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.
Update from comments: I'm SURE it's just a coincidence that training neural networks and mining cryptocurrencies are both applications that benefit from very large arrays of GPUs.
If *I* was a VC I'd be hiring complexity theory nerds to figure out what areas of research are promising once you have Yottaflops of numerical processing power available, then place bets on AMD, Nvidia, and (maybe) Intel going there and start seeding the field and hiring PR firms.
@cstross that's an interesting theory and I expect some do that, but I don't assume that's the real driver for either. I can't back that up, but I'm skeptical of simple, what many would like to believe takes.
What I know is that outside the VC area more promising, ethically driven technology devt has been going on under the radar since before either and am hopeful one of these will start to come together soon. No GPU's needed, designed for simple legacy h/w and harness unused resources.
Charlie Stross
Mark Hughes