Creating a specialized neural net to perform a specific function is cool. Slapping GPT into customer support because you like money is horse shit and I hope your company collapses. But yeah you’re right. Blockchain was a solution with basically no problems to fix. Neural nets are a tool that can do a ton of things, but everyone is content to use them as a hammer.
Blockchain and crypto were worse. „AI” has some actual use even if it’s way overblown.
SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 11 hours ago
Yes! “AI” defined as only LLMs and the party trick applications is a bubble. AI in general has been around for decades and will only continue to grow.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I’m glad you didn’t say NFTs because my Bored Ape will regain and triple its value any day now!
protist@mander.xyz 8 hours ago
Bro the GME short squeeze is going to hit any day now. We’re going to be millionaires bro, you just wait
confusedbytheBasics@lemm.ee 13 hours ago
Blockchain has many valuable uses. A distributed zero trust ledger is useful. Sadly the finance scammers and the digital beanie baby collectors attracted all the marketing money.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
And yet, every single company that has ever tried to implement a distributed zero trust ledger into their products and processes has inevitably ditched the idea after releasing that it does not, in fact, provide any useful benefit.
WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
It is exceptionally useful for the auditing of damn near everything in digital space, as long as shared resources and 3rd parties have access to the blockchain … which is probably the major reason companies and politicians don’t want anything to do with it.
It’d be a lot harder to hide crimes, fraud, grey business dealings, bribery and illegal donations, sanction violations, etc, etc if every event in the entire financial system and supply chain was logged and verifiable.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
The reason major businesses haven’t bothered using distributed blockchains for auditing is because they fundamentally do not actually help in any way with auditing.
At the end of the day, the blockchain is just a ledger. At some point a person has to enter the information into that ledger.
Now, hear me out here, because this is going to be some totally out there craziness that is going to blow your mind… What happens if that person lies? Like, you’ve built your huge, complicated system to track every banana you buy from the farm to the grocery store… But what happens if the shipper just sends you a different crate or bananas with the wrong label on them? How does your system solve that?
The data in a system is only as good as your ability to verify it. Verifying the integrity of the data within systems was largely a solved problem long before distributed blockchains came along, and was rarely if ever the primary avenue for fraud. It’s the human components of these systems where fraud can most easily occur. And distributed blockchains do absolutely nothing to solve that.
Thrashy@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
The idea has merit, in theory – but in practice, in the vast majority of cases, having a trusted regulator managing the system, who can proactively step in to block or unwind suspicious activity, turns out to be vastly preferable to the “code is law” status quo of most blockchain implementations. Not to mention most potential applications really need a mechanism for transactions to clear in seconds, rather than minutes to days, and it’d be preferable if they didn’t need to boil the oceans dry in the process of doing so.
If I was really reaching, I could maybe imagine a valid use case for say, a hypothetical, federated open source game that needed to have a trusted way for every node to validate the creation and trading of loot and items, that could serve as a layer of protection against cheating nodes duping items, for instance. But that’s insanely niche, and for nearly every other use case a database held by a trusted entity is faster, simpler, safer, more efficient, and easier to manage.
_bcron_@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I’m not even understanding what AI is at this point because there’s no delineation between moderately sophisticated algorithms and things that are orders of magnitude more complex.
I mean, if something like multisampling came out today we’d all know how it’d be marketed
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
AI is a ridiculous broad term these days. Everybody had been slapping the label on anything. It’s kinda like saying “transportation” and it means anything between babies crawling up to wrap drive and teleportation.
RarePossum@programming.dev 6 hours ago
Because most of them are AI
It’s just once AI becomes useful (and not magical), we tend to stop calling it AI unless AI gets more VC money.
It’s called the AI effect
catloaf@lemm.ee 12 hours ago
The AI buzzword means machine learning. You give it a massive dataset and it identifies correlations.
Regular hand-coded AI is mostly simple state machines.
slacktoid@lemmy.ml 12 hours ago
Technically speaking how I differentiate it is:
- clever algorithm is a good heuristic
- statistics on steroids is machine learning
- using a transformer model is AI (for now)
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Yes. But companies bought into AI way more than they bought into crypto though, in many outlandish and stupid ways. And many AI companies sell it in ways they shouldn’t.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 13 hours ago
Crypto has a legitimate value, you can buy drugs with it.
Graphy@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Honestly kinda miss when the drugs I did were illegal. I used to buy weed from this online seller that was really into designer drugs. The amount of time I used to spend on Erowid just to figure out wtf I was about to take.