AI Mania: From Tulips to Tokens

https://seanhelvey.com/tools-and-their-tools/

34•Lambda11•1h ago

Comments

nekusar•50m ago

Or the 1990s Beanie Babies.

Or hell, 2 years ago with "those fucking apes", aka NFTs.

Or, the Meta-Verse. Yeah, that really took.... Off.

jiggawatts•39m ago

Tulips, NFTs, and the Metaverse all revolved around exclusivity and collectibles. Art with no real utilitarian value.

I pay OpenAI $100/mo, twice what I pay for my mobile phone service.

It’s a useful service that I use every day.

I have never even heard of anyone in my social circle expressing even a mild interest in tulips, NFTs, or the metaverse.

This bubble has much more in common with the rail road boom and the 2000 fibre build out bubble.

gcgbarbosa•31m ago

How did metaverse revolved around exclusivity or collectibles?

simonjgreen•28m ago

the metaverse went from being about owning your identity and digital possessions to mostly being about buying jpegs. once collectibles and nft speculation became the headline, it was hard to explain why any of the underlying technology mattered. after that, most people just associated the whole thing with speculation rather than the original vision.

which is a shame, I still feel like VR is full of untapped potential

GolfPopper•4m ago

You start with "real utilitarian value" and your example is... how much you pay for it. That sounds more like a drug habit.

EA-3167•28m ago

Quite a few of the usual suspects are involved in Crypto, NFT’s, “Metaverse”, and now AI. You’d think people would figure it out, but there’s the old Upton Sinclair quote I guess.

smokel•38m ago

This is a pretty confusing article. It seems to string together some loosely related facts to make the current AI boom look bad.

simonjgreen•32m ago

It is confusing. But I enjoyed the read, it’s refreshing to read a string of rants from a human rather than something perfectly polished by Opus.

andy99•27m ago

I didn’t read it, primarily because of the tulip thing in the title which seems anything but a refreshing take.

jayd16•16m ago

One sentence in, it mentions that the tulip reference is from a book on botany and perhaps not just a reference to Wallstreet and bubbles.

c-fe•9m ago

I also enjoyed it. Something about the writing really made me enjoy it, it was so different from the llm text i read all day long

bjourne•18m ago

Agreed. It has nothing to do with either tulips nor mania. Just some random musings.

bezier-curve

blfr•31m ago

We created the content their systems are built on, yet they won’t even share how much energy each query uses, how much water goes to cooling

"You read my blog so now show me your utility bill" is... an interesting argument.

simonjgreen•25m ago

“You ingested the vast majority of available human knowledge to build your product, and intend to change the entire world with it, and in fact are doing so incredibly rapidly at a rate that dodges scrutiny. Could we know more?” Would be the expanded version I guess

jayd16•22m ago

Take advantage of open information, provide little yourself. Seems like a consistent enough line of questioning.

andy99•14m ago

The OPs framing is better. Where does anyone say there’s a requirement to share data as demanded because you used a publicly available resource. These companies have created something world changing L, that everyone uses now, that you can get for free or for a very small amount of money. They certainly don’t need to indulge anyone’s nosing or whatever this is, the argument is ridiculous.

turtleyacht•28m ago

Aren't human skills the tulips? That's why we're recording all kinds of movements; tokens become generic execution currency.

dgellow•18m ago

No, AI tokens aren’t generic, they by definition cannot be used as a currency because they aren’t fungible. Generated tokens have completely different value depending on their meaning. You can spend 1M tokens doing nothing but wasting time and energy, then spend 100K tokens that bring a lot of value. It’s even weirder because we don’t have a way to know the ROI of tokens in advance

dools•18m ago

I don't understand how you could compare crypto, which has no utility and no fair value, with AI which is used by hundreds of millions of people every day to achieve real outcomes.

cyfex•17m ago

"GPU compute powering crypto for the last decade..."

I keep hearing this lately. Also, that GPU compute has been re-purposed from crypto to AI.

I had the impression that crypto was powered by ASICs for the last... many years. And that was why GPU mining (let alone CPU mining) was not profitable

decimalenough•3m ago

Bitcoin mining is powered by ASICs. Random shitcoins are not.

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