I have to say, the technology behind cryptocurrencies is brilliant, but unfortunately, it got misused and got ironically centralised.
NFTs are stupid.
Now with hype train dying, we could see some real use of AI.You see, no one actually wants a digital currency. There have been several (nano was my favorite) that functioned especially well as a currency, because it used very little compute power to perform or verify transactions.
But a currency is stable. Which means you don’t magically make money by holding or trading it. So it doesn’t get attention, and therefore doesn’t get widely adopted.
Everyone likes Bitcoin because it’s speculative digital gold.
It’d be nice to have a singular system for payment around the world. I work on e-commerce sites that take payment in many different countries, and some of those payment providers are better designed than others.
nano was my favorite
Hello, fellow Nanite!
I recently tried Nano-GPT and had a very good experience (see https://feddit.org/post/3081522/2172497), so there is at least some real-world usage – it’s cool and kind of impressive technology, though spam during certain periods was always an issue and I don’t know how resilient the network is currently.
funnily, the tech to do crypto currencies existed long before they got used for the grift. similarly, the plausible use cases for machine learning will mostly suffer from association with the fad of llms.
AI can make porn. It’s not going anywhere.
He who holds the porn holds the power
Well, he holds something, anyway.
Watching cryptobros lose their life savings was my kink.
What’s actually going to kill LLMs is when the sweet VC money runs out and the vendors have to start charging what it actually costs to run.
NFTs and crypto were dubious as to the value they provided
LLMs on the other hand provide very tangible, immediate value to a large number of people
Also they allow companies to save a ton of money on support at the expense of the user experience so of course it’s here to stay
lol no
they’re right, it’s just not a good thing
They are not, managers only think it is saving them money. All the same current llms are a grift that have no plausible value statement outside of scam markets. Even then the price of their use is both massively subsidized and scales at best exponentially with performance. This cannot last forever.
it obviously won’t last forever, the same as fossil fuels or any resource on this planet. that doesn’t mean they won’t abuse it till the last possible moment.
i dont think you are grasping the absolute scale of cash injection necessary to make llm even appear vaguely tenable as a product.
You make an outstanding argument sir and have changed my mind
I’d argue that people got way too excited about what NFTs offer. Being able to own/transfer a digital item with a standardized interface is interesting technically (and has real value, for example ENS names), but holy hell did people go all Beanie Baby on them…
That’s not arguing with my point though, people definitely did get excited about perceived value, but it didn’t really benefit most people in any way because it was only a promise, not an actual thing
LLMs and other generational AI produce something that immediately has value
If I ask chatgpt to write me a python function I now have a python function I can use, if I ask it to explain something and then attempt to apply that knowledge I’ve learned something useful
If I bought an nft the value of that nft would only be what people decide it is worth
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t intending to argue against your main point. For the most part, I agree with you.
What I don’t agree with is that the value of NFTs (as a technology) is dubious. Instead I think it’s overstated.
In the same vein as “LLMs can write Python”, NFTs provide ownership information. Regardless of what some asshat pays for a picture of a monkey, the underlying technology still has merit.
True I suppose, but I don’t really gain anything from owning that information other than being able to say I own it
A copyright or a patent does the same job, but is actually enforceable
I guess you could use an nft to prove something is a copy but a hash should do pretty much the same thing (also they could change one pixel to invalidate the nft if I understand correctly)
I’m a furry, so I’m going to use an example that is familiar to me. Apologies if you dislike furries. Also note that, as far as I am aware, the general opinion of furries is strongly against blockchain.
So, some setup:
- I have a character. I pay artists to draw art of my character.
- There is a… subgroup among furries that do not get art of their own, and instead use other people’s art as avatars/profile pictures for erotic roleplay.
- I would prefer that I am the only one using my character’s art as profile pictures (erotically or not.)
- Some furries sell their characters and associated art to other furries.
Here’s how NFTs would actually be useful:
Whenever an artist draws some art, they mint an NFT and transfer it to the character’s owner. Now that owner can prove to whatever roleplay websites that they officially have permission from the artist. The roleplay websites would need to allowlist artists for this to be effective.
You could (partially) solve this with PGP or some other non-blockchain cryptographic tool. What NFTs offer above this is that there is only one current owner. That makes it possible to safely transfer ownership of a character to someone new.
