"If this was a problem already, OpenClaw's release, and this hiring by OpenAI to democratize agentic AI further, will only make it worse. Right now the AI craze feels the same as the crypto and NFT boom, with the same signs of insane behavior and reckless optimism."

There are definitely people abusing AI and lying about what it can actually do. However, Crypto and NFTs are pretty much useless. Many people (including me) have already increased productivity using LLMs.

This technology just isn't going away.

The underlying tech in a signed public ledger, using chaining methods and merkle trees to record things with non-repudiation, thats useful. I went to a meeting which included people from the Reserve Bank of Australia or the financial regulator, and they said that between nation states, settlement was about mutuality, and absent a regulator to tell you what to do, federated processes around things like this were entirely rational choices. Nothing whatsoever about Bitcoin, Ethereum, the hype machine, rug pulls, just the underlying tech using normal PKI and some data structures and HSM backed processes. The regulator said informally, in a regulated monopoly agreeing to use mutual (dis)trust methods like a chain would be acceptable as an audit method to the regulator. Nothing about you or me, nothing about hype. Mechanistic settlement methods amongst competitors in a reasonably transparent manner.

Some payment chains are painful. An awful lot of middlemen take a cut. Some payment chains impose burdens on the endpoint like 90 day settlement debts which could be avoided with some use of tech. Nothing about the hype, just modification to financial transactions, but they could be done other ways as well (as could the settlement ideas above)

NFT are the same logic as bearer bonds. They're useful to very specific situations of value transfer, and almost nothing else. The use isn't about the artwork on the front, its the posession of a statement of value. Like bonds, they get discounted. The value is therefore a function of the yield and the trust in the chain of sigs asserting its a debt to that value. Not identical, but the concept stripped of the ego element isn't that far off.

Please note I think bored ape and coins are stupid. I am not attempting to promote the hype.

AI is the same. LLMs are useful. There are functional tools in this. The sheer amount of capital being sunk into venture plays is however, disconnected from that utility.

I don't like the weasel word "democratize" because there is nothing democratic about being forced to use a tool on condition of keeping your job. Democratization goes both ways, if you can't destroy something you cannot truly control it; I'm sure if you put it to an actual vote, many people would be surprised at the results.

It doesn't have to go away, it just needs to be better regulated. I could also increase my productivity by taking Adderall, if that was my end goal. But most people don't, since there are other factors to take into consideration, like becoming unable to function without it, or long-term cognitive decline...

The tech isn’t going away, but its usability is probably going to be recalibrated once we factor in the long term danger ( effects on learning and acquiring/maintaining skills, maintenance costs of ai made code, etc).

We’ll still have the “best code tooling ever invented” stuff, but if the market is assuming “intellectual workers all replaced”, there’s still a bubble pop waiting for us.

You should check out HN /new and /show the last couple of weeks.

It's just like all the ICO, NFT, and other crypto launches, but for all the little things that you can do with Ai. Everybody or their bot has some new game changing Ai project. It's a tiring mess right now, which I do hope will similarly die down in time

For clarity, I was a big fan of blockchain before it got bad, still am for things like ZKP and proof-of-authority, and I am similarly very excited for what Ai enables, but (imo) one cannot easily argue there is not a spam problem that feels similar.