Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea – known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water – changed its name to "Long Blockchain Corp." Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.
[...] The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn't the peak of the blockchain bubble – rather, it was the start of blockchain's final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022's blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.
[...] They were amateurs. Their attempt to "make fetch happen" only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.
[...] Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were "investing" in a vast enterprise – but the only real money ("fiat" in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble's energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.
We've stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money – and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest – are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.
Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:
Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.
They're not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.
[...] Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:
Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify's "AI DJ" will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn't put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).
But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn't add up to what Bank Of America analysts called "a defining moment — like the internet in the '90s." For one thing, the most exciting part of the "internet in the '90s" was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn't dominated by large companies – indeed, it had them running scared.
The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to "This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves." Some revolution.
AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn't "artificial" and it's not "intelligent." "Machine learning" doesn't learn. On this week's Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete – not our new robot overlord.
« US Court Rules Uber and Lyft Workers are Contractors | £2B and 8 Years On, Still No Emergency Services Network »
Related Stories
Shares of Baidu fell as much as 10 percent on Thursday after the web search company showed only a pre-recorded video of its AI chatbot Ernie in the first public release of China's answer to ChatGPT.
The Beijing-based tech company has claimed Ernie will remake its business and for weeks talked up plans to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into its search engine and other products.
But on Thursday, millions of people tuning in to the event were left with little idea of whether Baidu's chatbot could compete with ChatGPT.
[...]
"We can only explore by ourselves. Training ChatGPT took OpenAI more than a year, and it took them another year to tune GPT-4," said one Baidu employee. "It means we're two years behind."Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Related:
The AI Hype Bubble is the New Crypto Hype Bubble
DuckDuckGo's New Wikipedia Summary Bot: "We Fully Expect It to Make Mistakes"
LLM ChatGPT Might Change the World, but Not in a Good Way
Alphabet Stock Price Drops After Google Bard Launch Blunder
OpenAI and Microsoft Announce Extended, Multi-Billion-Dollar Partnership
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, @05:10AM (7 children)
😉
That said AI will solve more real problems than blockchain and cryptocurrencies ("this is worth a lot because I can prove I wasted a lot of resources on it"), so there's more real stuff behind the hype.
Current AIs can already spell and write better than the average American. And when I call support whether it's some person in India reading a script or an AI the level of support is probably just as crap either way.
By the way, if an AI is helping to scam people with scam calls will it be even harder to jail the humans responsible? I guess you could still follow the trail of bank accounts (mule accounts etc).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, @05:35AM
Agreed. There is going to be a machine learning bubble, but it is clearly more useful than cryptocurrencies and blockchains. It will steadily become better independent of the hype, whereas cryptocurrency just accumulated more scams, hacks, blockchains growing too big, used to gamble instead of exchange money, etc.
The criminal activity enabled by AI will lead to new restrictions on phone services, web services, and anonymity in general. Good luck, have fun.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, @05:38AM (3 children)
Such great opportunities! So little risk... Wishing I knew how to cash in on this stuff
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, @06:53AM (2 children)
Hey ChatGPT how can I get in on the scam action?
(Score: 1) by guest reader on Thursday March 16, @04:43PM (1 child)
ChatGPT>
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Freeman on Thursday March 16, @05:51PM
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Nuke on Thursday March 16, @08:49AM
Hate to break it to you, but nobody follows the trail of scammers' bank accounts now. OT, I know,
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Thursday March 16, @05:12PM
The limit of X as monetization approaches infinity = giant steaming pile of turds.
In general, the more monetization the bigger the pile, and Google is already there without AI.
You can only boil the frog so much. Google's initial "enshitification" might have been a bit subtle, but a few years ago it crossed threshold where it became painfully obvious. Stuff you knew was there and was more convenient to "just google" went away. It wasn't even in the long tail. You go to the URL and it's still online; but Google didn't index it. I wonder what they're doing in their massive data centers now. Maybe playing basketball or tennis. It was inevitable. The emperor can't resist walking around naked until just the right child points it out. That child will be golden. The next king. People will flock to him. He'll grow up though. He'll have needs. There will be kids to feed, and lucrative offers. The cycle will repeat.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by darkfeline on Thursday March 16, @06:14AM (2 children)
Even as someone who laments that no one understands cryptocurrency, it seems painfully obvious that the recent generative AI advancements have many more practical applications, with immediate avenues toward widespread commercialization, than blockchain. Of course people want to invest in these opportunities.