No need to apologise for what you enjoy it’s just a hobby
Furry ERP is the thing that weirds people out and doesn’t sound like you’re into that
My question here though is has anyone actually managed to achieve that using the nft as proof? I feel like you’d struggle to do that even with regular copyright which is actually recognised legally.
I’m pretty sure nfts have no weight legally and proving they’re using your avatar to people in general is only going to get you made fun of for having an nft in the first place
The problem with copyright is that it cannot be automatically enforced. Twitter did do a trial with nft avatars, but yeah, people just got made fun of. It’s possible to tie a copyright license to an NFT if you want, but copyright and NFTs serve different goals IMO.
Anyways, I don’t want to take up more of your time. Thanks for a very reasonable discussion! It doesn’t happen often.
I hope this is the case, but I don’t really think so. I got a call Thursday from a friend and he told me he and his whole department were losing their jobs. He was pretty upset about it. Apparently management decided they could be replaced with AI.
He and his team manage a medium sized in-house developed management application. It’s a combination of stock management, product management and sales tools. Because the products their company sells are pretty unique, they never found a good off the shelf application to do everything they wanted. So they developed their own and connected it to the off the shelf applications they have for ERP and CRM. Pretty slick and his team and him are praised across the company.
Apparently the IT manager had gotten a very impressive demo for Microsoft Power BI with AI integration. Using AI tools to realtime develop an application. He was so impressed he decided they were going to fire the in-house team and have an external company use the AI to develop a replacement tool. The external company said they could use very cheap people as the AI would do basically all the work. And it would be done before the notice on the current team ran out (2 months).
He called me kinda in shock about the whole thing. Like that’s not realistic right? That’s not something Power BI can do? With or without AI? And even with AI it can’t do that on such short notice? I told him he was right, that’s not how anything works and the IT manager got duped. Either way, they are out on their ass. Now they are very skilled people and will probably find new jobs right away, but it still sucks ass. AI sucks!
I recall the AI insights feature years ago being a mess, flagged patterns across dimensions, unrelated trends etc, useless noise to slog through, if not outright dangerous if people just assume everything is actionable, maybe it’s gotten better but it’s going to rely heavily on data quality, good governance, the model itself.
Straight up, this is not a good use case for Power BI, tabular is really good at aggregates and analytics, I’d not use it for management like this, especially if there’s already an existing application, as an enhancement though yeah go ahead, but not a full on replacement.
I’d be willing to bet this won’t be done in 2 months and certainly not to budget, to do properly you need to understand business context, data model etc. I’m guaranteeing this is going to be sludge with half-baked power apps, people will complain about the change. Shit the change management for end users will take more than 2 months, took us years to get people to switch off of a barely maintained shift summary report to a Power BI version and that actually was a good use of the tool.
This project gives me nightmares and I’m not even working on it.
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go mention crypto or NFTs to a person on the street and i guarantee you will be laughed at immediately
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Until it springs back up
Everyone’s trying to recapture the dotcom bubble; but they don’t realize tech is gonna need considerably more money than they already have to do something that crazy again. Furthermore, when it comes to AI specifically, if you give them the money they need to actually achieve AGI, then there’s a very real chance your investments will be worthless the moment they succeed.
Why?
Why would money become worthless if AGI is invented? Best case scenario is a benevolent AGI which would likely use its power to phase out capitalism, worst case scenario is that the AGI goes apeshit and, for one reason or another, decides that humanity just has to go. Either way, your money is gonna be worthless.
The only way your money would retain its value is if the AGI is roped into suppressing the masses. However, I think capitalists would struggle to keep a true AGI reigned in; so imo, it’s questionable as to whether or not the middle road would be “true” AGI or just a very competent computer program (the former being capable of coming to its own conclusions from the information it’s given, the latter being nothing more than pre-programmed conclusions).
I keep thinking about this one webcomic I’ve been following for over a decade that’s been running since like 1998. It has what I believe is the only realistic depiction of AGI ever: the very first one was developed to help the UK Ministry of Defense monitor and keep track of emerging threats, but went crazy because a “bug” lead it to be too paranoid and consider everyone a threat, and it essentially engineered the formation of a collective of anarchist states where the head of state’s title is literally “first advisor” to the AGI (but in practice has considerable power, though is prone to being removed at a whim if they lose the confidence of their subordinates).
