I have to say, the technology behind cryptocurrencies is brilliant, but unfortunately, it got misused and got ironically centralised.
NFTs are stupid.
Now with hype train dying, we could see some real use of AI.
You see, no one actually wants a digital currency. There have been several (nano was my favorite) that functioned especially well as a currency, because it used very little compute power to perform or verify transactions.
But a currency is stable. Which means you don't magically make money by holding or trading it. So it doesn't get attention, and therefore doesn't get widely adopted.
Everyone likes Bitcoin because it's speculative digital gold.
It'd be nice to have a singular system for payment around the world. I work on e-commerce sites that take payment in many different countries, and some of those payment providers are better designed than others.
I recently tried Nano-GPT and had a very good experience (see https://feddit.org/post/3081522/2172497), so there is at least some real-world usage – it's cool and kind of impressive technology, though spam during certain periods was always an issue and I don't know how resilient the network is currently.
AI is useful, you just have to use it right. Most "titans of business" think it's a replacement for humans. It's infinitely obnoxious correcting them in a business setting.
NFTs of art was really not supposed to be anything more than a proof of concept. I think the original purpose of NFTs was to be able to have an NFT representing title to land or something that you could then barter or sell on the blockchain.
NFTs were created in a code jam and had no intents to become title transfer tools.
It was and always be limited by the amount of data the NFT can contain. They went with URLs because they are small enough to fit. An actual land deed title document? Too big to fit into an NFT. Simply not enough bytes to go around.
This was the strict limitation from the very beginning. The only thing an NFT actually verifies "ownership" of is a URL.
You can run it on your own machine. It won't work on a phone right now, but I guarantee chip manufacturers are working on a custom SOC right now which will be able to run a rudimentary local model.
It will run on a phone right now. Llama3.2 on Pixel 8
Only drawback is that it requires a lot of RAM so I needed to close all other applications, but that could be fixed easily on the next phone. Other than that it was quite fast and only took ~3gb of storage!
It's still overhyped and being shoved into every app, service and system that exists whether it adds value or not.
Its definitely not going away, there's some real value to LLM/AI (much more than crypto anyway) but make no mistake there's going to be a significant correction where the bubble bursts and AI becomes right sized.
When the microwave first hit mass adoption there was an enormous amount of microwave meals, cookbooks, and recipes that tried to use it for everything imaginable. Eventually the hype settled down and now for most people the microwave isn't the primary or at least sole means of cooking.
But the microwave is still a great way to make a quick baked potato.
I'd argue that people got way too excited about what NFTs offer. Being able to own/transfer a digital item with a standardized interface is interesting technically (and has real value, for example ENS names), but holy hell did people go all Beanie Baby on them...
That's not arguing with my point though, people definitely did get excited about perceived value, but it didn't really benefit most people in any way because it was only a promise, not an actual thing
LLMs and other generational AI produce something that immediately has value
If I ask chatgpt to write me a python function I now have a python function I can use, if I ask it to explain something and then attempt to apply that knowledge I've learned something useful
If I bought an nft the value of that nft would only be what people decide it is worth
It said cost worries have risen not costs themselves, it was in the same paragraph about concerns with response accuracy, I imagine that's just a survey
In reality both cost and reliability have improved massively since ai took off like this, requests cost a fraction of a penny each and provided you prompt it right gpt 4o gets it right 90% of the time for me
Yes crypto is full of scam coins, but scammers permeate everything, should we give up on email too for the same reasons? Saying crypto in general is a scam is just ignorant.
XMR as well provides key privacy protections, etc.
When I say dubious I mean it's not tangible, there's no guarantee of its value.
If I have chatgpt write me a block of code that block of code is inherently and immediately useful to me
If I buy a bitcoin it will probably eventually increase in value but I can't do anything with it, and there's no guarantee it won't be immediately worthless the next day
I guess by the same logic you could say the code might be immediately worthless if there's a solar flare that wipes out all technology on earth but you get my point I'm sure
I hope this is the case, but I don't really think so. I got a call Thursday from a friend and he told me he and his whole department were losing their jobs. He was pretty upset about it. Apparently management decided they could be replaced with AI.
