[senttoschool]

Such a "smh" opinion.

AI is useful. The vast majority of crypto are just scams and unregistered securities. Crypto mining is wasteful.

Are you going to tax whenever people who use the neural engine inside the iPhone? Makes no sense to tax AI energy use.

[DrNosferatu]

Indeed, AI is useful whereas Crypto mining is wasteful.

Furthermore, carbon tax is a bad idea, as it is regressive, (further) inflation generating, and ends up benefiting polluters from markets with poor regulation - just to list a few disadvantages.

Direct government investment and projects like a Green New Deal would be much more helpful for the Environment.

But I think the OP is mostly concerned about their deflated crypto portfolio...

[rvz]

> AI is useful. The vast majority of crypto are just scams and unregistered securities. Crypto mining is wasteful.

Cars are also useful but the majority of them (Petrol and Diesel) are extremely wasteful. The difference is however is that there are greener alternatives (Electric). Crypto has also proven to have greener alternatives and a major proof-of-work blockchain moved to a greener alternative method proof-of-stake, showing it is entirely possible.

AI (Deep Learning) has no known greener alternatives, and always requires more compute, data centers, GPUs, FPGAs ASICs, to scale further and the result is more resources is wasted [0][1], for hallucinating chatbots and vision systems that need to be fine-tuned again and at worse retrained.

It makes perfect sense to tax it as after more than a decade, Deep Learning still has no viable green alternative methods to reduce its training, inference and fine-tuning operations.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water...

[DrNosferatu]

It seems I have hit a nerve! :D

AI in general, and LLMs in particular, will change Society to a scale only comparable to what the Word Wide Web has done since the 90s - hopefully for far more good than bad.

Crypto is basically penny stocks - or actually, in good truth - a glorified pyramid scheme.

It is sad that Hacker News allows and normalizes this self-interested promotion of it, disguised as "opinion".

Indeed: tell us that you don't stand to personally gain monetarily if crypto rizes, user "rvz" ;)

(some goes for the author of the bloomberg piece)

[rvz]

> It seems I have hit a nerve! :D

Hit what exactly? You have failed to refute any of my points.

> AI in general, and LLMs in particular, will change Society to a scale only comparable to what the Word Wide Web has done since the 90s.

I don't think you would trust a black-box 'AI' in any high risk activity such as medical, financial, legal advice and especially transportation which there is a lack of a human driver or pilot, end-to-end to hold accountable once something goes wrong. Hence it will be totally regulated and licensed.

Not only techies like you wish to accelerate everyone further into a dystopia no-one asked for, but to even recklessly risk deploying untrustworthy AI models unchecked which can easily hallucinate and confuse themselves over a single pixel or any adversarial input. Making them unsuitable for anything serious, unless they are strictly regulated for that purpose.

Regardless, my environmental argument still stands unchallenged. Crypto has alternative greener methods to proof-of-work right now, and former PoW blockchains like Ethereum have shown that it is possible to significantly reduce its emissions by 99% by moving to a greener consensus method. [0][1] AI (Deep Learning, LLMs, CNNs, etc) however still does NOT have any viable greener alternative methods of training, inference and fine-tuning available and continues to waste tons of electricity and water. [2]

> Crypto is basically penny stocks - or actually, in good truth - a glorified pyramid scheme.

How on earth is a centralized stable-coin like USDC a pyramid scheme? The prime use-case is near-instant low-fee world-wide international payments which is verified publicly on-chain to discourage fraud which once it happens it is immediately traceable, which is why companies like Moneygram [3], Stripe [4], etc have their own crypto offerings under regulattions.

> It is sad that Hacker News allows and normalizes this self-interested promotion of it, disguised as "opinion".

Speak for your self. Since both of you have ZERO sources to your comments. Thus your comment can be simply dismissed.

> Indeed: tell us that you don't stand to personally gain monetarily if crypto rizes, user "rvz" ;)

Not after you learn to spell 'rise' before you comment next time instead of embarrassing yourself.

[0] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain...

[1] https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption

[2] https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/ai-chatgpt-water-usage-envir...

[3] https://stellar.org/moneygram

[4] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto