I never really get the cryptocurrency comparison. AI has an application beyond grift. Like, even if they stopped developing it now, an AI “style hints” in the style of spellcheck and grammar rule check would be a no-brainer as a thing to add to an office suite.

The valuations are totally and completely nuts. But, LLMs have little legitimate applications in a way that cryptocurrencies never will.

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mbgerring 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Also I’m going to go ahead and say that “it’s slightly better than classical NLP for grammar check but requires 10,000x as much compute resources” is not an improvement

	▲	bee_rider 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The models are already trained… is inference so costly? It’s just a dot product or a matvec or something, right?

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mbgerring 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Lots of crypto boosters said that crypto had use cases beyond grift and that anyone who couldn’t see that was a moron.

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nmfisher 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Millions of people are using (and paying for) LLMs for their daily work. The number of people using crypto as an actual currency is a rounding error by comparison.

There's definitely similarities when it comes to the wave of hype and greed behind them both, but the fundamentals really are completely different.

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lucianbr 16 hours ago | parent [-]

I work at a company with hundreds of thousands of employees, and they're mandating the use of AI, monitoring it, and pushing like crazy. Like their life depends on it. You get threatening emails if several days pass without you using AI.

Now tell me again what the usage numbers mean in resepect to usefulness.

	▲	aksosoakbab 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is a huge red flag imo. Mandated usage and yet nothing to show for it. To top it off Sam Altman is a known dishonest actor (and has already shown his true colors at openai). AI is here to stay and has some truly cool uses. But there’s far too many snake oil salesman involved currently.