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 I sometimes do reviews of research proposals.
I have not much liked having to determine if the proposed budgets for computing are reasonable or not because of cryptocurrency scammers running up the GPU prices or buying up entire production lines.
I will not like it if "AI" scammers do the same thing.
Charlie Stross
Michael Busch