The major difference between the 2 is how they're being adopted by customers and the tangible value they return.<p>AI/ML barrier to entry is far simpler and vastly user friendly compared to crypto. Instant value return or gratification from ML products (GTPs and rest) is far more mainstream friendly.<p>Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has had their funds stolen or lost using ML products. I understand content creators and those who, unwillingly, contributed knowledge to learning systems did get circumvented but i'm talking about users/customers. Compare that to the negative stigma of crypto frauds and stereotypical association to illegal transactions.<p>Apples vs. rotten oranges in my opinion!
We have been using AI for various tasks for decades now. In fact, every day things you take for granted are powered by machine learning, and most people don't even realize it.<p>Is OCR "a scam just like crypto"? How about voice recognition, used daily all over the world? What about spam filters? Clearly useless over hyped technology right?<p>Even if you wanted to limit the term AI to large language models, which by the way, would make your use of the term incredibly wrong, it STILL has many common and useful application. You can use LLMs to classify text (sentiment, toxicity, etc), they can be paired with voice models to improve speech recognition or improve translation services, and so on.<p>I think it's better to ask what you think the major similarity is between AI and crypto, because it's hard to find any other than a subset of the crypto fanatics now jumping on LLMs as the solution to every problem. But this group isn't actually part of the AI community.
The cycle of these technologies is always the same:<p><pre><code> 1. Initial introduction or release
2. Major hype and influx of greed money. <- AI is here now
3. Failure to live up to the hype, resulting in the tech becoming a punchline and gobs of money lost
4. Renaissance of the tech as its true potential is eventually realized, which doesn't match the original hype but ends up very useful
5. Iteration and improvement with no clear "done" or "achieved" milestone, it just becomes part of society
</code></pre>
The bombardment of charlatans taking advantage of the term, coupled with commercials everywhere suggests we will soon hit stage 3 for AI. The Super Bowl commercials are usually the tipping point.<p>Crypto is at stage 3 now.<p>Not all technologies make it to steps 4-5.<p>Hell, I remember when social media followed the same path. And ecommerce before it. Or the web in general before that. And on and on it goes.
From Matt Levine’ “Money Stuff”:<p>~~~<p><pre><code> > In 2021, at the height of the investor frenzy for crypto startups, entrepreneur Chris Horne raised $2 million in seed funding for Filta, a marketplace on which customers could buy and sell custom nonfungible token face filters that could digitally augment their face, say, by adding cat whiskers or a block head. But by the time the company launched in late summer of 2022, enthusiasm for crypto had waned and Filta was faltering.
>
> So Horne pivoted to the new hottest sector: artificial intelligence. He ditched the NFT idea, and this year relaunched Filta as a generative AI-powered digital pet, one that talks and can offer its owner emotional support. The technology behind his new company is OpenAI’s large language model, ChatGPT. And Horne is running his new Filta venture off the capital he raised for his original concept.
That is probably the most cynical version of “crypto guy pivots to AI” I have ever read, but even here it’s an obvious improvement. Before, he was going to sell people pictures of cats on the blockchain. Now, he is going to sell people pictures of cats that will talk and offer emotional support and not be on the blockchain. Strictly better!
</code></pre>
~~~<p>Seems like maybe a little bit?
Interesting analysis. Suprised HN is so negative towards AI (and that the positive:negative ratio to AI is about the same as it was for Crypto a few years ago!)<p>The obvious difference is that AI has abundant use-cases, while Crypto only has tenuous ones.<p>Maybe there is added negativity considering it is a technology where there is clearly a potential threat to jobs on a personal level (e.g. lift operators were very negative towards automatic lifts).
One perspective I've been thinking about lately is how the rise of Crypto has been hugely beneficial for AI, in the same way that the dot-com bubble was hugely beneficial for the internet.<p>Essentially Crypto lead to huge investment into GPUs and GPU technology, and then once Crypto collapsed lead to a huge capacity of compute power which then decidedly was put into AI.<p>I doubt that investment into GPU technology would have been driven by the idea of AI alone. Something manic like Crypto had to drive it initially. Without Crypto, I imagine the AI revolution we're seeing today would not have taken place.
AI feels more like the .COM bubble. There was a lot of hype and nonsense but the underlying tech really changed the world. I feel the same about AI. Crypto was always a solution that looked for problems it could solve.
