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Crypto and NFT situation happened because of our society, media and vc/startup landscape who hype things up a lot for their own reasons. We treat massive technologies as new brands of bottled water. Or, actually, as a new hype toy as fidget spinners or pop it toys. This tech is massively more complex and you have to invest time to learn about its abilities, limitations and potential developments. Almost nobody actually does this, it's easier to follow hype train and put money into something that grows up and looks cool without obvious cons. Crypto is cool for some stuff. On the other hand, where's your Stepn (and move to earn in general), decentraland cities, Apes that will make a multimedia universe? Where's "you'll be paying using crypto for everything"?

Same for LLMs and AI: it is awesome for some things and absolutely sucks for other things. Curiously tho, it feels like UX was solved by making chats, but it actually still sucks enormously, as with crypto. It is mostly sufficient for doing basic stuff. It is difficult to predict where we'll land on the curve of difficult (or expensive) vs abilities. I'd bet AI will get way more capable, but even now you can't really deny its usefulness.






It makes no sense to compare the current AI hype to the tulip mania of crypto/NFTs. A much better parallel is to cloud computing hype in 2009.

I was just joining the workforce at that time, so I was unaware of any hype. From my perspective, cloud computing was just "there". Was the hype really comparable to today?

I think it does. Startups, VCs and media still provoke hype trains. People cherry pick and extrapolate everything in AI as well.

Except the benefits of LLM adoption can be measured empirically, with your own eyes. And don't require network effects to fully realise benefits, unlike cryptocurrency and NFTs. Ignoring the hype and doing your own thing with it is a good choice.

I agree to some level, but crypto and NFTs also have value without network effects present.

You could even argue that without network effects AI is also very limited: way less users -> way worse models. It took OpenAI to commit capital first to pull this off.

The point is I think comparing these areas (and other tech) is still interesting and worthy.




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