Everywhere??

That’s exactly the hype talk that’s going to burst this bubble.

Here’s tech’s dirty little secret. Despite all the screams about automation and universal basic income… the exact numbers where job replacement would show are in the labor productivity numbers. If GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced… bingo… you’d see that number climb.

Productivity has actually stayed flat or gone down over the last 15 years. Despite the fact that we’ve had trillion dollar corporate behemoths now. Despite that fact that we’re enabling a surveillance state Orwell couldn’t imagines. Despite the polarization we see. And teen anxiety going through the roof along teen/pre-teen suicides.

When you said AI (and in my view tech in general) are everywhere, I’m guessing this wasn’t what you meant…

I don't think the rub is with AI in general. Everyone working in tech knows how pervasive ML especially has become.

I think the contention is with AI suddenly being redefined as only referring to language models, and the view that intelligence has been solved by these models.

There has clearly been a massive marketing push to label these models as the "one true AI", both from companies and from AI influencers. This is where the echo chamber exists, and it's easy to get stuck in it.

Maybe I am wrong and we have solved intelligence. But I seriously doubt it.

> speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision

You know very well that that's not what GP is referring to. Speech to text, natural language translation, recommendation, and computer vision are all very useful things, but also were very much real and in consumer hands long before the current hype cycle.

Generative AIs are in their hype cycle. IMO the tech is overhyped to hell and back, but it will still probably yield better results than Crypto, there are legitimate uses for it. But those uses need to be ok with an 80% correct solution, which is not sufficient for all the things LLM hypelords are saying they can be used for and there is no path forward for closing that 20% gap.

So you aren’t infuriated by automated phone systems? Because let me tell you, the number of companies whose reputation has survived me having to deal with their fucking phone robot can be counted on my middle finger.

Crypto has been quite useful for me personally, from VPN payments to donating to locally forbidden causes.

AI only does bad things to me so far: surveillance, spam, fakes, search results poisoned, twitter and reddit closed up because of it etc.

Where is my automatic captcha solver? Where is a robot that will get me to a live person in a support call? Where is a spam filter that doesn't send all useful emails to spam? Where is a filter to hide fake reviews on Amazon? To fight against Amazon's crazy product ranking system? Such useful things are nowhere on the horizon.

This—100%. The AI revolution with LLMs is creating a new type of interface with computers—the AI interface. Will it kill us all? Eh, probably not. Will it completely change human civilization forever? Eh... maybe not? (But also maybe).

But what it already has begun to do, and will continue to do is change the way we interact with computers. The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Siri and Alexa are going to look downright primitive compared to what we'll have in the next 2-5 years and that is going to be VERY mainstream, and VERY useful for huge swaths of the population.

Crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in any way shape or form that isn't immediately over-shadowed by a different medium.

I mean. We can compare the hype pattern between the two and still acknowledge that one has utility while the other doesn't.

Both have resulted in a bunch of hopefuls starting companies, in order to attract mountains of venture capital. Companies that will only have a loose connection to the tech that drives the hype.

> AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day.

For most people that's a promise for the future, but beside some translation tools (who are far from perfect) there is not much.

For instance: semantic search is and was a big topic, but so far even ChatGPT is not a real answer, Stable Diffusion is very nice if you want to produce some cartoon alike graphics or some porn deepfakes, but just not ready for simple common photo editing tasks. OCRs have gotten better, but still nothing that "by magic" makes a badly scanned piece of paper into an almost-native clean pdf and so one.

Yes, there is much progress and potential, but not much for real world usages.

I hate to point this out but as a regular user, recommendation engines and search have not gotten better in the last, say, 10 years. (Although that may not be true in terms of selling advertising and propaganda, both of which I tend not to pay a lot of attention to.)

Likewise, speech to text and language translation are more available, but they're still pretty bad. And computer vision is much better than 10 years ago, but I wouldn't bet anyone's life on it.

And yet, the hype train is still gaining momentum. Having been through more than my share of AI winters, I can feel another one coming and it's going to be bad.

I'm not necessarily arguing that they're the same, but let's be honest with ourselves - crypto said the _same_ things as it was ramping up. Just replace all the applications of AI you listed with the many hypothetical use-cases crypto-pushers were listing out.

As always, sounds cool. Actually do some of it and then let's talk more.