AI, specifically ChatGPT is the first thing since maybe my Google/Stackoverflow that has fundamentally changed my day as a developer.<p>It's a constant conversation now, with ChatGPT, over hard problems. The AI doesn't always get it right, but it's a great partner, with so many great suggestions.<p>I cannot imagine going back.
Interesting sentiment analysis, but hard to put into context without a baseline for the sentiment of average HN comments. In my experience, HN can be impressively cynical on just about any topic that gets posted. Some times a great article will get posted and people will find creative ways to complain about everything from the color choice of the website to unrelated complaints from loosely related topics. It gets negative very quickly in here.<p>It’s also interesting to see sentiment trending downward in time for both topics, even as the real-world benefits of AI become more obvious. My gut feeling is that this shows some of the contrarian bias on HN: Comments here are more optimistic about things that aren’t yet mainstream, but lean negative as soon as something becomes too popular or mainstream.<p>Interesting article. Thanks for including the details about fine tuning your own model.
I'm interested in the last bit. That sentiment towards anything on HN has become steadily more negative over time. Would be interested to see if this trend exists on other websites and the internet as a whole. It could be a way to measure the optimism/vibe of all of humanity. Is the entire internet becoming more cynical/skeptical/mean?
Can you add some normalisation topic (or combination / average of several topics) like "linux" or "javascript" or something that's been around for a long time and hasn't really had a hype cycle recently?<p>It's interesting to see how AI/Crypto relate to each other, but e.g. for sentiment analysis we would need to check if maybe HN got more negative _overall_ or if it's actually dependent on the two topics you chose
Crypto is fun as a concept but after more than a decade it doesn't seem to be useful for much, apart from speculation. And I say this as someone who has fooled around with crypto a lot.<p>AI has plenty of use cases. Just ChatGPT alone is helping me everyday in many different ways. I don't think it's remotely comparable.
The one thing that stands out really clearly in the sentiment graph is how, prior to the AI sentiment trough around 2022, AI and Crypto sentiment were highly correlated in their movements.<p>It would be interesting to see a broader analysis across subjects and see if that shared movement wasn't about AI and crypto, but largely just sort of a fluctuation in general tone across HN, or if instead <i>relative</i> to general HN sentiment, sentiment on Crypto an AI movements were correlated prior to the recent divergence.
Although I'm generally favorable towards crypto, the biggest difference is that unlike crypto, AI, especially in the form of LLMs and image models are extremely idiot-friendly.<p>No, I don't mean it in a derogatory way: crypto leaves a lot of loose ends to be tied up by everyday humans who just want to be left alone - oh, and if anything goes wrong once, your fortune could be lost and there's no one to complain to.<p>AI, on the other hand, is already making its way into browsers like Microsoft's Edge where I can ask it to generate all kinds of ideas, images, summaries, etc. via the chat format everyone is already friendly with. Likewise, GPT3 & 4's first major applications that took off was ChatGPT that brought AI chat to noobs and you don't need to be a hacker bro to use that.<p>In contrast, the first time I downloaded Metamask and tried to buy USDC, I quickly found out that there are different versions (correct me if I'm wrong) of this single cryptocurrency hosted on the Polygon, Ethereum, Avalanche, etc. blockchains.<p>What's that even supposed to mean to a beginner who wants to send money to a third-world country in minutes? And, remember: one wrong step and you could possibly lose everything.
Yes, most projects are pure hype. The amount of AI peddling on Twitter and YouTube is unprecedented. I wish the community were a lot more humble in that regard. That being said, there are a lot of legit use cases and customers in need of solutions that cannot be done quickly via a few API calls to OpenAI and require a lot of customisations and hand-holding. AI is hyped a lot, but there are companies out there, and I like to consider us being one of them (bias, I know), that think about how to enable customers to solve/improve real problems with the help of AI instead of making a quick buck by peddling the latest doc-chat solutions.<p>From that perspective, AI is not the new crypto. If you ignore the noise and focus on the actual work, you will find a lot of good things about this field, and I might say even breakthrough advances, that help us reconsider what intelligent life really means.<p>Disclaimer: we are one of the first "chat to your docs" companies that came out as soon as ChatGPT was released when all we had at our disposal was text-davinci-003 and basic vector stores. Now, we do mostly other things.<p>Edit: fixed typos
Crypto requires explanation, AI merely demonstration.<p>The only demonstration crypto has is 'look, more money today' and that only works sometimes.<p>AI's demonstration is followed by explanation of how it will kill us all, or why it won't work in context X, or take our job, etc, but you can kind of just ignore that and use it.
