David Gerard brings up an interesting association: the crypto grifters, as their scam begins to disintegrate, have jumped ship to become AI grifters.
You’ll be delighted to hear that blockchain is out and AI is in:
- Sequoia Capital, who wrote a now-deleted glowing profile of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, has gone full AI. See their home page. [Sequoia, archive of June 3]
- Crypto VC firm Paradigm has broadened its focus to include AI. [The Block]
- Circle’s Jeremy Allaire: “AI and blockchains are made for each other.” [Twitter]
- IBM: “The convergence of AI and blockchain brings new value to business.” IBM previously folded its failed blockchain unit into the unit for its failed Watson AI. [IBM]
It’s not clear if the VCs actually buy their own pitch for ChatGPT’s spicy autocomplete as the harbinger of the robot apocalypse. Though if you replaced VC Twitter with ChatGPT, you would see a significant increase in quality.
Huh. Interesting. I never trusted crypto, because everyone behind it was so slimy, but now they’re going to slime the AI industry.
Also interesting, though, is who isn’t falling for it. Apple had a recent shindig in which they announced all the cool shiny new toys for the next year, and they are actively incorporating machine learning into them, but they are definitely not calling it AI.
If you had watched Apple’s WWDC keynote, you might have realized the lack of mention of the term “AI”. This is in complete contrast to what happened recently at events of other Big Tech companies, such as Google I/O.
It turns out that there wasn’t even a single mention of the term “AI”. No, not even once.
The technology was referred to, of course, but always in the form of “machine learning” — a more sedate and technically accurate description.
Apple took a different route and instead of highlighting AI as the omnipotent force, they pointed to the features that they’ve developed using the technology. Here’s a list of the ML/AI features that Apple unveiled:
- Improved Autocorrect on iOS 17: Apple introduced an enhanced autocorrect feature, powered by a transformer language model. This on-device machine learning model improves autocorrection and sentence completion as users type.
- Personalized Volume Feature for AirPods: Apple announced this feature that uses machine learning to adapt to environmental conditions and user listening preferences.
- Enhanced Smart Stack on watchOS: Apple upgraded its Smart Stack feature to use machine learning to display relevant information to users.
- Journal App: Apple unveiled this new app that employs on-device machine learning to intelligently curate prompts for users.
3D Avatars for Video Calls on Vision Pro: Apple showcased advanced ML techniques for generating 3D avatars for video calls on the newly launched Vision Pro.
- Transformer-Based Speech Recognition: Apple announced a new transformer-based speech recognition model that improves dictation accuracy using the Neural Engine.
- Apple M2 Ultra Chip: Apple unveiled this chip with a 32-core Neural Engine, which is capable of performing 31.6 trillion operations per second and supports up to 192GB of unified memory. This chip can train large transformer models, demonstrating a significant leap in AI applications.
Unlike its rivals, who are building bigger models with server farms, supercomputers, and terabytes of data, Apple wants AI models on its devices. On-device AI bypasses a lot of the data privacy issues that cloud-based AI faces. When the model can be run on a phone, then Apple needs to collect less data in order to run it.
It also ties in closely with Apple’s control of its hardware stack, down to its own silicon chips. Apple packs new AI circuits and GPUs into its chips every year, and its control of the overall architecture allows it to adapt to changes and new techniques.
Say what you think of Apple as a company, but one thing they know how to do is make money. Lots of money. They also have first-rate engineers. Apparently they are smart enough to not fall for the hype.
I never trusted cryptocurrencies because I didn’t really understand them.
I know what blockchain is vaguely and what cryptocurrencies are but why they should have any value and what they are good for was never clear.
They seem to be created out of thin air by anyone who has the resources to publicize them.
And what good are they?
They are hard to spend since most places won’t take cryptocurrencies.
They are hard to trace which makes them ideal for money laundering and tax invasion.
I have a boring life and never need to launder my income, pay my private security forces, or evade taxes.
