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posted by hubie on Thursday March 16 2023, @04:36AM   Printer-friendly

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble (09 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow:

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by progo on Thursday March 16 2023, @06:32AM (6 children)

    by progo (6356) on Thursday March 16 2023, @06:32AM (#1296430) Homepage

    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.

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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Nuke on Thursday March 16 2023, @08:55AM (1 child)

    by Nuke (3162) on Thursday March 16 2023, @08:55AM (#1296445)

    I never knew anyone that paid their rent with BitCoin.

    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 2023, @01:47PM

      by Freeman (732) on Friday March 17 2023, @01:47PM (#1296680) Journal

      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 2023, @02:07PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 16 2023, @02:07PM (#1296475) Journal

    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 2023, @08:45PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday March 16 2023, @08:45PM (#1296546)

      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....)

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Thursday March 16 2023, @04:57PM (1 child)

    by Beryllium Sphere (r) (5062) on Thursday March 16 2023, @04:57PM (#1296514)

    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 2023, @08:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2023, @08:52PM (#1296551)

      Sadly I think it's the end of all forums. The shit-for-brains computer can out-spew even the most toxic of shitposters.