Charlie StrossFeb 25, 2023

The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about all the current hype around Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT is that it follows, as night follows day, about six months after the bottom dropped out of the cryptocurrency scam bubble.

This is not a coincidence.

Hucksters are chasing the sweet VC/private equity money that has been flushed out of crypto, and AI is the new hotness all of a sudden.

If you're thinking about investing now? Don't: it's too late and you'll be the target of a grift.

Show threadHello, yes, this is Gregly
@cstross This is a very good point. I’ve sometimes gotten annoyed by the comparison between neural networks and crypto, because the former actually has some utility (if used ethically and responsibly) while the latter is utterly pointless and destructive… but from an investment/financial standpoint, they’re exactly the same sort of hype bubbles.
Feb 25, 2023 at 2:36pmWeb
Show threadCharlie StrossFeb 25, 2023
@glindsey Given that much of what passes for "journalism" these days is just stenography copying from press-releases, I suspect the PR firms are working overtime to push AI. Things will tick along for a while but there's going to be a crash, sooner rather than later: my view is that the Bing/ChatGPT fiasco is just a harbinger of the way deep learning models are going to be discredited in the public eye in about 1-3 years' time (The cryptocurrency bubble lasted a bit over a decade in contrast).
Show threaddr2chaseFeb 25, 2023

@cstross @glindsey

"I wonder if Sam Altman was a crypto booster?"

https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/21/sam-altmans-worldcoin-wants-to-scan-every-humans-eyeball-and-give-them-crypto-in-exchange/

TechCrunch is part of the Yahoo family of brands

Show threadCharlie StrossFeb 25, 2023

@dr2chase @glindsey In retrospect, Martin Shkreli was just ahead of the curve.

(If Ian Fleming was alive today he'd have a field day.)

Show threaddr2chaseFeb 25, 2023
@cstross @glindsey
What's most disappointing to me is the non-role of the press in answering that Sam Altman question -- it just occurred to me, "where's he from?" and lo, search engines provide.
Show threadHello, yes, this is GreglyFeb 25, 2023
@dr2chase @cstross They provide FOR NOW, but once we have hallucinating AIs doing it all for us, it will happily and confidently tell you that he’s the guy that directed “M*A*S*H”
Show threadBornachFeb 25, 2023

@dr2chase @cstross @glindsey

The #OpenAI founders also share the same ideology as #FTX founder #SBF
https://youtu.be/Lm0vHQYKI-Y
#EffectiveAltruism #Longtermism #cryptoscammers

"Dario Amodei, then research director at OpenAI...Amodei has since left OpenAl to co-found Anthropic...an “AI safety and research company.”... received... funding from other EA adherents, including Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of recently collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX"
https://techpolicy.press/chatgpt-safety-in-artificial-intelligence-and-elon-musk/

The Rich Have Their Own Ethics: Effective Altruism & the Crypto Crash (ft. F1nn5ter)

YouTube
Show threadCharlie StrossFeb 25, 2023
@bornach @dr2chase @glindsey Speaking as an SF writer who hung out on the EXTROPY-L mailing list in the early 90s, none of the LessWrong bullshit is remotely surprising to me.
Show threadHello, yes, this is GreglyFeb 25, 2023
@cstross I totally agree. For me, one of the neat things about NNs is precisely that they *do* get things wrong — often. I see their hallucinations as a feature, not a bug; a tool that could truly be used to help creativity and inspire ideas (setting aside the problematic training data for now). But these folks want to market and use them as all-knowing infallible oracles, and that’s just not gonna happen. The instant the advice of one of these NNs gets someone killed, the bubble will implode.
Show threadMr. CompletelyFeb 25, 2023
@cstross @glindsey similar to the way tesla is chasing L5 autopilot to the point of public endangerment not for any reason related to the consumer market, but to be the vendor that lets every shipping and delivery fleet in the world replace all their drivers.
Show threadLisPiFeb 25, 2023

@glindsey @cstross There are some interesting uses to cryptocurrencies.

The thing is, those uses are better served by other better & simpler designs (#GNUTaler > bitcoin for basically all purposes especially privacy), and don't lend themselves well to grifting. So you won't see them.