Have they? AI compared to cryptocurrency has already been deployed and battle tested on billions of users, just think of BERT used on Google queries, all the models used for moderation and recommendation on social media (probably the whole reason why TikTok is so popular), translation, captioning etc... It really seems quite different.
How is that different from bitcoin being used as currency in many places all over the world? You used to be able to go and buy a pizza using a bitcoin transaction, then that regressed but at the time it looked like bitcoin might actually be the future.
Turns out there were some problems that crypto currencies hadn't solved yet, and those still aren't solved. At the time people expected the tech to advance to solve all those things, but they failed to do so.
Same thing applies to current day AI, in order to revolutionize the world like the hype expects they need more things that are completely unknown whether we are actually able to solve or not.
Until those things are solved generative AI is just new search, translation and some funny pictures. Useful but not that world changing. Internet 1995 you could already connect and talk to people from all over the world in social networks, do banking, shopping etc, all the technical problems were already solved, people just hadn't caught up to it yet.
Internet just needed social changes to happen, generative AI still requires technological breakthroughs.
Bitcoin has never reached the proliferation of AI, even though some have used it to pay for pizzas. It's 2024, and with AI you can already do: semantic search, moderation, translation, captioning, TTS, STT, context-aware grammar checker, LLM, audio/image classifier, smart editing tools etc... So yeah it's quite different compare to Bitcoin.
And none of those changes the everyday life of most people. Bitcoin revolutionizing banking would, as would generative AI if some new breakthrough was made, but currently the biggest thing it does for most people is that it lets them cheat on homework etc.
Just look at how popular TikTok is (it wouldn't be without its powerful recommendation model), or the fact that the majority of the world's population has to rely on translation models and subtitles to translate the vast amount of English text online. Bitcoin is never going to "revolutionize" banking, it's really just a downgrade, no privacy, no fraud protection.
The recommendation AI portion isn't much related to generative AI, where the former connects existing data points and the latter creates new data points.
This TikTok ads team job post[0] does, however, mention "AI-powered smart video generation (we are also exploring AIGC)" (AIGC = AI-generated content) which implies to me that they are looking to genAI to make new content.
Tiktok isn't generative AI, I don't think you understand this topic. The topic is generative AI, not recommendation AI, recommendation AI doesn't require much investments, the generative AI that companies has poured many billions into the past few years is the topic.
Right, for you it might be more useful. But people still make payments across the world into countries using bitcoin that would be hard to do without, I'd say that is a more world changing use case than an error prone document reformatter.
I am not saying bitcoin is more important overall, I'm just saying that it is fair to put the two on similar levels today, I believe generative AI will ultimately have important use cases, but as they are today that is far from a given.
It is possible that companies will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on electricity and hardware just to come up with stuff that are barely better than we have today, and then it turned out to be a massive big waste poured into overhyped technology.
Could also be that it gets good enough to do a lot of useful stuff worth all that effort, but you can't count on that happening. The main difference is that we today know crypto currencies was a dead end, we don't know that about transformer based generative AI so it makes sense to make that bet, but it could still be a massively overhyped dead end.
Cryptocurrency is a use case, AI is a technology. It’s odd to compare them.
AI is more comparable to GUI or internet or cell service than it is to cryptocurrency. Blockchain, if you must, but I don’t think anyone could saw AI has to more relevance than blockchain.
Internet in 1995 had already solved all the problems required to revolutionize the world with cheap fiber optics fiber being laid everywhere, the world just had to catch up to it.
The same isn't true for generative AI today, in order for it to revolutionize the world similarly to how the internet did it still need some more unknown pieces, which you are expecting to happen but it might not. The internet however was already completely solved when it was hyped, very different.
I mean I was there, and it feels similar. The internet was “solved” in the way that transformers “solve” AI. And there were so many unknown pieces for internet business and tech.
The difference between internet and AI is one is mature and the other is nascent. That’s it.
Exactly. I’ve thought since ChatGPT first took the world by storm that the directional promises of AI were completely correct but the hardware isn’t at all there yet. The dot com bubble crashed yet the Internet is more important than ever today.