He and his team manage a medium sized in-house developed management application. It's a combination of stock management, product management and sales tools. Because the products their company sells are pretty unique, they never found a good off the shelf application to do everything they wanted. So they developed their own and connected it to the off the shelf applications they have for ERP and CRM. Pretty slick and his team and him are praised across the company.
Apparently the IT manager had gotten a very impressive demo for Microsoft Power BI with AI integration. Using AI tools to realtime develop an application. He was so impressed he decided they were going to fire the in-house team and have an external company use the AI to develop a replacement tool. The external company said they could use very cheap people as the AI would do basically all the work. And it would be done before the notice on the current team ran out (2 months).
He called me kinda in shock about the whole thing. Like that's not realistic right? That's not something Power BI can do? With or without AI? And even with AI it can't do that on such short notice? I told him he was right, that's not how anything works and the IT manager got duped. Either way, they are out on their ass. Now they are very skilled people and will probably find new jobs right away, but it still sucks ass. AI sucks!
I recall the AI insights feature years ago being a mess, flagged patterns across dimensions, unrelated trends etc, useless noise to slog through, if not outright dangerous if people just assume everything is actionable, maybe it's gotten better but it's going to rely heavily on data quality, good governance, the model itself.
Straight up, this is not a good use case for Power BI, tabular is really good at aggregates and analytics, I'd not use it for management like this, especially if there's already an existing application, as an enhancement though yeah go ahead, but not a full on replacement.
I'd be willing to bet this won't be done in 2 months and certainly not to budget, to do properly you need to understand business context, data model etc. I'm guaranteeing this is going to be sludge with half-baked power apps, people will complain about the change. Shit the change management for end users will take more than 2 months, took us years to get people to switch off of a barely maintained shift summary report to a Power BI version and that actually was a good use of the tool.
This project gives me nightmares and I'm not even working on it.
there are some other use cases tho, just imagine the bank would give your payment info to insurance companies for example (which they could), the only way to pay would be cash and crypto
Everyone's trying to recapture the dotcom bubble; but they don't realize tech is gonna need considerably more money than they already have to do something that crazy again. Furthermore, when it comes to AI specifically, if you give them the money they need to actually achieve AGI, then there's a very real chance your investments will be worthless the moment they succeed.
Why would money become worthless if AGI is invented? Best case scenario is a benevolent AGI which would likely use its power to phase out capitalism, worst case scenario is that the AGI goes apeshit and, for one reason or another, decides that humanity just has to go. Either way, your money is gonna be worthless.
The only way your money would retain its value is if the AGI is roped into suppressing the masses. However, I think capitalists would struggle to keep a true AGI reigned in; so imo, it's questionable as to whether or not the middle road would be "true" AGI or just a very competent computer program (the former being capable of coming to its own conclusions from the information it's given, the latter being nothing more than pre-programmed conclusions).
I think AI has some specific uses that it would be great at, but it’s getting shoved into places it doesn’t belong. (Kind of like how everything had touch buttons for a while.)
Yep. I see it a bit like asbestos. It's being added to everything as the new cure-all to every problem imaginable. And similarly I think we'll see some pretty rough repercussions down the line.
I hope this is gonna happen but the problem is ai is actually powerful. The best result is if its just too expensive to make good enough to use for scary things.
None of those things are dead in any way, maybe nfts at best but btc has been back towards all time highs a few times just this year. Some scam, right?
Same with AI, so powerful but everyone just says AI art bad and that’s that as is that’s all AI can do, make art and steal low skill jobs away 🙄
What a lame unoriginal post, yeah AI hype is dying down and interest is normalizing, must be dYiNg!!!! Give me a break.
