Ask HN: Anyone else feel like AI hype is the new crypto hype?

There’s definitely a lot of people overhyping Generative AI.<p>However there’s a marked difference between it and crypto in that it provides immediate value to the lay person with very low risk to them.<p>Stuff like summarization or scribing audio or text transformations.<p>The other day I was in a fabric store and overheard the cashier telling her coworker that she likes using ChatGPT to help write emails to vendors. It’s that kind of accessibility that crypto never had that AI hype is banking on.<p>Now the big issue is scalability. Everyone is showing off these massive models that are still expensive to run. Very little delivers at that quality while being able to run locally for a user. Without being able to run locally, it’s very expensive for the companies.<p>My biggest worry is that true mass consumer facing generative AI will be orders of magnitude less useful than the expensive cloud backed models.

Prior to AI, an algorithm that could identify objects in a picture seemed impossible. It&#x27;s opened the door to countless use cases and has already redefined how we interact with technology to an extent. But it&#x27;s early, like the internet was early in 1995.<p>And yes tons of scams and overhyping by people who clearly don&#x27;t understand the technology themselves. Those people are always going to be around, they capitalize on excitement, regardless of whether the underlying thing is legitimate.<p>I&#x27;ve been subscribing to - AI probably won&#x27;t be as bad or as awesome as everyone thinks.

I think yes and no.<p>I think the hype itself is a lot of the same hype that we saw for crypto. Trying to find anywhere it can be shoved and just using &quot;AI&quot; having a ton of market power even if what is being done makes zero sense.<p>However unlike Crypto, which had a technological barrier that blocked any serious adoption by the general population. AI doesn&#x27;t have that barrier. So I am worried that the hype will continue to grow and the bubble won&#x27;t pop in the same way since too many people have just accepted it even though it is severely flawed and being shoved in places it doesn&#x27;t belong.<p>Edit:<p>Also I really wish when we talk about &quot;AI&quot; we can be specific on if we are talking about &quot;LLM&#x27;s&quot; being shoved everywhere or if we are talking about more traditional AI that was more commonplace and almost invisible just a couple years ago. Above I am referring to LLM&#x27;s and the image&#x2F;video generation tech.

That was a popular opinion about a year and half ago. It seemed liked the ignorant and indolent switched horses very quickly, although crypto might be coming back with the Bitcoin price going up, and SBF locked up in an oubliette to be forgotten.<p>I still see it as a serious bad sign that anybody mentions crypto and AI in the same sentence. For one thing they are diametrically opposite in economics. A blockchain uses 10,000 computers to do the work 1 computer could do (one reason why nobody showed up at a CS conference with the idea until Bitcoin mania hit) whereas AI models need a lot of computation and significant amounts of data such that there is no way you are going to do the computation on a blockchain and if you are extracting data from a blockchain it is going to be “small data”.

I&#x27;ve yet to meet someone who&#x27;s used crypto to buy something legit. After more than a decade of it being known about.<p>After one year, hard to find anyone who hasn&#x27;t used ChatGPT.<p>So no they&#x27;re nothing alike, one being useful.

Nope, many of these AI &quot;tools&quot; start out as legitimate research papers (NOT the bastardized form of &quot;whitepaper&quot; crypto created).<p>These tools actually push capabilities forward and can be used basically for a few $ of GPU time on Hugging Face or another cloud provider.<p>Sure, there are still loads of people trying to sell &quot;AI Headshots&quot; etc but this to me feels entirely different.

The similarity is that for both subjects the vast majority of people do not understand. When people do not understand a thing and that thing is very popular it makes for a great vehicle for scammers. The scammers are not intrinsic to either topic in this case but mostly just come directly from traditional finance which is their home.

I&#x27;m tempted to say that LLMs have the potential to be useful, whereas crypto assets are speculative garbage.

Yes. The comparison holds very strong in most (but not all) ways.

Like crypto, it&#x27;s scammer catnip; lots of money sloshing around, most people don&#x27;t really understand how it works, mentioning its shortcomings is kinda taboo in the community, going from dumb idea to thing which kinda looks like it might be a product if you don&#x27;t poke it too hard requires minimal skill.<p>I think the same conditions also product a lot of _accidental_ scammers; people who aren&#x27;t intentionally selling something impossible, but are merely too incompetent to realise that what they are promising is impossible (I think someone linked an LLM tool that claimed to _do your taxes for you_ here recently...).<p>That&#x27;s not to say there&#x27;s nothing to it, but it is a near-perfect playground for grifters.

The difference between AI and crypto is that AI is legitimately awesome, with a huge number of applications that (1) are very real and (2) anyone, even a layperson, can understand without lots of mental gymnastics.<p>Where there&#x27;s money, there will be scammers, unfortunately.