Comment on Will AI Startups End Up Like Blockchain Startups?

Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Yes, but not to the same extent. Both AI and Blockchain are amazing technologies, but those people that are pushing either as the next big thing since slice bread don’t understand them.

Blockchain is an elegant solution to a decades old problem that’s actually impossible to solve called Byzantine fault tolerance by making it costly to bad actors to the point where it’s better for them to become good actors. It is revolutionary, but very unlikely that someone will make a profitable product out of it, especially because the two more obvious uses for it already exist and are open source.

LLMs, which is what people are calling AI, is also a very cool new step for text prediction. But it’s not in fact intelligent, so it can’t do anything without supervision, and more often than not it’s easier and safer to create something yourself than to fix a possibly broken, possibly malicious creation by someone else. LLMs are great for stuff like brainstorming or suggesting short pieces of code that I was about to type anyways, but to think they can produce a book or a program on their own is absurd.

However, as much as I think Blockchains are elegant, they solve an abstract and very specific problem, whereas LLMs are good at solving generalized stuff. There are plenty of applications that would benefit enormously from having LLMs, e.g. a bot that finds, summarizes and points you to documentation at work would help anyone having to deal with documentation to make them more efficient, and companies that invest in these sorts of solutions might come up with great products. But most of the time they’re using it as a buzzword or worse trying to remove a person’s job which will backfire.

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