No amount of Blockchain "Webinars" would have convinced my kids to use the blockchain.
- My mom cant figure out Blockchain either
- My sister (doctor) and brother (3 degrees) cant figure out Blockchain either, because they are too afraid of scanning the wrong QR code and having their balance drained
My mom, sister, and brother all use ChatGPT. My brother uses it actively for work.
In any case, defining public use or accessibility as the metric of relevance of something is quite illogical. You end up with countless absurdities like relativity being worthless and CocaCola being the most relevant invention ever.
Which 'blockchain'? Blockchain is a singular noun, that's like saying "they can't figure out phone".
I think this is an important detail. A lot of "forced into it" numbers will get presented as "happy users" in various unfair metrics comparisons.
Can you define what a metaverse is in this case and how is it different from what we used to call an MMORPG?
Roblox involves no block chain and no VR, so what exactly is "metaverse-y" about it?
I disagree. Kids will turn anything not too abstract into toys. An improvised radioactive sample (actually some neon indicator bulbs in a box) + Geiger counter brought by my parents = a version of a hide-and-seek game from my own past.
Also, a model maglev train is something so obvious that I am sure such toys will appear immediately once the technology becomes viable.
I’d wager the biggest non-speculative use case is pig butchering scams and ransomware.
Probably, but drugs are also a big use-case (and I don't just mean retail, its used in wholesale for transferring sums of money internationally to buy precursors, for example)
edit: I'm prepared for the enshittification of GenAI, but given competitive edge, many people will pay top $ for faster/higher parameter inference, I'm hoping ad support is minimal on the super deluxe god tier AI subscription which I'll have to pile all of my spare cash into.
How conceptually could a paid search engine solve the problem of SEO and spam? (Curation seems economically infeasible?)
Is what you're actually proposing ad-free search results? (I'd be willing to pay Google approximately $0.01 per search for this. I suspect this is probably more than they get from anything but the most expensive ads (pharma ads that confused old people will click on).)
What I would really love is a browsing-assistance agent based on something like GPT that can summarize and de-cruft search results for me and show me content extracted from web pages in a standard format without any Javascript.
OTOH, I am a paying ChatGPT Plus user and there are some days where I feel like I get my monthly subscription price's worth in a single day.
In terms of summarization, this study Anyscale just published is interesting - llama2-70b gets within a hairsbreadth of gpt-4/human scores for summarization, so it's conceivable that sometime soon, you might be able to run a local LLM on your browser and get decent results (4-bit quants of llama2-70b currently take about 40GB of memory, you need at least 2 x 24GB or 1 x 48GB GPU to run them at reasonable speeds atm): https://www.anyscale.com/blog/llama-2-is-about-as-factually-...
1. How expensive are these to operate when compared to search engines? If search engines are about as good at information retrieval, but are much cheaper, what does that mean for the future of these services?
2. How good are these systems actually when compared to search engines? I get that for things like code, you can immediately verify results through testing, but GPT was trained on what looks good to humans thanks to HFRL, not necessarily for correctness.
I really wonder what's going to happen with this comparison in the near future. I think there's two possibilities:
1. Running inference on models and keeping the models relevant by introducing new data remains extremely expensive and companies like OpenAI operate at massive losses. Eventually this leads to their products getting worse.
2. Models get cheaper to run and efficient enough to run on mobile hardware without losing much fidelity. OpenAI still might be in trouble in this scenario if "open source" models like Llama2 get popular.
I think in this aspect the difference between GPT vs Google not in level of tech, but because GPT took text from copyright owners and distributes it without their consent and without showing their ads, which is being challenged legally in my understanding.
As far as I can tell, it performs a search and then feeds the full text of the search results to an LLM and present a summary with citations.
I think the review was basically, "I’ve had worse cocktails. I’ll be honest."
So...meh?
Sounds like grade A Microsoft marketing speak. But wait, there's more!
In this instance, I don't see how this offers any advantage over the usual registrar-based DNS: at the end of the day I'm just using the ENS rootnode keyholders as my registrar, and I don't see how the blockchain is solving any problem that couldn't be more efficiently solved with a traditional database.
Not too long ago the US government put pressure on all financial institutions to stop processing payments for Wikileaks without them ever having been convicted of committing any crimes. That's just a single example plucked out of the sky, regardless of your feelings about that organization.
The great advantage that we get from a decentralized, opt-in trust infrastructure is that we have an avenue around these unjust and extralegal encroachments.
Having said all that, even if you don't care about politics, there are countless examples of centralized entities changing ownership, or changing strategies, and their users pay the price. See: Twitter taking people's usernames.
You might be fine with dealing with living at the whims of billionaires but I want my digital life to be more durable than that.
