AI Mania: From Tulips to Tokens

LLambda11 about 2 hours ago 43 commentsRead Article on seanhelvey.com

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Discussion (43 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

botencat•about 1 hour ago

Does this article being unreadable prove that it was at least written by a human? Frustrating tradeoff.

nadermx•about 1 hour ago

Not the solution you where hoping AI to solve?

smokel•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours ago

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

jayd16•about 1 hour 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.

jrflowers•about 1 hour ago

Nice. What other stuff haven’t you read?

c-fe•about 1 hour 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

pydry•about 1 hour ago

Unless you subscribe to the view that This Time It's Different(tm), they seem pretty pertinent.

babelfish•40 minutes ago

tulips do not have intelligence, tokens do

lioeters•35 minutes ago

That's an unintelligent thing to say about tulips.

bjourne•about 1 hour ago

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

bezier-curve•about 1 hour ago

It's basically talking about the impact on the environment and which class of society will end up benefiting from AI. I thought the article was pretty clear, and a message we as a society should be discussing more, especially with the current state of things.

With that said, the article reads like it's been through an AI pass, and not as concise and direct as it could be.

cyfex•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour ago

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

reverius42•about 1 hour ago

Random shitcoin mining surely isn't a large fraction of industrial GPU usage?

decimalenough•44 minutes ago

Not anymore, but around 10 years ago it absolutely was, because for a short period you could literally print money with them.

latchkey•about 1 hour ago

GPUs were used primarily for ethereum and to a lesser extent, other shitcoins. ETH switched to PoS in Sept 2022 and 18+ million GPUs were turned off almost over night. Nothing else has the liquidity to sustain a large operation any longer. ASIC's are used for bitcoin and a few smaller shitcoins, GPUs hadn't been used for bitcoin in many years.

GPUs used for mining don't translate well to AI at any large scale. It is all newly created (modern) hardware. Some miners who ran GPUs (and ASICs) have transitioned to running AI compute (CoreWeave, IREN, NScale, myself...), but that's not the same thing as taking the hardware and using it for AI. It is new hardware.

CPUs for mining crypto are a niche edgecase with very little liquidity and generally a bad idea, since it just incentivizes botnets.

ButlerianJihad•about 1 hour ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cryptocurrencies

Major cryptocurrencies are based on Proof of Work or Proof of Stake. There are other consensus algorithms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt#Introduction

Scrypt has been introduced to stave off ASIC and FPGA solutions.

dools•about 1 hour 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.

bigstrat2003•about 1 hour ago

Crypto bros claim that crypto is super useful, revolutionary tech too. The proof is in the pudding, and AI has yet to show any real utility.

dools•about 1 hour ago

> and AI has yet to show any real utility

Ummm ... have you not tried using LLMs for coding work?

VorpalWay•43 minutes ago

Not OP, but I have, and I'm not impressed. Perhaps it would be good if you are doing things in the training data (like churning out yet another bland website). But if you are doing things that are not well represented in publicly available code, or in unusual languages, then LLMs are not great currently.

They are great for finding the right ffmpg command line arguments though, and not having to deal with that mess must count for something.

blfr•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour ago

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

andy99•about 1 hour 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 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•about 2 hours ago

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

dgellow•about 1 hour 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

arisAlexis•40 minutes ago

In the meantime tulips prove math theorems that humans couldn't solve. Ridiculous article title (I wouldn't read it)

gyanchawdhary•39 minutes ago

this article reminds me of Greta for some reason .. wonder what she's upto these days ?

nekusar•about 2 hours 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.

EA-3167•about 2 hours 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.

jiggawatts•about 2 hours 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.

GolfPopper•about 1 hour ago

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

chung8123•about 1 hour ago

How much you spend on something does have an indication on what the utility is for you. Though people spent on all the other hype things so at the time those things also had some utility for that user.

quietbritishjim•about 1 hour ago

I think their point is that is pretty cheap for such a useful service. The opposite of a bubble price.

gcgbarbosa•about 2 hours ago

How did metaverse revolved around exclusivity or collectibles?

simonjgreen•about 2 hours 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