Tired of Crypto hype? Well, it passed. Now they hype is big on AI. Useful things will surely come out of it but before lots of money will be made on hype alone.
There was hype around Crypto because people were making large sums of money from it, despite unclear "real" uses beyond easily moving large sums of money around.
There is hype around AI because hundreds of millions of people (including me) are using AI tools every day to help them with their work. In contrast to crypto, random people are not making enormous amounts of money; there are no 18 year olds in AI stumbling into hundreds of millions of dollars. Even OpenAI is not particularly profitable and is mainly sustained through its close partnership with Microsoft.
I think this reversal of the money <-> utility relationship makes these technologies fundamentally different, and lumping them together into the category of "just another hype cycle" is unfair.
There's money to back the hype alright, but it resides with businesses/academia/government who are itching to find a way to buy their way into an AI-enabled modernization.
Just a quibble, but "hundreds of millions of people" seems high by an order of magnitude or two. That would be around 1 in every 20 people in the world.
But this is known. Has OpenAI released usage figures?
I'm on a one-person crusade against that 100m user number. It comes from a report released by a company that gathers analytics from people who were convinced to install dodgy browser extensions!
I made some notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/19/how-chatgpt-kicked-off... - I think ChatGPT had 30m users by Feb 3rd (a date later than that 100m number), because "two people with knowledge of the figures" leaked that to Kevin Roose at the NY Times.
I'm sure it's gone up a bunch since then. Maybe it has hit 100m even - but I don't think that original 100m number should be trusted by anyone.
Wow. 13 million per day = 1 in every 400 people on Earth with internet access, if Google is correct that world population is now 8e9 and 64.4% of the world has internet access.
It's hype for sure but for AI I can think of a ton of real-world use cases whereas all crypto use cases sounded pretty contrived. I think AI will be a revolution of the scale of the internet or even bigger. Maybe the current version of ChatGPT is flawed but the possibilities are there. I am thinking analyzing long contracts, writing letters, verifying system requirements and tests and so on. The potential seems endless.
There is hype around AI because hundreds of millions of people (including me) are using AI tools every day to help them with their work. In contrast to crypto, random people are not making enormous amounts of money; there are no 18 year olds in AI stumbling into hundreds of millions of dollars. Even OpenAI is not particularly profitable and is mainly sustained through its close partnership with Microsoft.
I think this reversal of the money <-> utility relationship makes these technologies fundamentally different, and lumping them together into the category of "just another hype cycle" is unfair.