AI/ML is certainly going to get integrated everywhere ultimately and in a lot of things that will get hidden to the average consumer, like medical imaging.<p>What is really hype right now is how AI is going to upset all our day to day lives and earn billions for startups.<p>It is probably going to be a bit more incremental than the hype right now, and most of the profits will likely go to the already established tech companies.<p>ChatGPTs AI assistants are already seen as a sign that a good number of AI startups that are a thin layer around someone else's LLM will collapse due to zero moat.<p>It also isn't even clear where the profits are going to come from GPT/LLMs other than from NVIDIA selling shovels to the miners. Beyond that it will probably be the existing tech companies and they may be running them at a considerable loss for a long time to come.
Well, I've never really used crypto, save for mining a few bitcoins way, way back in the day. The idea was really appealing and initially seemed revolutionary - but also a bit of a tempest in a teacup.<p>LLMs -- I've gradually been using them more and more, with tangible benefits (less effort to complete a task / quicker turnaround on projects). Some workflows that were unimaginable are now possible, because of this bi-directional bridge between structured information and human language.<p>One is a pyramid scheme, the other is a digital exoskeleton / ironman suit. It really doesn't compare.
Github Copilot has been really valuable to me and has had meaningful, positive impact on my life.<p>Crypto hasn't made me more productive in any way. To me, it's had the same utility as an online casino.
As someone who predicted the fall of cryptocurrencies early on, I would say no. But there is a certain class of scammy hype-driven individuals (overlap with the crypto-bro-crowd is not unvommon) that have the potential to turn everything into a hollow and meaningless hype.<p>This is problematic, when the nature of the hyped thing is distorted. Cryptoassets for example were useful mostly for high risk speculation, shady money transfers and for pyramid schemes. As a currency these things totally sucked, but that was the promise: "Soon money is going to be replaced by this thing". Additionally they hyped the underlying technology ("everything must be on the blockchain!") and some idiots went along and made it part of their tech stack without any rational reason to do so.<p>Machine learning is different in that it already showed some incredible value. That value comes with potentially huge societal impacts as it will destroy entire classes of jobs and distort the concept of truth even further. But having a thing that does what it does is genuinely useful, outside of get-rich-quick schemes and speculation.<p>Now machine learning is in danger of being overhyped into something it is not. As impressive as some of the results are, this is not artificial intelligence in the traditional "artifical consciousness" sense of the word. It is a way to come up with plausible outputs to a given input.
Very interesting. I've introspected a great deal lately to (try to) gauge my own biases with regard to these technologies, because I think AI is absolutely incredible and I'm less skeptical about it than other things, namely crypto, which I've always held with very deep skepticism. Does that mean AI is "different" or am I just biased?<p>To that end, I'm very curious: how does AI compare against other major tech advancements that are relevant in the HN community? The AI vs crypto comparison is the one I see the most, or ChatGPT/LLM vs iPhone, but surely there are some other less splashy or controversial comparisons.<p>What about something like React/Angular/SPAs vs AI? Less exciting, I know. I'm just really curious about how AI stacks up against something other than the obvious ("obvious," because of what I've been reading - again, biases) comparisons.
Appreciate the addendum.<p>I suspect there are two things being measured at once here: people's sentiments changing, and the content being discussed changing.<p>Once a topic becomes "trendy", the average article quality seems to drop. You go from research articles and niche blogs to the general press and businesses trying to cash in on the trend.
I think the Addendum is the most interesting part of this blogpost. For the decade or so I've been on HN, I don't feel like it's been getting more negative overall. But maybe it's just more discussions about various dramas overall than before, which would drag down the score I'm sure.
