The AI Investment Boom

> I will take AI bubble over crypto bubble any day of the week.

I've been in the former since '21 and have seen every single cycle since 2011 in the latter, I can assure their is more dumb money in the former than in the latter; (just by scale alone) at least in the latter whether it was ICO or NFTs or whatever mal-investment was promptly punished (rugpulls/exit scams) companies like INTEL get to stay in Zombie mode because of the corpo-welfare that the US doles out while shaming everyone else to be prudent with their investments while these corps and banks spend like drunken sailors and tries to strangle the former out of existence (rightly so in most cases as most crypto is a total scam).

With that said, what you will see emerge are some incredibly established players in both fields that will have the staying power to change how the Industry is shaped around them: Nvidia and Bitcoin are comparable to one another in that respect.

Both have/had crazy volatility but the staying power and just the fact they remain firmly at the center of both Industry's is rather telling that you simply don't see what these technologies offer because of the hype and boom and bust cycles.

As a person who directly benefits from this: I can assure you most of these VCs are exit liquidity just as most foolish people are for the alt scams of yore, execpt the US economy (likely all of the Western World at this point) isn't entirely reliant on the promise of vapourware with 'crypto' in any capacity, weheras the same cannot be said about the theatrics of Jensen's Nvidia.

Source: I build data center infrastructure for these mega corps doing 'AI' and I'm doing an MSc in CS (Big Data) and been a Bitcoiner since Satoshi was still on BTF.

You might be right, but the crypto people were/are basically religious in their responses. I see a few loons for LLM's talking about how AGI is near, and of course there's the EA/LessWrong people talking about doomsday. But none of them were as staunchly dug in _and_ misinformed as the crypto folks.

edit: if it isn't clear I'm a staunch opponent of cryptocurrency in any form.

> edit: if it isn't clear I'm a staunch opponent of cryptocurrency in any form.

It's very clear, but your exposure to zealots, on both sides, shouldn't deter you from being objective and seeing what these technologies actually offer. Hence why i wrote that part in the 2nd to last paragraph.

HN has such misinfored vitriol for any technology it didn't ordain itself, you sem to be of that cohort, what's odd is that very same people who gave you VC.SV funded startup land are all major backers of this technology.

I can just summarize this in one phrase: you seem to collectively not know, what you don't know and make leaps in logic and misinformed judgments from that POV.

zifpanachr23 said:

> AI people sound more dug in to be honest from my perspective. But I guess that's cause the crypto stuff tends to be less overtly religious and more overtly batshit crazy politics and economics, which I'm much more used to dealing with haha. And mostly, everyone has figured out the scam by now on the crypto side.

>>The AI people freak me out cause they are all talking eschatology and shit as if they have stumbled upon the literal ark of the covenant like in raiders of the lost ark or something.

>>>It's a really great act to be honest. They've been clearly studying a lot of the more dishonest American religious culture of the last couple of decades.

I'm going to commit a HN faux pas to prove a point and show you why I think Bitcoin has a valid use case here alone: I decided to repost what he said because there are valid points here and are worth discussing.

Had I the inclination I can hash this into the blockchain for all to see what was written from this poster for the aforementioned reasons for as long as the mainchain continues to be maintained, protected and supported .

This has great utility, and the mere suggestion that you cannot get over that is because those 'crazies offend me and my disposition' and stop there you fail to see why and what this technology can already do--create an actual immutable archive of all Human history if we desire it.

But to his point, yes it's roots in Crypto-Anarchism (which started in CA at the inception of the rise of modern SV btw) has many of you questioning the ''sanity' and 'motives' behind this technology, and you assume they are all the same but rest assure their is a reason for the brain drain from all of tech/STEM/finance during my era and time in Bitcoin.

Most of whom are now incredibly wealthier than they ever were working in academia or private industry if you think money is a measure of one's success--I don't, but most of you do.

The AI people strike me more as a range of the introduction corpos from banking and academia into bitcoin (Gavin's, Hearn) to total con men like Veer and sprinkled in there are the cult memebers you mentioned who honestly think that their techno-utopian trans-humanist dreams are being built one LLM update at a time. It's sad... it's the same thing just different names/faces.

I have little interest in the ycombinator legacy of hustle culture, growth hacking, get-millions-for-glorified-todo-app, etc. As far as I can tell it is effectively the underlying reason for why crypto and AI get hyped up to the point where we can't have reasonable discussions about them in forums.

I'm just here because it happens to be where like-minded people (_sometimes_) hang out.

> I have little interest in the ycombinator legacy of hustle culture, growth hacking, get-millions-for-glorified-todo-app, etc. As far as I can tell it is effectively the underlying reason for why crypto and AI get hyped up to the point where we can't have reasonable discussions about them in forums.

Ohh, well... I'm guilty of drinking that kool-aid, unfortunately and was a boot-strapping fintech founder with the battle scars to show--those scars appear in this discussion thus far by the way.

But I get it, I'm trying to be amicable about this as much as I can, especially fbecause I know no one can deny us anymore in the BTC side at this point, and in the AI side... well, money-hype boom and AI-doomer pr0n cycles aside we are actually building amazing amounts of compute that hopefully can yield amazing results, something like Starship recovery system levels of advancement in many other Industries/Sectors one day, probably very far off in the future but that's the start, right?

Every forest starts with a sappling kind of a thing, and these two technologies emerged from a time when I was in my formidable development period so I saw them as something more than just the marketing side--AI is marketing, ML is really just stats with code to back it up after all. Bitcoin is just a FOSS network using token based cryptographic key encryption.

Stop using throwaways if you want real conversations, it might help you have those conversations you're looking for. :)

No one cares that blockchains are immutable, that doesn't mean that information written there is correct. Just that it was written on X date and the content. You could find proof of the biggest scandal of all time and post it on the blockchain so "the man" can't stop the word from getting out but 99.99999999% of readers would read a version presented by a simple web server and with the value cached in a closed database or memory. Which if the government wants to take down, it can. And if that does go down, no one will save a link to the entry on the blockchain. And on the flip side I could write obvious falsehoods in the same way. Blockchain provides no value for legal attestation nor information distribution.

In practice, the vast majority of blockchain ledgers record the history of scams, penny stock style trading and money laundering attempts.

> In practice, the vast majority of blockchain ledgers record the history of scams, penny stock style trading and money laundering attempts.

It doesn't take long before they make themselves present. Thanks for proving my point.