- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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- [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.
And that’s their problem. The price is up because anybody with sense and no morals wants to sell off their holdings for as much as possible before the next “market adjustment” leaves them hodling the bag.
I have no interest in the specifics of why the price is up or down, I’m not a speculator. That’s not the point of all this. The only point is it’s still there. Which it is.
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 You’re two years out of date, Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022.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.