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.
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.