The difference, as always, is that AI is useful - in many different ways.

Crypto was useful for speculative investment and occasionally for working around money transfer restrictions.

IMO they are the same, they make certain things easier than they used to be. Not everyone needs to make transactions without a bank looking over their shoulder, and I don't personally know anyone whose life is changed by being able to type 100x faster (or conversely, produce summaries 1/100th the length of the input)

I continue to try applying small models to tasks life producing structured data from unstructured (using lmstudio's schema parameter) and it's really neat that I can extract data from work emails, but every once in a while it will hallucinate a new phone number when the one I needed was in the prompt, so it still hasn't met the kind of reliability I want in order to actually automate stuff where dollars are on the line

What AI is useful for makes cryptocurrencies look marginally more useful by comparison.