Crypto was stupid from the beginning, NFTs are even more stupid. And people who knew about the tech told everyone so, before the idiots bought the shit to get rugpulled.
Ai art is bad for artists, but not inherently bad bs.
AI art is antithetical to art. Art requires artistic intent.
It could have some limited application for very early exploration in commercial art, or perhaps as very limited tools used in existing art software, but generative art is inherently pointless and you need artists to be able to do incremental iterations properly, which is required for real work, which isn't supported yet. I'll sure it'll get better and more convincing, but it's still inherently pointless to use AI for art, since the is supposed to be human expression.
I love Ai defenders who are ready to tell you what art is and what artists wants. Like maybe instead of recomending this cloud based bullshit app, first try to pick up a pencil actually?
people at the forefront of cryptography and economics were excited about the Bitcoin white paper because cryptographic digital currencies is an obvious-in-hindsight
evolution in currency.
they were so excited about it that they joined nakamoto in creating cryptocurrencies, collaborating and developing new technologies until it was launched and beyond.
"idiots bought the shit to get rugpulled"
how exactly is gaining 400,000% in value over a decade a "rug pull"?
Ok maybe we had bitcoin over a decade and nobody cared. It was mainly used by criminals and tax evader. The concept of a decentralized money system is stupid when they just drop the Blockchain and fork a new one once a too rich person got hacked.
Bitcoin is not regulated by the government, but by rich people. Bitcoin has a 100% virtual value. An artificial scarcity does not create value. If tomorrow the the USA makes bitcoin illegal, it's value will drop a lot.
I mean the stock market is similar, but at least it is regulated.
Too bad the integration has already been shitting up products. When the whole thing dies they're gonna have to disentangle the AI bullshit and who knows what damage will remain afterwards.
Not likely. The research folks were highly skeptical of crypto from the start, but not the latest AI advances. The AI is a fundamental technology that was developed by the scientific method and can be empirically examined right now. Crypto is an application of 1980s technology with the hope that it will gain momentum as a currency with enough marketing.
commenting again cause the other poster's remark prodded me into digging the numbers on fundraising and it's pretty interesting :
So the best year for crypto was 2021 with >30B$ raised. 2024 is projected for 10B$ raised so indeed that's a divide by 3, pretty grim picture, right ?
Except if you take a look across industries, it's obvious that 2021 was an anomaly year everywhere. For example Healthtech peaked around 60B$ in 2021 before going down to 15B$ in 2024. Surely you don't think that Healthtech is a dead fad, do you ? That pattern is consistent across industries.
I don't think GP is arguing that crypto is a good thing here. They are refuting the meme which calls crypto a dead fad.
As mind boggling as it may sound, crypto is still a very strong industry, raising about 10 billion per year. Sure fundraising has been divided by 3 since the hype years but that's still very comfortable numbers.
Again, not saying it is a good thing. But just because it doesn't make mainstream headlines anymore doesn't mean it's dead.
Love to hear how you think cryptographic digital currencies aren't cryptographic digital currencies.
"As for the rest, "It's good because it's making lots of money""
cryptocurrencies are exceptionally popular tech with very active communities developing new technology that is constantly gaining popularity and value.
Crypto is a speculative market. That doesn't make it a good currency - in fact, it makes it a very bad currency. Bitcoins changing in value so much and so rapidly makes them awful for use as a daily currency, and they're backed by fiat currencies anyways because otherwise, they'd have no value.
The only reason people care about crypto is because they think they can make a lot of money off of it when they hand the bag off to somebody else.
"[Fiat currency] is a speculative market. That doesn't make it a good currency - in fact, it makes it a very bad currency. [Dollars] changing in value so much and so rapidly makes them awful for use as a daily currency, and they're backed by [gold] anyways because otherwise, they'd have no value."
yes, yes, go on.
"The only reason people care about [fiat] is because they think they can make a lot of money off of it when they hand the bag off to somebody else."
It's good that fiat currency never really got a foothold or it looks like you wouldn't have any argument.