As you get older, you see these cycles again and again. People get excited about new potential and ideas, and then you get the naysayers. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. But no one ever beats a coin flip, and humanity consistently progresses over time.
I for one support the investment of resources toward new technologies that may advance our race.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, @06:50AM
> no one ever beats a coin flip
Correction: 1/2^n of people beat n coin flips.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 16, @03:01PM
Visa (yes, the credit card conglomerate) announced a "program for digital content creators" shortly before the NFT collapse. Apparently some Visa mucky muck with an office overlooking some tropical harbour was motivated to press on with the program after the NFT collapse, so we attended their video conference for creators which had pivoted from the still image video art NFT landscape that we were actually curious about to the "old reliable" video log channels content creators.
>it seems painfully obvious that the recent generative AI advancements have many more practical applications, with immediate avenues toward widespread commercialization,
Apparently, state of the artists in this space consists of "throwing what you have at every available wall and developing anything that sticks at all." Once you find a monetizable channel for your content, the next challenge is retention of your market, usually through a constant stream of new content publication. So, Visa's Zoom call was just a bit before the ChatGPT hype wave hit, they completely failed to mention the obvious: use of AI to either directly generate or assist in the generation of this stream of "similar content" to keep audiences engaged, and thereby monetizable whether through the big beast of advertising, or more niche streams like merch, consulting, etc.
>Of course people want to invest in these opportunities.
On the Visa (financial services) zoom call, they had speakers from a few "services" companies who would do things like consolidate your various income streams into a single account for you, help you manage and understand your effort investment vs actual payoff in the various streams.... you know, really, it sounded like a whole lot of nothing to me - a little bit of investment / short term credit line income smoothing but otherwise just kind of "chewing your food for you" turning the raw income statements into more understandable decision making information for the "artists" to prioritize their future efforts. How large and successful or fast growing these various financial services companies are was unclear, but what was clear was that they exist and appear to be part of the overall ecosystem, offering to help content creators manage the financial end of their operations - for a fee.
For the artists, primary monetizable channels mentioned were TikTok and YouTube, but they emphasized the diversity of channels available and the imperative to diversify your distribution and monetization to survive the rather arbitrary and frequent shifts in market behavior and channel provider's policies.
>People get excited about new potential and ideas
Our man Cory here is a long time master of digital content creation, and I assume at least acceptable levels of monetization to meet his needs. AI is the new hotness indirectly driving the value of his content. He's not alone, publication outlets (HackerNoon comes to mind, there are many others) are attempting to gather content related to "the latest hotness" and distribute it to eager readers... The fun thing about AI as a topic is the meta-potential of AI to subsume the content itself, sort of an Ouroburos, and the implications of all that - although, in a way, it's not much different from the vacuum basis of "cryptocurrency value."
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by progo on Thursday March 16, @06:32AM (6 children)
Maybe they're both bubbles, and I swear I'm not high on AI fumes right now, but I think AI has a better chance of improving the world compared to cryptocurrency. Right now people I know have been using ChatGPT to get unstuck with writing cover letters and fixing broken code in their jobs, which directly pays for their living expenses. I never knew anyone that paid their rent with BitCoin.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Nuke on Thursday March 16, @08:55AM (1 child)
Don't they? I was getting the impression that I was the only person who didn't. However, bitcoin is useful for paying my blackmailer, and those guys in India who phone me up to fix my computer.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday March 17, @01:47PM
Long story short, my previous doctor's office changed insurance policies and I found out via a dude that sounded like he was from India. Sure, maybe it wasn't an India call-center. I would be Highly Skeptical that they hadn't out-sourced that.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday March 16, @02:07PM (1 child)
They're pretty definitely both bubbles, but there's a CHANCE that the underlying technology (AI) will grow in value really quickly. And it will definitely have more value than cryptocurrencies have manifested. (I'm leaving a chance open that Crypto may have a net positive value, even if not enough to justify the scams.)