2. The second part argues about centralized entities changing ownership. I don't think the example of Twitter usernames is a good use-case for blockchain: there's nothing here that isn't already solved by public key crypto alone (which is how blockchain solves the problem anyway).
Maybe Twitter here is just an example and you want to talk about corporate control over payment services? I don't think this is a compelling argument. There's no shortage of payment services and even if one of them is bad you can always find another. Yeah: Stripe or your bank go out of business tomorrow, but switching to Apple Pay or a different bank is not a huge problem.
I agree with you that public key crypto solves many of these problems, but you still need to publish your public key somewhere. And you need an infrastructure where public keys are first class citizens with the platform.
I gave ENS as an example precisely because it is open source digital public infrastructure where such things can be published forever, and it is not corporately controlled. It happens to use a blockchain to do consensus and create incentives for people to opt into running the public infrastructure. I personally think these game theoretical incentives are integral for the functioning of the platform but am not married to the idea if there are better ones.
Something like Ethereum is an anti-authoritarian platform. You don't use it unless you desire the qualities of anti-authoritarianism. For everything else there's centralized solutions.
I think we've seen some people striving for a competitive advantage, and willing to see one exist, but I don't know if we've seen any "AI company" turn a meaningful and durable profit yet (open to being wrong on this).
To me (so far), it seems like GPT use cases that apply it as a table stakes feature of some greater application (rather than an ecosystem or a platform), are the ones that are actually showing promise in terms of expected utility + value capture.
If GPT4+ level engines become as cheap to execute as a SQLite query, I think that's where things get interesting (you can start executing this stuff at the edge).
But I still can't see new companies (a la OpenAI, MidJourney, etc.) making a lot of money in this scenario, it seems to overwhelmingly favor companies that already have distribution.
Yea the sql queries, string or array manipulation are better and fast than google 8/10 times because of the errors it generates.
Granted, if you are spending 10x the future value of the product your are offering ... then even a 10x decline in compute costs won't get you where you need to be.
they quantized model from 16 bits to 4 bits which was low hanging fruit, and looks like they can't quantize it anymore to 2 bits..
Pixel 6+ phones have TPUs (in addition to CPUs and an iGPU/dGPU).
Tensor Processing Unit > Products > Google Tensor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit
TensorFlow lite; tflite: https://www.tensorflow.org/lite
From https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine :
> The Apple Neural Engine (or ANE) is a type of NPU, which stands for Neural Processing Unit.
From https://github.com/basicmi/AI-Chip :
> A list of ICs and IPs for AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning
In my opinion, Microsoft's proposed 365 Co-pilot pricetag of $30 per month per user will probably make a profit. High usage users being offset by low usage users when corporate 365 group memberships come into the mix. Many corporates will take a chance on it, willing to throw plenty of money at anything that is perceived as having a chance of improving hard to define competitive edge, creativity and productivity.
On the other hand, I’m not sure that you can legitimately argue that it is not over-hyped. The only way that it isn’t is if we achieve “singularity” imminently - because that it is what a sizable number of people, including possibly some people at OpenAI, are actually expecting.
That was no reflection of the actual potential it just indicated that people at all points of the value chain had not yet grasped how or what the internet was or how it would mesh with humanity.
That’s where we are now. It’ll burst but not because it’s overhyped; because we don’t collectively understand the implications.
Also, even if some people in some usages get benefit out of it, does not mean that fuels hype and snake oil to try to sell it to uninformed people to use in inappropriate places. Baking soda is good for making bread, lots of people use it for that with great success. It is snake oil for curing cancer, however.
And for art NFTs, much of the interest is from the collectors space or collector sentiment as these are an improvement in supply transparency and provenance in comparison to other mediums of collections.
An important snake oil trait is making grand claims which have little basis as fact, particularly with things which are difficult to understand or difficult to verify (if not impossible.) You can say anything about a product if the prospective buyers can't verify the claims. And so, the claims tend to get broader and flashier.
Therefore, a snake oil sales pitch could still be applied to a highly useful product.
Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the non-coin-blockchain always struct me as a "hype train" or "snake oil" because it was a solution in search of a problem. NFTs are even worse since they haven't found any purpose to exist yet (money laundering?).
Contrast that with the "GPT" offerings (ChatGPT/Bing/Copilot/Bard/etc). Multiple of my colleagues are actively using them routinely every workday and when you demo it to another person, they understand it, and they too start utilizing it in their workflow. Heck, my mom discovered it herself on Bing's homepage and was telling me I should check it out.
That's the opposite of "snake oil" or a hype train, it is arguably a competitive threat to search engines.
PS - Small disclaimer: "AI" is a nebulous term. I'm talking specifically about LLMs. Other types of "AI" have already been here for a long time making our lives better (e.g. computer vision).