this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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It also reminds me of crypto. Lots of people made money from it, but the reason why the technology persists has more to do with the perceived potential of it rather than its actual usefulness today.
There are a lot of challenges with AI (or, more accurately, LLMs) that may or may not be inherent to the technology. And if issues cannot be solved, we may end up with a flawed technology that, we are told, is just about to finally mature enough for mainstream use. Just like crypto.
To be fair, though, AI already has some very clear use cases, while crypto is still mostly looking for a problem to fix.
Let's combine AI and crypto, and migrate it to the cloud. Imagine the PowerPoints middle managers will make about that!
No, this isn't crypto. Crypto and NFTs were trying to solve for problems that already had solutions with worse solutions, and hidden in the messaging was that rich people wanted to get poor people to freely gamble away their money in an unregulated market.
AI has real, tangible benefits that are already being realized by people who aren't part of the emotion-driven ragebait engine. Stock images are going to become extinct in several years. People can make at least a baseline image of what they want, no matter the artistic ability. Musicians are starting to use AI tools. ChatGPT makes it easy to generate low-effort, high-time-consuming letters and responses like item descriptions, or HR responses, or other common draft responses. Code AI engines allow programmers to present reviewable solutions in real-time, or at least something to generate and tweak. None of this is perfect, but it's good enough for 80% of the work that can be modified after the initial pass.
Things like chess AI has existed for decades, and LLMs are just extensions of the existing generative AI technology. I dare you to tell Chess.com that "AI is a money pit that isn't paying off", because they would laugh their fucking asses off, as they are actively pouring even more money and resources into Torch.
The author here is a fucking idiot. And he didn't even bother to change the HTML title ("Microsoft's Github Copilot is Losing Huge Amounts of Money") from its original focus of just Github Copilot. Clickbait bullshit.
I totally agree. However, I do feel like the market around AI is inflated like NFTs and Crypto. AI isn't a bust, there will be steady progress at universities, research labs, and companies. There is too much hype right now, slapping AI on random products and over promising the current state of technology.
A tale as old as time...
Still waiting on those "self-driving" cars.
Self driving will be available next year.*
*since 2014
I love how suddenly companies started advertising things as AI that would have been called a chatbot a year ago. I saw a news article headlinethe other day that said that judges were going to improve the time they took to render judgments significantly by using AI.
Reading the content of the article they went on to explain that they would use it to draft the documents. Its like they never heard of templates
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
starting to use AI tools
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I'm still trying to transfer $100 from Kazakhstan to me here. By far the lowest fee option is actually crypto since the biggest difference is the currency conversion. If you have to convert anyway, might as well only pay 0.30% on both ends
Look into DJED on Cardano. It’s WAY cheaper than ETH (but perhaps not cheaper than some others). A friend of mine sent $10,000 to Thailand for less than a dollar in transaction fees. To 1bluepixel: Sounds like a use-case to me!
If only I had some money to transfer somewhere :(
Layer-2 rollups for Ethereum are also way cheaper than the base layer, this page lists the major ones.
Hmm.
You still have to deal with ETH fees just to get the funds into the roll up. I admit that ETH was revolutionary when it was invented but the insane fee market makes it a non-starter and the accounts model is just a preposterously bad (and actually irreparably broken) design decision for a decentralized network, makes Ethereum near impossible to parallelize since the main chain is required for state and the contracts that run on it are non-deterministic.
There are exchanges where you can buy Ether and other tokens directly on a layer 2, once it's on layer 2 there are no further fees to get it there.
Layer 2 rollups are a way to parallelize things, the activity on one layer 2 can proceed independently of activity on a different layer 2.
I have no idea why you think contracts on Ethereum are nondeterminstic, the blockchain wouldn't work at all if they were.
I think that because it’s true. Smart contracts on Ethereum can fail and still charge the wallet. Because of the open ended nature of Ethereum’s design, a wallet can be empty when the contract finally executes, causing a failure. This doesn’t happen in Bitcoin and other utxo chains like Ergo, and Cardano (where all transactions must have both inputs and outputs accounted for FULLY to execute). Utxo boasts determinism while the accounts model can fail due to an empty wallet. Determinism makes concurrency harder for sure…but at least your entire chain isn’t one gigantic unsafe state machine. Ethereum literally is by definition non-deterministic.
Crypto found a problem to fix. The reason the problem remains: everything is run by that problem so it was astroturfed to death by parties that run the current financial system and the enemy of their enemy (who’s a friend), opportunistic scammers like SBF and Do Kwan.