That said, I think most people will find that the ChatBots have a net-negative influence on society, and most of the benefits are gathered by a few companies. But note that ChatBots aren't an end-stage of the process, they're an intermediate step. MS is already working on hooking them up to mechanical bodies to create the first generation of true robots (unless you count a few really special purpose devices, like the submersibles that have been used to explore under the Antarctic ice shelves, or the Mars rovers).
So the ChatBots may not stand at the peak of this PR for more than a few months, possibly weeks depending on what's already in the labs.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 16, @08:45PM
Cryptocurrency is the application of asymmetric key cryptography to a "value exchange application" where "value" is more notional than anything else - just as in fiat currency, so that's fair. Asymmetric key cryptography has tremendous value, particularly in a "big world" model where you don't personally know the players you interact with on a regular basis. However, since its inception in the 1970s most people have been slow to ascribe significant value to asymmetric key cryptography, until Bitcoin...
Some amalgamation of fiat currency and asymmetric key cryptography is likely to grow alongside, possibly intertwined with, the credit card ecosystem, possibly grow very quickly once launched. Whether or not it is branded as "cryptocurrency" is an interesting speculation (bets, anyone?) The unprecedented rapid increase in what people were willing to pay for crypto-coins will not soon be forgotten - but it will likely fade away like the tulip bulb craze, beanie babies, baseball cards, rare coins and postage stamps, etc.
AI, too, has been lurking since the 1980s, with little neural nets trying, usually in vain, to model various discrimination systems. Character recognition was a classic early win for neural nets, but it didn't really get recognized as intelligent by most meatbags until it could discriminate cat pictures from large datasets, generally the same problem as character recognition but with much higher resolution inputs and higher dimensional matrices than the character recognizers of the 1990s. The recent hype is driven by an Eliza like program that has trawled enough data from the internet to have something resembling an average conversation with a reasonably intelligent (IQ 100 - whatever that means) human. It's all the more alluring due to its imperfections, not always getting its facts right, etc. just like the real humans it's cribbing its notes from.
Unlike human employees who need food, shelter, healthcare, entertainment, education, paid time off for childcare, etc. this "reasonably intelligent" chatbot has a well defined capital cost for hardware purchase and maintenance and operating costs for electricity. Businesses love predictable employees, and anything this AI can do, it does without the potential for slip and fall injury, sexual harassment, discrimination, etc. claims. If it should fail for any reason, or if additional capacity is required, replacement and expansion costs are well defined. For what it can do, "AI" puts certainty into the production-cost side of the business equation.
The only problem is: if AI puts all the meatbags out of work, how will they afford to buy the products and services that AI is selling? (whistling at tune about UBI....)
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Thursday March 16, @04:57PM (1 child)
The technical progress is rapid. A few months ago ChatGPT would fail a bar exam. A paper that just hit SSRN showed GPT4 passing and outperforming most humans. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389233 [ssrn.com]
Either it will plateau or it will keep improving. Imagine what a few more rounds of improvement would look like.
Overhyped? Of course. So what? The interesting conversation is about what it can't do and what it can.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, @08:52PM
Sadly I think it's the end of all forums. The shit-for-brains computer can out-spew even the most toxic of shitposters.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday March 16, @06:35AM (11 children)
Real Artificial Intellect should be built on logical inference paradigm, not on simulated neuroticism paradigm.
We need more Logic Programming, not some fancy tensor multiplication scam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_programming [wikipedia.org]
Stop teaching children stupid things!
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Thursday March 16, @08:35AM (1 child)
I guess it's worth saying that these mutivariate analysis routines can be useful. But they aren't "AI".
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 16, @08:49PM
When they are passing the Turing test, does it matter how they are doing it?
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Thursday March 16, @02:13PM (6 children)
You're never going to get true sentience out of a Turing archetecture computer, although sentience is easy to fake. AI is magic. Not Diskworld magic, but David Copperfield magic, incredibly easy to perform thanks to humans' anthropomorphism and giant databases.
You may get sentience from a quantum computer. But then, we're going to have to understand exactly what sentience is and how it comes about before we can artificially build it.