For a lot of people crypto is pretty much “There are computers involved, so this must be the future of money!” As if a large chunk of our use of money backed by actual governments isn’t already computer centred.
It’s hard for me to respect Apple as a company when they’re stealing 30% of developer’s money. There is no need for that and it’s just greedy, plain and simple. I can see them charging 8% or so when someone sells an app on their platform, but 30%. Give me a break!
due credit: cowritten by Amy Castor and me. We usually do a crypto newsletter, and half the crypto blogs were trying unconvincing pivots to AI, so we thought it might be fun! Also, I got to get stuck into the LessWrong rationalists ;-)
we’re back on crypto though, I have hundreds of pages of SEC filings against Binance and Coinbase to read right now …
I’m increasingly coming around to the idea that one of the key factors behind a heck of lot of what is wrong with the world today together is VC money. (And a big chunk of the rest is Private Equity.)
cryptocurrencies are the same as the holy roman empire : they don’t have a lot to do with cryptography (they use cryptographic hash functions and digital certificates, but so do a lot of applications) and they are not currencies in any sense of the term
Another fun note : Apple didn’t spoke of metaverse either. Their demo was on incremental improvement not a paradigm shift that will change internet
On that subject, a new video of Adam Connover with Dan Olson : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aU-QkJfgGw
$1000 for a monitor mount. All I’m saying…
dude this sounds exactly like they did fall for the hype, then realized the entire leftosphere and about 30% of the nazis as well have decided AI is the antichrist and just changed the name on it two weeks before the expo.
In other entertaining news, an attorney is in hot water with the court, after he filed a legal brief that apparently was entirely prepared by ChatGPT. The problem being, with six cited precedent cases, all six were confabulations by the bot – they didn’t exist.
Which was spotted simultaneously by opposing council and the jurist. Predictably, the jurist lost any semblance of a sense of humor and demands a good explanation. The offending attorney’s defense was, he used ChatGPT to verify the results, literally asking it if its citations were good.
Which is an admission of suspicion, yet he proceeded to file the fiction with the court. I really don’t see this one ending well for him at all.
There is always trying to prove true idiocy, but then one has to explain to a rather angry jurist how someone with a profound lack of intellect passed law school and the bar exam. Which would also be akin to proving to an angry jurist precisely why you can prove the jurist is actually a true idiot in every legal sense.
When you want to get out of the hole, first put down the damned shovel.
I never trusted cryptocurrencies because I did understand them. Also how actual currencies work. And that the two are incompatible, but crypto-as-described would be the most perfect vehicle possible for pump-n-dumps…
euclide @ #6 — I saw Vision One as an inkling of a paradigm shift similar to what iPod was when it was introduced and eventually came to mean for telephones. That shift is away from “desktop” computers and large screens taking up your living room. The presentation focused on two use case. One was entertainment…watching movies and so forth. The other showed people in work situations at desks and in meetings doing work without a standard computer in front of you. Ironically they emphasized how using this technology you can collaborate with your colleagues wherever you are.
I like Scott Kurtz’s take on the subject:
https://www.toonhoundstudios.com/comic/20220131/?sid=372
and on NFTs in particular.
It was pretty easy to see through the cryptocurrency hype in its early days because the touts promoting it would argue in the same article that (1) crypto payments were 100% untraceable and (2) crypto money couldn’t be stolen because the blockchain contained proof of ownership. 矛盾 indeed. After the first few high-profile crypto heists, the touts stopped mentioning (2).
meson@3–
That’s true. It’s also not even close to the worst thing about Apple. And yet, sadly, it is probably the most ethical of the IT giants.
Perhaps this “AI hype machine” might find itself on a collision course with the “diversionary fearmongering/scapegoating of AI machine.” Or maybe the two hype machines will feed off each other…
Or maybe the hype machines will have sufficient mass to collapse into a singularity and be gone from annoying the world.
Hopefully, taking the cryptomaniacs with the hype.