Self plug because it’s sort of relevant, I wrote a short snarky blog post today complaining about how the “AI” conference scene is very boring compared to crypto.<p><a href="https://blog.hazybridge.com/ai-is-boring/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://blog.hazybridge.com/ai-is-boring/</a>
As far as I know, AI hasn’t succeeded in literally blinding anyone: <a href="https://mashable.com/article/bored-ape-nfts-vision-loss-apefest-party" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://mashable.com/article/bored-ape-nfts-vision-loss-apef...</a><p>Molly White’s comment at the end is superb.
AI is many many leagues ahead in potential, for both benefit <i>and</i> damage. Realistically, we are going to see much more of both from AI.<p>AI weaponisation (socially, politically, militarily, financially, etc..) will be a pretty big deal going forward, and will potentially see shady shit happen at a scale and effectiveness that will make crypto's little niche-scams look like child's play. The same old story we've seen with every major new system we introduce throughout human history.<p>Crypto is merely a usage token. It's like comparing "the world's banking system" with "the world".
It's not that i think anything is wrong, but isn't it strange there's no jump I see in WFH comments during the pandemic when everyone was doing it
context: i work as an ml engineer.<p>i agree with the bubble sentiment that apparently many people have. i recognize how it would be at my own career's expense. but i feel that many arguments made here miss the forest for the trees.<p>applied statistics or statistical learning has been around long enough and we have seen its innovations and rebranding over the decades. i clearly see the theoretical point to it and hence decided to find my place in this field.<p>however, the "AI" movement as of late, including the generative AI bits, fall into the bubble territory for me. just like those who are serious about blockchain and its wide implications will still toil towards it, so would companies serious about machine learning.<p>however, most people are riding the wave are for short-term gains, just like many in crypto space were there for speculative money-making.<p>the LLMs to me are an evolution (albeit a macro one) to predictive functionality of smartphone keyboards of the past, but they are touted to be the holy grail. their capabilities are impressive, but it only scales up so much in its current form. those just making an app on top of api provided by these services will not last. moreover, the explosion of advancements mean there will be no stability for those maintaining the infrastructure in the near future.<p>at least with the pursuit of making the largest models have shed light on the need to optimize the deep learning stack, which is the only silver lining for me.<p>i would love to be wrong and see what comes next, but i believe the general public will lose interest soon and we will have another winter before a major breakthrough. the "AGI" claims are just like those made by vr enthusiasts in the 2010s...i mean the 1980s.
It would be interesting to do a sentiment analysis on users to see if users themselves are becoming more negative over time or if negative voices are composing more of the message volume.<p>With the degree of data available I have wondered if you could determine a point at which you could suggest users see professional help. Then if you could do such a thing, would it be ethical to do so? Would it be ethical _not_ to do so?
Interesting how sentiments gets worse over time for every topic.<p>Could you check the overall HN sentiment over time, to see if we got more pessimistic ?
Just want to point out that this post is by a company that works in the “AI” space.<p>Not saying that it’s wrong or right, but it would be like asking someone in a cult to tell you if the cult is a scam. You might find a few dissenting voices, but most are going to support or it would lack the critical mass required to stay afloat.
I have never been on the crypto bandwagon other than some GPU mining here and there. I still have yet to see a use case other than making financial transactions banned by the government and MAYBE as an alternative to figuring out how wire transfers work.<p>ChatGPT in the first month had more demonstrated utility than Crypto since it was founded.
I somehow feel crypto is very alive and it's here to stay.
It's still a strong hedge against state-owned money.<p>The people declaring it dead either don't grasp it or got burnt by buying in during the last bull run.<p>Take a step back guys, if you trade, trade anticyclic, now is a better time to buy than two years ago - just sayin.
The difference in AI and Crypto is that AI is much more accessible.<p>Everyone can appreciate a photo of an astronaut on a horse.<p>Few can grasp the concept and significance of a store of value. Let alone a DAO.<p>It's the same reason why Harry Potter is more popular than Einstein's "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" in which he came up with the theory of relativity.<p>When others talk about something we don't understand, we tend to get angry and dismissive. Like boys in elementary school who think girls are stupid. Because they can't figure out why they act the way they do. So on top of the lower popularity, we also get the hate towards crypto.
AI and crypto are very synergistic. As AI makes deepfakes easier and cheaper, an immutable ledger with cryptographic signatures at every step becomes a more and more valuable tool for attestations of identity and proof of history.