Older than dirt? Kid, I was a BETA TESTER for dirt! We never did get all the bugs out.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 16, @04:22PM
Unless we do it by accident. Then we don't need to understand a thing.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 16, @09:02PM (4 children)
>You may get sentience from a quantum computer.
Are quantum phenomena really necessary for sentience? Thermal noise is certainly an acceptable source for random input, quantum shenanigans in wetware brains are suspected, but even if they are present, are they truly necessary to generate the kinds of behavior we ascribe to sentience? Even if a "sentient" machine were based on a PRNG and would reliably produce the same answer every time from a given initialization state, is the unpredictability of the Mersenne Twister complex enough to adequately emulate sentient behavior to pass a million independently administered Turing tests?
As I recall, in the 1950s "construction and use of tools" was a distinguishing characteristic of "sentient humans," separating our hallowed beings with souls from the wild meat out there that we evolved from. They were still pushing that -even then- outdated crap in schools in the 1970s and even 80s.
We don't fully understand the basis of sentience, and we don't readily grasp such quantum phenomena as we presently can repeatedly demonstrate, but that doesn't mean B is required as a basis for A.
I don't suggest that ChatGPT is currently sentient, but if you're going to define sentience by the outcome of a test, we are rapidly approaching the point where the algorithm and database based "intelligences" are going to pass whatever test you might come up with at least as often as a random sampling of humans.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Saturday March 18, @02:02PM (3 children)
It's completely unknown. We have no idea what sentience really is, let alone how to make it come about. Asimov's fictional novel Foundation and Earth (IIRC, I may have the wrong book, it's in that series) had a planet named Gaia (actually one of many names for Earth, but not in that story) where everything alive was sentient. Remember, he was a biochemist who did cancer research so he would know far more about it than I.
But taking the idea farther, maybe every subatomic particle in the universe is sentient, with every combination increasing its sentience? Maybe the attraction between electrons and protons is love, and the repulsion of proton to proton is hatred or revulsion? Can you have sentience without emotion?
But the appearance of a thing does not prove that the thing one is observing is what it looks like. David Copperfield can give the appearance of making a 747 disappear, but appearances can deceive, as can all of the other senses.
Despite my belief that no Turing computer can become sentient (I know how computers work; I've studied wiring diagrams and programmed in raw machine code, and I practiced magic as a child, although I was nowhere near as good as Copperfield), I used a sentient Turing computer in the flash fiction story Sentience. [mcgrewbooks.com]
Older than dirt? Kid, I was a BETA TESTER for dirt! We never did get all the bugs out.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 18, @08:42PM (2 children)
I feel (not know) that most living things are sentient in varying degrees, and the ability to recognize that sentience in others is a measure of the level of sentience in the one doing the recognition.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Monday March 20, @05:55PM (1 child)
I have to agree. Remember, even though the idea was from fiction, a biochemist wrote it. Thought itself is a chemical process.
Older than dirt? Kid, I was a BETA TESTER for dirt! We never did get all the bugs out.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 20, @06:28PM
Agreed: thought is clearly a chemical process. Now, whether or not that chemical process has significant quantum effects (like photosynthesis does), we may not have a handle on yet - certainly quantum mechanics is involved but I am confident (without basis) that whatever role quantum processes may play in thought, there are other processes that could replicate those functions, whether basic chemistry, electrical, digital, or whatever else.
As for thought itself, there are various dimensions of complexity / sophistication of thought, and levels within those dimensions, one of which might be "self awareness" and another might be called "sentience" both of which independently may or may not be present in a given "thought system" under evaluation.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 16, @04:23PM
Because they are somehow different, right?
My take is real AI will be built with slightly less real AI. Bootstrapping is the answer. Just try understand it well enough to keep up.
(Score: 2) by i286NiNJA on Friday March 17, @04:49PM
I'm actually doing some reading along these lines. There's a whole world of AI that's getting excluded from the current wave of hype but will eventually find it's way into the mix. I don't think that we're going to PROLOG our way to Data and Terminator but we are going to run up against the limits of throwing massive machine learning models at problems and we'll have to use a mix of AI technologies to take things yet even further.