The thing is that the specific technologies behind all of those very practical improvements are not what's being hyped up this bubble. Speech recognition, for example, usually involves a lot of audio preprocessing, followed by some form of RNN/LSTM/Transformer to generate candidates, followed by beam search to score and choose from candidates.

If you are a machine-learning practitioner, you should be familiar with all of those techniques and how they are used so that you can solve practical problems with them. But if you just read about AI in the news and figure you're going to found the next great startup and make a billion off it, you'll probably start by feeding a whole bunch of data into Tensorflow and then getting useless garbage out of it.

This hype bubble is specifically about LLMs, extremely large-parameter transformers that are trained on all the data OpenAI or Google can get their hands on. And then supposedly if you ask them the right questions, you will get useful answers back. For people that put in the time and experimentation to actually find the right questions and the right applications, that will probably be true - but the hype is that this will change everything, and it most certainly will not, just in the same way that beam search is frequently useful but it definitely does not change everything.

But slick promoters will nevertheless manage to use people's lack of knowledge to redirect billions of dollars in capital into their and their employees' pockets, the same way that slick promoters used crypto to redirect billions of dollars in capital into their and their employees' pockets.

The thing is, it's perfectly possible for something to possess hybrid qualities.

In the case of AI: both potentially quite useful (unlike crypto) and incredibly, toxically overhyped (just like crypto).

Ironically, the fact that a lot of people think "You it's actually kind of useful sometimes, therefore you can't compare it crypto/web3" is part of the engine that drives the hype.

Agreed, and when people seem to simply correlate them on no other quality than being widely observed in popular culture they lose me entirely.

The tech religious overhype train is here to stay. There has never been a more established need for calm honesty.

> Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction

Do you understand what a massive impact that has been? It has disrupted one of the largest industries on the planet, which is drug trafficking.

Financial services is the biggest industry on the planet but as soon as crypto is involved “a vehicle for speculation“ is invalid

So speaking of echo chambers…

It's not as clear cut really.

Overall economic productivity didn't shoot up in the last decade despite the dramatic progress we had in software and hardware (e.g. [1]), and it's not clear that AI/ML will dramatically change that. Yes searching pictures on my iphone by text is convenient and Netflix recommendations might be more addictive, but the path from that to ubiquitous economic prosperity, safety, and comfort (the technoutopia many here are striving for) is not clear at all. It's also not very clear if those marginal improvements are worth the substantial share of total human brainpower thrown at them.

[1] https://www.aei.org/economics/good-news-bad-news-on-us-produ...

And a tool to resist inflation and protect assets against theft, bank closures or government raids in countries where people are just barely surviving. You have a pretty Anglocentric viewpoint.

So, you're pretty much saying:

    AI is just like crypto, but better!

Not sure that's reaaaaaaaaaally going to bring people around.

What an asinine thing to say and it exhibits your lack of willingness or ability or willingness to understand both AI and cryptocurrency.

> Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO.

Nope. The hype around AI by the AI bros is totally similar with the crypto bros back then.

> AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision...

Yet I guarantee that you don't trust any of their outputs for any serious applications and you need to constantly check for it's reliability since its output is often wrong, inaccurate or even outright nonsense. You don't trust it yourself, which that is the problem of this entire hype cycle.

On top that, it is all at the expense of the planet getting incinerated with no efficient alternatives to counter the amount of extreme waste of resources that these systems are consuming. [1] [2]

> Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction, a vehicle for speculation, and a platform for creating financial scams.

'never'

So Moneygram, Stripe, Checkout.com, etc using it is 'never amounted to anything'? If it was only for financial scams, all of them would have stopped using it a long time ago.

They simply didn't because financial scams on a transparent public ledger is a scammers nightmare and sounds like a very poor platform for creating financial scams.

But maybe you need to look outside of the AI bubble and see the trillions of dollars in which the banks have allowed in actual black market transactions by criminals in the FinCEN files [0] which is nothing compared to crypto.

[0] https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/ai-chatgpt-water-usage-envir...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/fincen-banks-sus...

[2] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...

AI will end up as Clippy 2.0 just as Crypto ended up as an overly secure payment processing platform.

I can evade taxes and government surveillance using crypto. That's value added for me.

I can evade taxes and government surveillance using crypto. That's value added for me.

>recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search

Both don't seem to work.

> Is AI overhyped?

no

calling something "hype" should not be a stand-in for data

Bitcoin has the potential to become the world’s reserve currency. Your smug dismissal of it is ignorant at best.

Consider how power structures (eg nation states) may change in such a future.