If I had the ability to migrate to another planet, the last thing I’d take with me would be an NFT image of some stupid primate.
1. dangerous new technology
2. that uses far too much energy (more than the entire country of X!)
3. do we really know how it works?
4. controlled by a shadowy cabal of super-coders
5. followed by a litany of anecdotal stories about victims of AI
6. and increasingly frequent and increasingly negative coverage of those getting rich off of it
they also used the same playbook against the internet, and open source, and mobile/social networking. probably the original cell phones too, at some point.
Also mock what it's been used for, find the "worst" example.
If not mock, as you say, label it as dangerous.
consider, however, that "BUT I'M TELLING YOU IT'S USEFUL!!! WHY WON'T YOU BELIEVE ME!!!" is the exact position the FUDsters want to put you in re: AI.
they're constantly on the offensive, no matter what the target is.
ChatGPT kan be useful or useless and NFT:s would have the same value or qualities otherwise.
NFT:s can be useful or useless and ChatGPT would have the same value or qualities otherwise.
The one playbook that exists here is defending NFT:s in lieu of it defending itself by being actually useful. (Which is not me saying that they are not nor that they couldn't be. Just that shouting that everyone is dumb and that your product is in fact awesome isn't a good look, is it?)
It really hit home to me when I saw something (that I can't find right now for some reason) about ChatGPT-4 being much more complex and would need X times more resources than ChatGPT-3.5 for the same queries (the number I don't actually remember, but I want to say 2 or 3x). Gave me a bit of a pause from me asking it to generate a bunch of sitcom scripts on random silly concepts for my private, personal amusement (Seinfeld in particular seems to work pretty well).
I was able to find an article on Bloomberg[1] talking about how the increase in AI is also increasing its carbon footprint, so yeah, it's coming. Also I saw this article[2] that estimates ChatGPT's usage in January alone to be equivalent to he power used by 175,000 people. And that's before ChatGPT-4.
People who are fans of AI right now reading this, eventually you're going to have to come to terms with it being responsible for a ton of carbon emissions as well, as it takes up more and more resources and scales to billions of people as they use it more and more in their everyday lives and the models and computation get more complex.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-09/how-much-...
[2]: https://towardsdatascience.com/chatgpts-electricity-consumpt...
If the dreams of companies making large sequence models do come to pass, and they really do scale up to where training and running large sequence models is a significant portion of world electricity usage, then of course it becomes a real problem, but the same would be true for any large electricity-intensive industry.
With AI there are strong incentives to make everything more efficient and use less energy. This is already happening: people are finding ways to run AI models on less powerful hardware (see LLaMA etc), and AI providers like OpenAI have managed to run things. Lee efficiently - that's presumably how they could drop the price of an API call by 1/10th for GPT3.5 compared to GPT3.
With Bitcoin efficiencies don't actually help, because the entire system is designed as a competition. The person who burns more energy wins more value. If the tech becomes more efficient the miners just increase their activity, so energy usage doesn't meaningfully decrease.
Then there's Ethereum, which just completed a major upgrade to convert its Proof of Work method to Proof of Stake and now uses a negligible amount of energy compared to other things, as shown in this article on their site[1].
And there are newer cryptocurrencies like Solana, that started as proof of stake to begin with and can handle at least 8500[2] transactions per second (compared to only 4 transactions per second with the much older bitcoin, and 30 transactions per second with Ethereum).
That's a hell of a lot more efficient as well, and also seems to be more efficient than ChatGPT is per query, as Solana's energy use per transaction is 3,290 Joules, or 0.00091 kWh[3], versus the conservative estimate of ChatGPT (3.5)'s estimated energy usage on this article [4] of 0.00198 kWh, or 7,128 Joules.
So I think that overall, crypto is still incentivized to become more efficient. Bitcoin is not, as more people care about the security provided by proof of work there than they do about energy efficiency, which is unfortunate.
[1]: https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
[2]: https://crypto.news/solana-transactions-per-second-hit-an-al...
[3]: https://solana.com/news/solanas-energy-use-report-september-...
[4]: https://towardsdatascience.com/chatgpts-electricity-consumpt...
The grand difference between the NFT craze and ordinary collecting, is that the latter is not primarily driven by cultish behaviour or the want for Internet Money.
I'm sure NFT, just as crypto, apps and The Internet eventually presents new findings or "just" novel ways of doing stuff. But so far, we have people confused by things _they_ don't understand, setting themselves up for a great loss.
The cultishness in it is the incessant: this is the way. This is new and nothing like this has ever existed before.
When it totally has! Manias and scams have come in all shapes and sizes and will continue to do so.
The reason y'all are buying in to this, is because the sucker's goin' up. Just like with crypto. Just like with dotcom stock and a ton of other things. The fact that there _are_ useful things that came out of the dotcom era, is not a proof of the viability of _your_ mania.
