Hey, have you noticed that no one is talking about NFTs anymore? It’s like they all just fell into a pit and everyone is embarrassed to say anything about them.
Can that happen to crypto and AI sometime soon?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Funny the memory hole people develop after a bad decision… :)
The logic of buying this stuff escapes me, unless it’s to get in on the scam and back out of it (and stay out) early. I’ve always thought that whether it’s beanie babies, NFTs, crypto, or piles of gold “collector” coins – none of them will buy much in the way of clean water, food, firewood or TP in an extended power out.
Uh, no.
Strong encryption proves its utility over and over again — used correctly, it’s the only guarantee of privacy we have on the internet, and also, increasingly, offline. And you aren’t going to stop people from trying to improve artificial intelligence unless you expressly forbid them from writing computer software.
Dan Olson killed NFTs with his viral Line Goes Up video essay, haha
NFTs are an extension of Crypto. They do one thing: show that Crypto is really not useful for much other than speculative markets. Its going to take the bottom properly dropping out of the currencies for it to just go away (and with it currently being propped up by this current administration and the tech billionaires, that won’t be happening soon).
Winter is coming for LLMs, but probably not for a couple years still. Plenty of mounting evidence that it doesn’t improve productivity and isn’t going to replace tech workers (in fact may just make the need for tech workers more necessary with all the AI code that will need fixing in the coming years).
@beholder, Crypto is not cryptography. No one is saying that is going away, but the Blockchain is pretty much useless…
Or rather no one is saying it should go away. Certainly not me :P
@2: “Crypto” in this context is very obviously short for “cryptocurrency” not “cryptography” – and indeed that is the overwhelmingly most common current usage in any context, outside of specialist discourse.
I don’t know that I have ever heard Cryptography referred to as Crypto (at least not currently)…
I mean if we want to be pedantic, being opposed to AI is odd as AI is in everything. But in the current discourse, AI is generally used to refer to LLMs and the current generative AI craze going on :P (AI isn’t going anywhere, not as a general concept.)
AI’s one of those terms that I’m finding increasingly worthless due to its overly broad use. I’ve been writing a sci-fi game and I’ve gone to the point that I refer to “synth” characters, rather than AIs.
For types of AI in the real world, I’m all for those that focus on narrow, specialized tasks like spotting cancer cells or genetic algorithms that devise innovative approaches for a clear goal. All this LLM and generative art junk is a waste of energy, water, and work hours for the underpaid data curators.
They just rebranded (some term) AI. It’s all still ugly ass ape jpgs
PZ wrote: about NFTs . . . It’s like they all just fell into a pit and everyone is embarrassed to say anything about them. Can that happen to crypto and AI sometime soon?
I reply: OH, I REALLY HOPE SO!
In my academic career that’s what it meant. People were miffed when cryptocurrencies stole the term.
AI isn’t going away. There’ll be a crash when the limits of current approaches are finally acknowledged and we realize we overbuilt a bunch and shovelled a lot of money at utter nonsense, but deep learning and generative models are here to stay.
Think of it like the doctcom boom and crash. Having a globally interconnected information system was extremely useful, and its value has boomed, despite the fact that yes, in 1999 and 2000 there was a lot of ridiculous nonsense.
#killyosaur
?? USD is also backed in almost the same way: the taxing power of the Unitedstatian government means that it’s a billionaire that can ‘give value’ (in this case due to the threat of the violence of jail if you don’t kinda sorta pay your taxes for given values of outrageous privilege) its currency.
I’m not saying that crypto is good. But it does appear to be being backed by folks who have the resources to do so indefinitely.
Albania Appoints AI Bot as Minister To Tackle Corruption
AI as it is being marketed today will go away, it is a meme to sell stuff. Don’t get me wrong, it’s real but not NEW. A few years ago everything being sold (in IT) was cloud this and virtual that…a few years earlier it was converged this and converged that and a few years before that every product had to have an “e” or and “i” in front of it to show it was a electronic/ internet connected or ‘smart’ version of a thing …and remember when any new business just needed to be a ‘dot com’ to be cool. So the marketing of AI that is so annoying today (and the kludge LLMs) will evolve (or be replaced.
Cryptocurrency markets and trading of cryptocurrencies? (as a commodity) like the trading of NFTs – the value of a thing is what someone will pay for them – NFTs or baseball cards or beanie babies or postage stamps. Cryptocurrencies at least have the utility of allowing for money laundering and untraceable / illegal transactions but as a commodity, I can’t see the value (but it is not my area of expertise) I can’t help but think that right now feels like 1630’s Europe and a whole lot of people are swearing about the sure-fire investment potential of tulips….
@14: “ihe taxing power of the Unitedstatian government means that it’s a billionaire that can ‘give value’ (in this case due to the threat of the violence of jail if you don’t kinda sorta pay your taxes for given values of outrageous privilege) its currency.”
Non sequitur. The fact that taxes are what mostly give value to the dollar doesn’t mean that anyone with money can do the same. Only government has the legal power to tax. Pretending to issue a currency in the USA can get you a long term in prison. “Cryptocurrencies” are not a currencies, they are commodities subject to the whims of the markets.
Eventually people will realize that they have no actual value and the markets will crash. Just when that will happen is quite uncertain, that it will is about as certain as certain can be. But as someone once said “the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”.
NFTs are still around and finding niche uses.
cf. https://marketexchange.io/blog/news/how-nfts-are-evolving-in-2025
@18: “NFTs are still around and finding niche uses.”
So are tulips.
Um, Ed. That’s exactly what I mean.
“Hey, have you noticed that no one is talking about [Tulips|NFTs] anymore? It’s like they all just fell into a pit and everyone is embarrassed to say anything about them.”
:)
Cryptocurrencies at least have the utility of allowing for money laundering and untraceable / illegal transactions but as a commodity, I can’t see the value…
Cryptocurrencies (some of them anyway) may continue to have value as an international medium of exchange (for legal and/or illegal business). As an investment/speculation vehicle, however, it’s basically bogus, since — like gold — its price can be pumped up by speculation, but it doesn’t actually grow in value like stocks, bonds or other assets; so what goes up will inevitably come all the way back down, and there will be no way to extend the run once investors realize they can’t pump the price up anymore.
Hm.
I just checked:
Market Summary > Bitcoin
173,659.36AUD 12 Sept, 5:55 am UTC
Or, for those who don’t trust AI snapshots: https://www.statista.com/statistics/326707/bitcoin-price-index/
AI is useful and quite amazing from the technical side. It can solve problems that currently have no other way of being solved such as speech/text recognition and so on. Even generative models can show some level of intelligence by combining their training sets and applying them to novel scenarios. So it will not go away but the hype will adjust to the reality.