Mastodawn

Charlie Stross Feb 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.

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Hello, yes, this is Gregly Feb 25, 2023

@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.

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Charlie Stross Feb 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).

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dr2chase Feb 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

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Charlie Stross Feb 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.)

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dr2chase Feb 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.

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Hello, yes, this is Gregly

@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”