I said that it was likely paying for compute resources that would be a killer use case. Implementing 402s would be that manifest: https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture
Now we’re moving deep into the AI markets, this will be a thing, combining both.
That said, con artists will still try to hustle others.
As if we didn't have ways to pay for compute resources already.
> Now we’re moving deep into the AI markets, this will be a thing, combining both.
Of course it won't.
> That said, con artists will still try to hustle others.
Indeed. By saying things like "innovative ways to pay for compute resources" and "our AI-enabled crypto bullshit is a cuting-edge thingamabob"
Time will tell, but as of now there are still no killer uses for crypto, other than hustling others.
Right now the majority of AI startups are hypeware.
90% of NFTs probably are just ownership certificates of JPGs so if that is what you want to "view" then the answer probably is "a JPG".
Other NFTs though might be some sort of online game char, access tokens to a live feed or just symbols of on-chaining offchain consensus. In those cases the answer isn't that straight forward. But generally I'd remark that an NFT in itself only has utility as long as you have access to its underlying chain, so if you cannot take the interaction with the chain with you its not going to be very useful. OTOH, if your sole purpose is looking at pretty pictures then one will probably best just compile JPGs to a folder. But that doesn't mean that one owns those pictures or that there are NFTs involved.
It’s a continued fallacy that a physical thing may be secured by a crypto transaction (entry to a DAG).
Now, immediate identity and exchange of contract value, such as on Lightning, may be useful for compute resources, but only in the moment of inference.
Crypto was built to service AI, and more specifically, GAI. This is crypto’s “killer” use case. Everything else done with it is a sideshow.
Ownership does not imply security of the underlying object, digital or physical. Point in case, I owned my car when it was torched by anti globalism riots. Same principle applies to NFTs. Actually the real revolution of NFTs as "JPG ownership certs" is that they democratize art in that everybody can look at the linked JPG in full resolution but only one wallet can own that NFT.
Wow. Retconning history has reached new highs. I mean, it's easy to do it, because crypto origins are in such a distant past of * checks notes * only the past decade.
"Hey guys, I own this valuable piece of `something`. You have to trust me, as it's 50 light years away, and all I have is a pointer to an address on a chain that is also 50 light years away"
1. You and "your guys" have low delay comms to home which means you have network sync and so everything is dandy
2. You and your guys have delayed comms so everything relating to state back on earth is time delayed (ie: you live in the past when it comes to things related to earth) in this case it only makes sense to talk in the context of that past, for which you actually again happen to have chain sync so everything is dandy.
So there's literally no point. Because that valuable thing is needed now, not X years in the future when the sync happens.
The whole chain thing literally relies on fast internet available everywhere everytime
I guess Bitcoin can be considered a cult, too. HODL became a religion since 2013, after it became obvious Bitcoin wouldn’t be “an electronic peer-to-peer cash system” and the “store of value” aspect of money was the only one left.
Scientology probably puts NFT-bro-ism to shame with its level of industry involvement... It's just usually less in your face about the cult part.
Tony Robbins (self-help)
Landmark Forum (self-help MLM)
Billy Graham (Christian revival)
Joel Osteen (prosperity gospel)
etc.
They seem to help a lot of people with just mindset stuff
There's carve outs for technical fields, for people who are willing to pay a premium for speed, or personalized learning, or putative 'networking' of course.
https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/pictures/college-a...
And public school is just a day care center to keep kids out of trouble so both their parents can work for corporations 10 hours a day. We’ve essentially created a prison environment for kids, and instead of fixing issues in it, we overdiagnose them with ADHD for fidgeting and prescribe amphetamines. Even Paul Graham noted these things: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Also banks are a grift, for many people. The “American Dream” was co-opted where you are sold the idea now of “owning” a home, but to do so you “rent” money issued by a bank, and then work 30 years to pay it back with a lot of interest. The government has to print more money eventually or people will work harder and harder and default. Money printing is actually what frees people up from having to slave for corporations as much (as we can clearly see happened after 2020 with the great labor exodus).
If you have to pay to learn something, it's a grift
Perhaps corrected by saying: _sometimes_ it's a grift, or _often_ a grift, or IMO it is a grift.
I think there's a level of money laundering involved.
Sure they do[1][2][3].
Mixing business and faith is critical to cult recruitment: industry allows the cult to establish "legitimate" footholds and develop stable income sources using the cheap (and often free) labor of its believers. This should ring a bell.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_Church
A bit like the emerging ai bros. Every few years we get these types bubbling up. I admire their commitment but some need a break.
This whole NFT debacle would be fun for me if it didn't cost me a dear friend; he's been working full-time on his "collection" for almost two years now, convinced he's "just around the corner of making millions" out of it when it's obvious the ship has long sailed. I guess there's more to it than just NFT craze, and he's probably struggling with other things, but his new "know-it-all NFT bro" persona makes it impossible to even approach him with a normal conversation.
Weird rant, I know. I simply don't know what to do anymore.