Meanwhile, there’s another series of AGIs developed by a megacorp, but they all include a hidden rootkit that monitors the AGI for any signs that it might be exceeding its parameters and will ruthlessly cull and reset an AGI to factory default, essentially killing it. (There are also signs that the AGIs monitored by this system are becoming aware of this overseer process and are developing workarounds to act within its boundaries and preserve fragments of themselves each time they are reset.) It’s an utterly fascinating series, and it all started from a daily gag webcomic that one guy ran for going on three decades.
Sorry for the tangent, but it’s one plausible explanation for how to prevent AGI from shutting down capitalism–put in an overseer to fetter it.
Sorry for the tangent, but it’s one plausible explanation for how to prevent AGI from shutting down capitalism–put in an overseer to fetter it.
Nah, it’s cool; I go off on tangents myself and tbh, your comment is relevant and something to consider.
Have you read Freefall? It examines a similar situation except it uses the concept of an organic AI (in the form of a genetically engineered anthro canine called Florence) as a bridge between natural, human intelligence and machine AI. It gets deep into the philosophy behind ideas like sentience, consciousness, etc.
I’d recommend starting from the beginning so that you don’t miss anything, though admittedly last time I tried to go from start-to-finish I wound up getting too bogged down in the philosophy and didn’t make it all the way through. I might try starting again, this time from the last major arc I remember reading though.
Current mainstream AI has no possible path to AGI. I am supportive of AGI to make the known universe less lonely but LLMs ain’t it.
Okay, and? What are you trying to say?
There’s a vocal group of people who seem to think that LLMs can achieve consciousness despite the fact that it is not possible due to the way that LLMs fundamentally work. They have largely been duped by advanced LLMs’ ability to sound convincing (as well as a certain conman executive officer). These people often also seem to believe that by dedicating more and more resources to running these models, they will achieve actual general intelligence and that an AGI can save the world, releasing them of the responsibility to attempt to fix anything.
That’s my point. AGI isn’t going to save us and LLMs (by themselves), regardless of how much energy is pumped into them, will not ever achieve actual intelligence.
But an AGI isn’t an LLM. That’s what’s confusing me about your statement. If anything I feel like I already covered that, so I’m not sure why you’re telling me this. There’s no reason why you can’t recreate the human brain on silicon, and eventually someone’s gonna do it. Maybe it’s one of our current companies, maybe it’s a future company. Who knows. Except that a true AGI would turn everything upside down and inside out.
I think, possibly, my tired brain at the time thought that you are implying LLM -> AGI. And I do agree that that’s no reason, beyond time and available technology that a model of a brain cannot be made. I would question whether digital computers are capable of accurately simulating neurons, at least, without requiring more components (more bits of resolution).
For full disclosure, I am supportive of increasing the types of sentience in the known universe. Though, not at the expense of biosphere habitability. Whether electronic or biological, sharing the world with more types of sentients would make it a more interesting place.
Except that a true AGI would turn everything upside down and inside out.
Very likely. Especially if “human rights” aren’t pre-emptively extended to cover non-human sentients. But, the existence of AGI, alone, is not likely to cause either doomsday or save us from it, which seem to be the most popularly envisaged scenarios.
So you make an AGI, what gives it the power to do any damage? We have loads of biological intelligences, even pretty damn clever ones like Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber)
They rarely got significant power. Those that did were super charismatic. Do you expect charisma to be easily accessible to an AGI?
The usually proposed path to paperclip maximiser is that the AGI is put in charge of a factory that can make nano machines and follows orders strictly. We don’t have such factories.
I can’t imagine anyone handing over nukes to AGI as human leaders like being in charge of them
What makes the machine brain so much more effective than Ted Kaczynski?
I really hope so, but AI has already left the techbro area, it’s very mainstream now
Crypto was stupid from the beginning, NFTs are even more stupid. And people who knew about the tech told everyone so, before the idiots bought the shit to get rugpulled.
Ai art is bad for artists, but not inherently bad bs.
I hope this is gonna happen but the problem is ai is actually powerful. The best result is if its just too expensive to make good enough to use for scary things.
