I can't brain, and I use ChatGPT to find the right words. It's also good for writing product descriptions for the same reason.
The “AI moment” that we crossed is way, way bigger than chatbots. Vector embeddings as a way to computationally address problems of semantic encoding is a total breakthrough on its own. Style transfer was already happening with GANs but Transformers took it to the next level.
An egregously disgusting example are all these therapy chatbots touting that they wish to provide help to those who need it, when that *entire* business model hinges on actual mental healthcare being inaccessible to most
AI (or more accurately ML) at least has some limited potential to mimic patterns in data. Keyword being Mimic. It's not intelligent by any stretch of the term.
But... with solid training data, mimicking can still be useful relative to the context of what it was designed for. It's still software.
(We're using AI wrong, though. Like some of the stuff we use it for we have had equivalent tools for a bajillion years. Most of the stuff we currently use it for is downright counterproductive.)
Completely different topics. Nft was an already finished product that was just not viable, and very stupid. Ai has been here for quite some time, is ever evolving, but, yes a lot of people surfing the wave, selling bullshit cause it's the only thing they are good for.
The difference is that there are applications with actual utility for machine learning—but they have all been in development for years and predate the current "AI" craze. People don't think of Google Translate as "AI" because the media has focused on chatbots so they can run lazy HAL-9000 headlines.
From the UX corner Jakob Nielsen has been adding fuel to his fire with “evidence” (very flimsy studies) and constantly pressuring everyone in the discipline to learn it “or else” and it’s starting to make me rethink a lot of our practice that I’ve taken for granted
It’s arguably worse because it’s embedded in the very structure of the web and it’s making web search and indexing on the internet much worse + a lot (I suspect all) of the free picture making ai has ties to like facial recognition/ selling your data
i mean yeah, that's most people. work is bullshit that dehumanizes you and grinds your soul into dust. anyone who DOESNT want to work less is hella suspect
I mocked the NFTs in real time but these AI tools will have major impacts on the world (many of them deleterious though not in a super intelligence apocalypse way).
Not sure how these things are in any way comparable. Maybe specific AI applications like art generation. But people seem to be completely overlooking how AI is helping and will help science/medical fields. People's view of AI is so narrow.
Yeah. Though AFE isn't even AI, and medical research is using data science not AI. Idk why they suddenly decided to use AI as a buzzword for everything. AI refers to created intelligences, not statistical modelling. NNs are neo-trees that pre-existed the whole AI discourse, AI is just a buzzword now
How is AI helping medical fields? Instances of AI interacting with patients and patient data have already been riddled with issues, namely that systemic bias ends up engrained in models
So, good news. Eventually they'll recover value in 20 years when the tech bros get the nostalgia wave. It'll be their polyester shell suits, but digital.
also the app-based-middle-men, an entire industry built on sand. examples: i need an app to use the laundry machines in my building. i need an app to access my work schedule. i need an app to access my paycheck. all of these apps do nothing but stand in the middle of things and go "we'll take a cut"
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Eh, guess give it another year and it'll be 0%.
"It's my apes, Odo. They're worthless now."
"I thought the point of NFTs is that they were unique. Irreplaceable. You were so insistent on their enduring value when they were 'stolen', yet now you say they're worth nothing."
The same people - THE EXACT SAME PEOPLE - who promised you that NFTs weren't just the future but they were *essential* to the future are currently promising you that "AI" isn't just the future but is *essential* to the future.
This is the tech industry now.
They probably want to sell that idea so they can hire artists for the cheap because they can threaten them with "being replaced"
For a solid decade, the tech industry has been almost exclusively scam-oriented. It's all lies.
The "metaverse" is coming but likely decades away.
AI is real though. It is a concrete product that solves everyday problems. LLMs aren't marketing mush - but a real solution to common challenges.
NFTs were mostly built on top of crypto again to solve a problem no one had.
The metaverse has sounded cool for 30 years but the tech isn't there yet.
Scammers all.
Cryotocurrencies also said they would solve many problems - but they too, were not technically capable of doing such.
The technology experts in both cases were correct.
Scammers may be shouting AI but the premise of getting rid of mindless drone work is antithetical to a good scam. More scammers are in the business of FUD there.
For better or worse AI is a victim of its own success - folks expect MAGIC which is great for avoiding scams.
The other three? If you said meh...
From the mid 20th century to the early 2000s, being a tech company meant you designed something, built something, created something.
You started a company, made something, and sold it.
You started a company, made a lot of promises, kind of made a thing, and waited for Apple, Google, Microsoft or Facebook to buy you out.
Creating useful things was no longer the point.
Never mind Elon repeated that same mistake half a decade later. I digress.
Sell direct! Cut out the middle man! Come up with pseudo bullshit you can package and deliver right to the door of anyone with more money than sense.
AI is early stages but it’s definitely real.
(Source: my software runs the AI systems.)
The difference with AI is that a lot of it is an advancement of prior (very useful, very real) tech that literally powers every facet of the modern world.
You just have to fact-check it.
(Rhetorical question)
NFTs have never demonstrated a practical use beyond money pit. AI tech is already doing work out in the real world.
Paying 100,000% over the actual price of said processors.
But by then nvidia etc will be onto the next big thing and they'll buy that.
However AI should be essential to the future, just for different reasons than that the scammers push.
But... with solid training data, mimicking can still be useful relative to the context of what it was designed for. It's still software.
Tech companies are just obsessed with grand world changing narratives where (conveniently) their own products will be essential just to live.
Also, do you remember Seth Green's fiasco? XD