just wait until they start really attacking AI. they'll roll out the same playbook.

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.

That's been the exact playbook.

Also mock what it's been used for, find the "worst" example.

If not mock, as you say, label it as dangerous.

If you want to promote adoption of something like NFTs it's up to you to present the compelling use cases, not get mad at the detractors. The reaction to the reaction here is even more predictable.

The playbook against NFTs is that they did nothing useful. That seems to still be the case. ChatGPT is useful, some of us are just not sure how useful it is yet.

Of course if your criteria is "do something useful" (whatever that means exactly), a whole lot of things in both the digital and physical worlds would have a hard time justifying their existence.

i'm not pro NFT, i wouldn't touch that stuff with a 10 foot pole.

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.

You're making an analogy with something (ChatGPT) that isn't analogous.

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?)

You're getting downvoted but you shouldn't be. There's already discussion about ChatGPT's energy usage, and once this starts scaling more, there's going to be more and more people concerned. Hell, I'm already a bit concerned with its energy usage, and I'm already struggling being a fan of crypto while also being concerned for the environment (didn't use to have to be, crypto didn't use a ton of energy 8+ years ago).

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...

this has always struck me as a weird argument. one could make a very rough comparison to the energy required to run a gaming PC for an hour, and the energy (inference + amortizing the training run) to run a conversation with ChatGPT for an hour, they're probably order-of-magnitude comparable. But there is no serious concern by anyone for the climate impact of PC gaming. It's just fundamentally that computers require electricity to run.

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.

the people writing this FUD have never seen the inside of a datacenter or understand how anything really works. they're just FUDsters, professional shit-stirring stooges. it doesn't matter if the tech in question is total garbage or the next coming of the internet.

It's a flawed argument. Consider the profit equation (revenue minus costs). The argument ignores that crypto is designed to have a minimum in cost (and that minimum is high). For most other computing applications, compute cost is just a cost and does not have a fixed lower bound. In other words, crypto is designed to be an energy use competition, AI is not.

i'm getting downvoted because we're in an NFT thread and people think i'm pro-NFT (lmao. lol. etc.) instead of anti-dipshit-FUDster "tech journalists".

There's one crucial difference between AI and Bitcoin when it comes to energy usage.

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.

I'll agree with you on Bitcoin mining specifically, but other aspects of cryptocurrencies I wouldn't. For example, the Lightning Network is a layer built on top of Bitcoin is all about increased speed and efficiency.

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...

That's why I said Bitcoin.

That's just a poor attempt at some cheap poisoning the well from you.

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.

Crypto is useful. A very long time ago there was a conversation about killer use cases. People on the ethereum side of the room thought programmable chains were it. People on the Bitcoin side said it was micropayments and script based post dating.

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.

> I said that it was likely paying for compute resources that would be a killer use case.

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"

I’ve found that when I don’t state things as fact on here that I don’t end up getting as much ire, but sometimes I just know what I do is true and am too lazy to explain it in my glee in seeing it manifest.

Time will tell, but as of now there are still no killer uses for crypto, other than hustling others.

hot air is still hot air. Yahoo! being a useful web directory doesn't mean that Pets.com is going to be good because it's "Web-powered".

Right now the majority of AI startups are hypeware.