To most people the main use of crypto is to make money go up. This is a dubious use case.

To most people the main use of AI is:

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Realistic chat bots

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These are not dubious use cases.

The number of people who have been defrauded by crypto number in the millions. The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero.

Even if AI is wrong 90% of the time, 10% of the time it makes someone's job easier. Making someone's job easier is objectively more valuable than making someone's bank account number go up. One adds wealth to society. The other redistributes existing wealth.

I can go on about the differences but I'll let you tell me about how Ethereum has a really good logging system first.

Also AI voice and image recognition and language translation are already ubiquitous.

You're not refuting the point, though. Both technologies provide utility that is not all-encompassing. People promote it as a panacea, and investors get angry when their investments aren't reciprocated. That's a hype bubble, and AI perfectly aligns with all of it's criteria.

As I insisted in my last comment - I couldn't give less of a shit about the success of either technology. Comments like this though:

> One adds wealth to society. The other redistributes existing wealth.

...make no sense. You're sounding equally as absurd as the people who insist on the opposite being true.

> The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero.

What's the number of people who have been murdered by AI? It's a much more dubious figure, but a larger one to be sure. If you want to move the goalpost to which one is more harmful, I still think you hamstring your attack on cryptocurrency.

> You're not refuting the point, though.

Why do people keep saying their opinions as if they are fact? Whether or not I refuted your point is independent from your assertions of such.

> Both technologies provide utility that is not all-encompassing.

No. Crypto provides no utility. At all. AI provides a lot of utility, some of the time.

And you know what, you're wrong. AI is a panacea. It's called general purpose transformer ffs. And not by marketers, but by actual engineers who developed the Transformer architecture. (Obviously I'm being a little facetious but AI is infinitely more of a cure-all than crypto)

> What's the number of people who have been murdered by AI?

The second most common use case of crypto is for anonymous transactions for illegal drugs and weapons. So that's all I'm going to say on that point.

For a sample crypto use case, low fees remittances.

Crypto's killer feature is being an open standard for finance that anyone can integrate with. Having a use case in drug and weapons transactions is still utility though, you're disagreeing with yourself

Ai doesn't do anything you couldn't hire a person to do, and you still need a expert person to vet it's outputs, so I think it also provides no utility?

> No. Crypto provides no utility.

That's just blatantly untrue. If there is anything you cannot do with normal money, cryptocurrency has utility. You can argue that it's overall negative utility or insignificant compared to the glory of AI (you may be right) but utility is inherent to any system of payment with more than 1 participant.

> AI is a panacea. It's called general purpose transformer ffs.

That's more than just a little facetious. AI generates text - it does nothing other than that. It's admittedly great at manipulating text, but that's where it's "general purpose transforming" stops. It encodes human concepts like emotions and spatial reasoning into words, which are incomplete analogs to how they work in the real world. It has impressive results, but comparing the value of human labor to the work AI can do is startlingly parallel to comparing the value of a database to the work a blockchain can do. It almost provides the basis for reality-distortion to investors, which is where those "marginal utility" AI/crypto companies come from.

> The second most common use case of crypto is for anonymous transactions for illegal drugs and weapons

The first most common use case of AI is for military purposes.

> AI generates text - it does nothing other than that. It's admittedly great at manipulating text, but that's where it's "general purpose transforming" stops.

I will refer you to the Vision Transformer: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929

I suggest you do a literature review on the applications of ANNs, CNNs and attention mechanisms. They are quite numerous but I will concede that they generally 'just' do compression.

AI encodes human concepts like emotions and spatial reasoning into vectors. Which, their analogous-ness to the real world, is more of a philosophical question than a practical one at this point.

> It has impressive results, but comparing the value of human labor to the work AI can do is startlingly parallel to comparing the value of a database to the work a blockchain can do.

I mean 'human labor' is a very general thing, compared to 'database' IMO.

> The first most common use case of AI is for military purposes.