The bulk of AI "projects," yes. As a discipline, no. Just like with the crypto nonsense, a bunch of junk was created and died. The same will happen with AI. What's left after the hype cycle/cash pump will be the things of real value.
> 2016: Whoa, deep learning actually works?<p>The deep learning wave began before 2010 when this analysis starts. When I was looking for a job in 2009, there was already a big deep learning hype wave, and my new employer sent me around to look for industrial funding.
Very interesting find, even though not their target:<p>"Interestingly, there is in fact a noticeable downward slope in average sentiment over time for those topics as well"<p>I would speculate total sentiment on HN is trending down. Its the disillusionment with tech.
I would look at YC startup sentiment on HN.<p>Regardless HN has always seemed to me to have a more pessimistic view so it is interesting to see the converse. Also it would be interesting to bucket by timezone.
Not even close, have crypto have been nearly this useful? I will give bitcoin the transaction use but other than transactions, crypto/smart contracts seem like there is always a way we can do that without crypto.
How much of the downward trend has to do with self-driving car overhype.<p>Lumping everything 'AI' together doesn't make much sense to me.
They both have "winters".<p>Each also has "true believers" who can ignore the facts before them and incessantly hype an imaginary future.
There was a time when ML brought us things like
<a href="https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/</a> and we had a good laugh.<p>Then came ChatGPT. The tens of billions dollars poured into the next hype, often by the same hustlers who hyped crypto (but for sure they were not the ones who lost the billions or stood in front of the court). Same environmental damage due to wasted electricity poured into wasteful, pointless computation. Same hype without any actual usefulness. In both cases this sentiment is met with a huff but it's factual.<p>Came the AI-written mushroom hunting guides.<p>Came AI Modi singing trending garnering votes for him. Our worst fears of democracy ending in favor of the candidate with the most processing power aka with the most money winning.<p>This pandemic (for covid didn't end yet) already 300 000 people died because of hand written propaganda (<a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071284/this-is-how-many-lives-could-have-been-saved-with-covid-vaccinations-in-each-sta" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071...</a>) when the next pandemic will come the AI produced oh so plausible bullshit will flood everything and millions will die.<p>Aza Raskin compared it to a zero day vulnerability for the operating system of humanity and he is oh so right.<p>Who is laughing now?
Wow, solid evidence that HN is turning into a bunch of cranky grouches! I suspected, but never thought the sentiment trend would be this clear.<p>I propose we fork the site and send out an invite for HNGoodVibesOnly for anyone whose post history is in the top half of the median sentiment distribution.
I am convinced blockchain wouldve produced a techno utopia akin to the birth of the internet. Unfortunately, it had the exact opposite dynamic of typical companies in that founders instantly became liquid millionaires without ever building anything. That is the crypto trap.<p>Virtually nothing else has this dynamic, even VC funded startups during ZIRP.
Genuine question: have macro trends ever, in the history of humanity, been consistently and correctly analyzed by fine-grained time series data?<p>I was always a bit sketched out by the macro economics classes I took in college.
Is it just me, or does the article not show how posts were classified as AI vs crypto? I see that they "use an LLM" but don't see a code snippet describing how, or an attempt at assessing error rates, which seems like a basic step in validating this. Maybe I missed it?<p>edit: Looks like this is the notebook used in the article:
<a href="https://github.com/corbt/hn-analysis/blob/main/analysis.ipynb">https://github.com/corbt/hn-analysis/blob/main/analysis.ipyn...</a><p>The classification seems pretty fraught; one cell shows a sample of articles classified as crypto, which appears to include a bunch of cryptography and other unrelated articles.
It's crazy how we refer to what's being marketed now as Ai. Ai is a very valid technology that has been worked on for years and even though it is expanding, it is not the same as the LLMs and other things that are being marketed and evangelized under the hood by old crypto and NTF sellers and scammers.<p>The bar for Ai should be what can learn and comprehend inputs without simply scraping Reddit, Twitter, and other social platforms on the Internet and then parsing responses. Ai as a term need to have an updated definition before things begin to become less hype and more meaningful. What is being marketed incorrectly as Ai these days is similar to how Crypto overpromised and under delivered, while also funneling money out of everyone's pockets, creating a frenzy of bad investment, and in creating unrealistic fear and very stupidly problems in society based on overconfidence in low-brow overconfidence in tech.