Hacker News Reader

Comment by neffo | Hacker News Reader

Metaverse? Crypto?

Did anyone actually take those things seriously? Theres certainly a difference between those blatant and clear money grabs and the actual technological advances that the current AI craze represents, for instance years of serious academic research and real world capabilities.

The whole anti-AI self-righteous craze will die down soon enough (as will the "feel the AGI" craze) and Transformer models will be just another tool in the toolbox

It’s easy to say they’re obviously silly now, and while a lot of us were saying they were silly before, there was a definite period where crypto/NFT/blockchain stuff was being taken reasonably seriously by commenters here and elsewhere.

I wasnt really involved in tech circles when it was getting big around 2012 but by the time I was starting to get educated on such things it was pretty clear that any scheme like cryptocurrency which revolves around money and has no intrinsic value is pretty much guaranteed to be a scam.

Again AI doesnt have any of these hallmarks

Cryptocurrencies were of interest at one point because they showed promise for providing a way to transfer money electronically in a universal fashion. Eventually the limitations proved too great and interest waned.

This AI wave of which we speak may be slightly different in that it has already proven to solve a certain class of problems, while I'm not sure cryptocurrencies ended up solving any problems in the end, but they both share a similar hallmark of people believing that early promise will lead to complete game changes in the coming years.

That is quite ripe for scams to take hold. It would hardly be the first time where we saw some incremental progress in AI, only to see it stall out and interest wane, but with the grifters trying to latch onto the early hype, convincing others that they have something magical to offer.

That puts it more into context and I do understand the comparison better from that perspective.

It still seems like the whole AI hype is absolutely overblown just as much as the cynical anti-AI hype which I frankly see more of. I really do think it will all die down, we will have another tool in the toolbox and maybe down the road at some point that tool will be instrumental in another hypeworthy breakthrough but whos to say.

I can give Copilot instructions in plain English to not only generate working code, but modify a file any arbitrary way, and someone hooked up Unity3D a while ago to put commands through ChatGPT and it responded correctly to instructions like "put ten cubes in the scene and make half of them red" - all far beyond a glorified phone tree like Siri, this was science fiction a few years ago. We're seeing the birth of the Star Trek bridge computer, and this is only a small subset of current AI. The best-faith end game of crypto is decentralized and free-as-in-freedom money and digital asset ownership, which is nice, but not nearly as game changing as what AI has already done and shows promise to do.

I am an AI optimist. I think that transformer models and improved computer vision will absolutely change society for the better. As will any other useful tools we add to our toolbox. I do not think it will be some paradigm shift or revolutionary new thing like the internet or like the printing press. Something closer to good touchscreens, or wireless connections that just work. Useful enough to become ubiquitous but not enough to totally change the landscape of human experience.

To date, Copilot and ChatGPT are just 'better' programming languages. Everything you describe could already be done using other languages, albeit languages that are more esoteric.

It is likely that these tools can make most everyone a programmer, like how improved elevator designs has made everyone an elevator operator. But how game changing is that, really? Tools like Excel have already made great strides in that direction, and with coding now standard fare in public school curriculums, everyone being a programmer is a game already well underway.

The "metaverse" and a lot of cryptocurrencies were always explicit grifts with the purpose of making money for someone. Metaverse (specifically, Meta's vision of one) relied on them making meaningless digital accessories and other digital goods and selling them to people under the guise of "paying the creators". Lots of crypto doesn't exist for any reason but to be hooks for gullible people to invest in them in hopes that others will buy the crypto as well. There is a small slither of uses where some cryptocurrencies can be kinda useful, but that's basically nonexistant nowadays under the mountain of scams.

Basically - the things you brought up were largely spawned from existing technologies and have very dubious use cases outside of extracting money. AI is neither - it's obviously not a monetary scam as a category, and it has lots of uses by itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com