This is true but the AI that the military uses is probably a far cry from what the public is able to access - and not from a technological advancement but a specificity standpoint. The military will want deterministic, non-opaque methods that are probably closer to the policy-gradient recommendation systems of old. Think Netflix and TikTok, not GPT.

I can say from an investor standpoint AI is probably a bubble but only because its entire foundations are open source. There's no money to be made from it, therefore it's a bubble.

Crypto on the other hand always had somewhat dubious foundations. There are few use cases for it, therefore it's a bubble.

> The number of people who have been defrauded by AI are zero.

Not true. I’m seeing fake voice scam stories on the news lately, fake kidnapping claims, etc

On the contrary, in those cases, AI fulfilled its purpose to the letter.

The closest to fraud AI has done is its hallucinatory outputs. And fair enough, this is enough to hold AI back from being 'it'.

When you say fraud, I think you're referring to companies defrauding investors, and selling non-existent functionality, rather than any fraud that might result from the crypto or ai being used?

Crypto never scammed anyone. People use crypto to scam people. Hence, my analogy. There is no tech that can scam anybody, except maybe autonomous systems

Ai has 1000000x more scam potential than crypto

I don’t understand the comparison

Well even in this case OpenAI hasn't scammed anyone. On the other hand Binance/FTX scammed a lot of people. I wasn't referring to the technology but the major players that use it.

And let's say I was - crypto promises utter anonymity in theory but is actually traceable in practice. So a bit of an academic scam on that front.

> I wasn't referring to the technology but the major players that use it.

So... you mean to insinuate the Sam Altman's current "AI Will Kill Us All Tour" isn't a hype bubble?

> crypto promises utter anonymity

Where?

Cryptocurrency promises a separate ledger for transactions where you don't need to be identified by name. If you identify yourself to buy crypto, then yes, you have defeated the purpose. Cryptocurrency doesn't "promise" anonymity any more than encryption "promises" security, though. If that's academic fraud then I'm Abe Lincoln.

> OpenAI hasn't scammed anyone.

Its CEO did, with Worldcoin. Which is pivoting to be essentially the same with an AI spin.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

> Even if AI is wrong 90% of the time, 10% of the time it makes someone's job easier.

Being 90% wrong causes a lot of extra work, severely reducing the gains of that 10%.

>To most people the main use of crypto is to make money go up. This is a dubious use case.

Not only is it a bad use case, it is self destructive. The only value a currency might have is if it is used in trade, holding currency "because the value goes up" is making it less useful as a currency.

Also BTC is very insufficient as an actual currency, especially from a purely technical standpoint.

If you count manipulation through mass media, social media and speech then AI is already doing harm.

> Trying to champion one or the other feels like pointless virtue signalling really.

No, I mean something very specific - I can do things at work with LLMs that I couldn't do a year ago without them. I can't say the same about anything crypto related.

If you think that AI is just spitting our word we've seen or that it's guesswork, I don't know how you can even discuss it in good faith.

Overall, I agree - the progress of AI has been breakneck over the past 12 months. But the difference in quality of Talk-to-Transformer and GPT-4 hasn't been that much in my experience. Both produce seemingly-correct text that crumbles under scrutiny and becomes useless for anything with a sub-80% acceptable failure rate.

It's great stuff, and I'd be lying if I said I liked cryptocurrency and don't use AI. The parallels are starkly visible though, and the "overpromise/underdeliver" cycle is already much further along than cryptocurrency ever got. The bubble will eventually pop because people are dissatisfied with the pace of progress, and then everyone will look for a scapegoat. We're already halfway there, judging by the daily deluge of "Ask HN: Why Does It Feel Like OpenAI Nerfed ChatGPT?" posts.

Crypto promised to replace the dollar, mortgages, ID systems, etc... It's had ten years to do so and still has little to show. ChatGPT was released a few months ago and has hundreds of millions of users. I use it every day for work.