Ahem.
I call that a mention.
OT
Just in; the DOJ has flipped Mark Meadows.
😀
Because it’s funny, it should be mentioned that Apples’ machine learning extends to how its software learns when not to autocorrect. An article (on CNN? I don’t remember) made the amusing point that when you want to use salty language, it will learn to not ducking autocorrect you so you don’t have to duck around and re-type what you ducking really meant.
You know what I mean.
John Morales @ #17 — I assume that’s a quote from the presentation. A friend reiterated the “no AI” claim to me just a little while ago. I thought I heard AI in there, but I haven’t had time to verify. There were several mentions of “machine learning” which…well, now we’re just starting to split hairs. From my half ignorant assessment, there were a whole bunch of AI/ML/KG/LLM reliant things in the announcements.
@8 Great American Satan
Let the cult of Apple have their fun. They’re psyching themselves up to buy a $3,500 paperweight, so they need to pretend they’re somehow different than the other techbros.
Robro, it’s quoted from the OP. What PZ posted.
@raven #1:
It sounds like you understand them just fine.
@Raging Bee: it is the same hype machine. If AI is so dangerous that it could kill us all then it must be real and powerful and therefore valuable.
It is similar to how Zuckerberg and Musk are okay with people thinking they are evil geniuses if it means they don’t realize they are idiots.
specialffrog,
Heh. A Necker cube of a comment, hinging on the pronoun game.
Zuckerberg is slowly rising, Musk is intentionally rising to proving idiocy.
Eventually, their greed turns their stock straight into dogshit.
Zuckerberg only adding himself slower, as he is smarter.
A mafioso once told me in confidence, “The greedy screw themselves”.
Didn’t work for him for long, as I felt bad for anyone needing to answer the door with a gun in their hand.
The creation of crypto-currency involves having a CPU/GPU solve the equivalent of a billion Sudoku puzzles to write a piece of code into the blockchain. This code has no value in itself and writing it required wasting a lot of energy and producing a lot of envicronmentally damaging hot air while wearing out perfectly good processing units. So if anything when you break it down, the process destroys value instead of creating it.
And then if you want to actually make money with it, you can only do so by selling it and since it has no inherent value, you are basically forced to bamboozle someone into taking this worthless code off of you. That means crypto-currency can never be traded in good faith and you will instead generate more bad will and despair in people while doing so, another net-negative of crypto-currency. O yeah, and you can use it to hide criminal activity behind it and that seems to be its primary “use” nowadays, strike three.
As currency it of course utterly fails due to its high volatility. When one unit of “cryptonium” can have the equivalent value of $1 or $1000 from one day to another…how can you ever build a legitimate economy around that? Especially with how easy it is to manipulate crypto value by just spreading convenient narratives on social media by an army of bots.
I treat everyone who peddles crypto as the equivalent of people peddling child porn. They’re utterly depraved and don’t deserve anything but my most negative attention at best.
Can machine learning actually learn my foibles of written language? It’d be nice to not need to fix “e. g.,” e. g.
I get entertaining mail.
“ChatGPT-Powered Job Search – Openings at HUB International, Vodastra, PHMC and more”
All the listings are generic, unrelated to my search parameters I used their service for in the past and entirely not in any cities near me. They got added to my spam filter.
I loved Dan Olson before it was cool.
I’ve heard cryptocurrency is useful for international trade, to avoid the hassles of currency conversion. That sounds fine and plausible to me; but how would a company that sells stuff for cryptocurrency pay its employees? Maybe they’d avoid the hassles of currency conversion by…passing the hassles on to their employees? Forcing them to do all the conversion themselves (and, most likely, pay their banks extra fees to handle them)? Or maybe operating “company stores” that sell their employees some of the stuff they need for crypto?
Raging Bee. nonsense and poppycock! They need to sell their employees all of the stuff they need for crypto, as well as the necessities for life via the company store by crypto only.
Know history, learn how much of life is simply reruns.