Investors who do nothing but follow the crowd dumped a tonne of money into cryptocurrency / blockchain startups regardless of merit. Now they are doing the same with AI. But AI actually has clear, immediate, and lasting value. Articles like this seem to be written by people who don’t understand the basic concepts about people who don’t understand the basic concepts. Both sets of people just seem to identify the trends and mistake the trend for the overall value. AI only looks like cryptocurrency / blockchain if you don’t know anything at all about either one beyond “they are trendy and attract people who like investing in trendy things”.
Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
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Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#22Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least ai seems significantly more useful than crypto.
I feel both things are not really ready for primetime, but i agree AI is way more useful.
Indeed. Crypto when done to its philosophy is to gain financial and market freedom for businesses and people like you and I. Sadly, there's been a lot of co-opting and from that, a lot of uneducated people who will call anything that empowers individuals to be "shady" and "criminal".
Alas, it would appear there are no such things as fundamental human rights, only laws, according to these people.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#24Routinely articles like these are written. I find them superfluous and a symptom of the human tendency to never sit down and reflect about stuff. Grifts prey on the ignorant, duping them through an informational gap. As such, grifts flourish in new and uncertain environments. Environments where expert opinion is still forming and is badly communicated, and scammers can sound knowledgeable to the average person withou…
Was this written by GPT? It feels very Trained On Hacker News.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#25Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a f…
It's a bit weird to label millions of people, including presumably yourself, as 'poor suckers', is this a joke?
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#26Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a f…
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Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#27Transformative tech: cars. If you invested in the early movers you very likely lost your money.
Transformative tech: personal computers. If you invested in early movers you missed microsoft and you very likely lost your money.
Transformative tech: Internet/web, dotcom boom. Google, facebook, twitter were not investable or did not even exist even up to when it popped.
Whether you believe AI is going to be massively transformative to the modern economy on a scale with cars or personal computing is actually not sufficient to start investing in the 'sector' (for want of a better term).
So this is useful as a reverse indicator. Anyone investing buckets in AI is worth betting against in general. Everyone? Maybe not everyone. Maybe.
Likewise even if the blockchain sector is dead. (Is it? No clue) This does not necessarily make the technology dead. (Even if you would like it to be). The web came back and reinvented as a massive distributed surveillance machine. Who would have predicted that in the crash? Who would have wanted it? Well we got it anyway.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#28Investors who do nothing but follow the crowd dumped a tonne of money into cryptocurrency / blockchain startups regardless of merit. Now they are doing the same with AI. But AI actually has clear, immediate, and lasting value. Articles like this seem to be written by people who don’t understand the basic concepts about people who don’t understand the basic concepts. Both sets of people just seem to identify the trend…
Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem.
AI solves real problems, and has been doing so for many years. Generative AI is just the latest and most accessible instantiating of it.
My first company was a dialup ISP in the 90s. I look at GPT4 and I see the 56K modem of AI. There is so much upside to be discovered, we have barely started.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#29Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a f…
Actually compared to the economies of past societies, the modern economy in the West is amazing. If you work hard, have a little bit above the average intelligence and potentially a bit of luck you can make a lot of money. If not I guess you can make excuses.
The simplest way to organize a group of people, animals, organisms is to make one of them leader and have the rest follow him. This is the way our ancestors behaved for hundreds of millions of years and it's hardwired into our brains.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel both things are not really ready for primetime, but i agree AI is way more useful.
AI is undoubtedly useful, perhaps not revolutionary as heralded. Crypto was never anything else than a grift. The only true feature of de-fi is to evade financial regulators, for a time, and enable large scale movements of shady money.
Nice contradiction.
> Crypto was never anything else than a grift.
Ah, alright then, I guess it's not useful for anything.
> evade financial regulators
Sounds useful to me!
> enable large scale movements of shady money.
Large scale movements of money? Super useful!