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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Grumbles about generative AI’s shortcomings are coalescing into a “trough of disillusionment” after a year and a half of hype about ChatGPT and other bots.
Why it matters: AI is still changing the world — but improving and integrating the technology is raising harder and more complex questions than first envisioned, and no chatbot has the magic answers.
Driving the news: The hurdles are everything from embarrassing errors, such as extra fingers or Black founding fathers in generated images, to significant concerns about intellectual property infringement, cost, environmental impact and other issues.
But it isn’t. It was never there in the first place. Even the tulip bubble still had tulips at the end, but crypto is just creaking along like a zombie on the inertia of hardware investments.
By “hardware investments” I take it you mean mining rigs? You’re two years out of date, Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022. It doesn’t depend on special-purpose hardware any more, or any hardware of particularly significant quantity. Bitcoin still does does but it’s a shrinking share of the total cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Again, if you aren’t interested in cryptocurrencies then feel free to ignore them. But making confident pronouncements about them when you’re not familiar with how they work or are used is not that. Poetic and emotional language is no substitute for knowledge.
No, I’m talking about hardware as in the corporate infrastructure. Exchanges, wallet operators, customer service, etc.
Almost nobody does their own crypto, they just make an account at Coinbase or something. This defeats the purpose of crypto by re-centralizing it, making the network susceptible to another Mt. Gox situation.
People are only using crypto because so many people are using crypto? Okay.
Right?
If you’re effectively forced to go through a corporate bank equivalent anyway then what even is the point? You might as well invest through a local credit union, at least it will still be around when the hodlers finish divesting and let the remains of the crypto market collapse into insolvency.
You’re not forced to, though. It’s an option.
I have no idea what you’re trying to argue here. One the one hand you say crypotocurrency is moribund, but on the other hand now you’re complaining about how there’s a huge infrastructure for people using it.
This whole thing is a weird offshoot from a discussion on AI, for that matter. What’s the relevance at this point?
An option that nobody uses isn’t really an option.
It’s clear that you’re not getting my point, and I’m not sure how else I could explain it. Both of those things are true, crypto is dead and the zombified corpse that remains is still trying to sell worthless tokens to what few gullible marks remain before the market gets wise and the bottom falls out.
The relevance to AI is that large language models are following the same trajectory. The whole market is propped up by big tech investments, and the firehose of money they have pointed into that bonfire will only last so long as it takes them to realize that that language models aren’t useful enough to justify their expense.
And it’s clear that you don’t know how cryptocurrency is actually being used, so it’s not a useful analogue to AI. Except to the point that you don’t know how AI is being used either.
The things that LLMs are being used for are already justifying their expense, otherwise they wouldn’t be used in the first place. There’s no “bubble” to pop on the usage side of things where jobs have been replaced by it, AI isn’tgoingto"go away." It’s possible that some of the big providers like OpenAI or Anthropic might go out of business or get bought out, that’s always a risk for first movers in a field like this, but if they fail it will be because others have stepped up to provide those services even more cheaply.
No, they aren’t. The things LLMs are being used for aren’t significant enough to justify the costs. OpenAI is the most capital-intensive startup in Silicon Valley history and burns through almost a million bucks a day in data center operations alone. Its net income was -$540 million in 2022 and 2023 looks to be closer to losing a whole billion despite nonupling their income. They’ll need to double their revenue again without raising costs just to start breaking even.
That kind of money-bonfire never lasts long.