I can understand some of the skepticism, we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT and now it seems history is repeating with AI.
However, I also totally see the point, as an example: the biggest reason I like Google Photos is the automagic tagging on the pictures, I can just write any random description and it usually finds them across 10+ years of photos I have stored (not perfect, but good enough), I can see AI replicating if not even augmenting such functionalities.
"Made some BS PR headlines, while not even having a clue how to do anything with those things, and surely not anything worth their customer's while" is an ever better description.
Which shouldn't surprise anyone in an economic environment where the money fountain dried up. Every company is desperately chasing new revenue sources over growing their existing ones right now.
Eh, I worked for a video analytics startup in 2016 and we had investors (and a CEO) who were desperately pushing to do stuff with AI because everyone was doing stuff with AI. Needless to say, the startup ended up alienating their customers and eventually failed and “exited” for a five figure sum.
The current “wave” of AI and deep learning and whatnot has been going on for almost a decade, longer than blockchain and definitely longer than NFTs if you ask me. Not saying that it’s not overhyped, but it’s definitely not a new hype.
"AI" (or whatever you want to call it) is real. I'm still on the fence around whether LLMs are as transformative--at least over the next few years--as some people think they are. But they're useful even in their current state.
I also had a batch of photos to process from an event and updated my Lightroom. The new Denoise did a really nice job with these relatively noisy/highish ISO pics. And the Adaptive preset to punch up the subject (speakers at an event) was pretty nice too.
Not game changing IMO but a nice workflow addition.
NFTs on the other hand always felt like beanie babies. Blockchain in the enterprise distributed ledger sense felt like it had some potential use cases although I was always pretty skeptical which seems to have been justified.
My take is that there has been an ongoing "AI/ML" hype cycle, but this latest craze is a more specific LLM hype. I expect to see a chatbot that can help you derive insights from everything you've uploaded.
For Dropbox, I predict that this will go exactly the way Dropbox Paper went.
I'm pretty sure Google is already using plenty of "AI" behind these functionalities. Heck, image classification was the very beginning of the current "AI summer" a dozen years ago!
Not nearly everything in AI is ChatGPT, not quite all is NLP for that matter, there's still plenty of interesting things which are improving. Dropbox might well be pivoting to improve their e.g. photo/video offering with AI, but they might as well have started that 5 years ago.
Blockchain and NFT brings no real value to most people.
My non techie wife and all her friends love ChatGPT and use it daily. My kids friends use it to do all their homework.
Which is pissing off my kids as I won’t let them use it.
Good to know some parents still care and make an effort.
I realy dread the day all new juniors comming from uni will be AI/chatgpt users and lack in a lot of other important areas.
Blockchain still hasn't had a killer app that made people want to use it.
LLMs do. Guess we'll see if it's really flexible enough to fit into a lot of business models, but it's not exactly the same thing.
I don't see it as the wildest thing that say, a corp using cloud storage might want an LLM trained on all their documents so instead of searching for where X employee who left the company 3 years ago stored some information that was on page 9 of a document from 2017, you just ask the model and it pulls the info and links you to the source doc.
> Blockchain still hasn't had a killer app that made people want to use it. LLMs do.
Well Blockchain promised a lot. I remember that in the beginning, I found it interesting and thought it would be the next big thing. Now we have had more than a decade to realize that Blockchain doesn't solve anything other than cryptocurrencies (and it's not clear if we want cryptocurrencies).
So yeah, I could totally imagine that many promises of LLMs today are similar to those of Blockchain back then. Let's see how it evolves in the next few years, I guess.
Bitcoin as "digital gold" that's easier to procure, store, move around, and split into pieces is clearly a "killer app". Gold has intrinsic value but it's market cap far exceeds that - it requires a "shared delusion" to accept that it's a store of value. I wouldn't say that Bitcoin as a store of value has society wide acceptance but 1T market cap is still very significant. I keep reading on hacker news that crypto bros lost all their money in the bubble that's now over, but the bitcoin I bought just 2 years ago is still way up. The real losers were the tech stocks I bought - maybe paying engineers 500k a year was the real bubble?
Then again, never try to convince someone of something when their salary depends on believing otherwise.
Uniswap likewise has billions in daily volume. Again, that's significant. I really don't understand how the hacker news groupthink can see a piece of technology that enables something completely brand new - decentralized market making - getting used daily to move billions of dollars around and say "there's absolutely nothing there".
Maybe you think there's no killer app because you hang out on upvote-centric site like hacker news and reddit where people downvote the hell out of things that contradict their narrative. Hacker news is a groupthink bubble.
There's many other examples. Look at how often people brought up energy usage and GPU shortages when NFTs get brought up. Then look how often it gets brought up when LLMs get brought up. It's night and day. None of these people cared about the environment. They didn't like crypto so it was a talking point against it - that's it. Because now, ETH is on proof of stake but everyone and their dog are buying 4090s so they can make waifus with Stable Diffusion. And all those "you're melting the planet people!" are conspicuously quiet.
What exactly is the killer app of LLM? A bunch of writing tools for SEO spam? Does anyone seriously read what ChatGPT writes and think this thing could do real literature or journalism? Everybody wants to use AI to write, nobody wants to read what AI writes. The only real "killer app" I'll give it is Github copilot. Most everything else is froth.
When NFTs were trendy, I read constantly on here they were beanie babies, that they were naming a star, whatever. You know what bubble I saw excited about them? Not the tech bros, but artists interested in a new way of monetizing their work. Go read Grammy award winnner RAC's twitter - he addresses people saying he "scammed" people by @ mentioning those he sold NFTs to and asking if they feel scammed. Fans of his bought the NFTs so they had a digital collectible representing his album, he got money to make art.
When Babe Ruth signs a baseball, it's still just a dingy baseball, but it has emotional significance to people. NFTs were the digital equivalent of that. I'm not surprised techies that have no art in their lives struggle to wrap their head around that.
But what is disappointing is that now Stable Diffusion takes a bunch of art that real humans tirelessly made, uses some neural net to rejigger it, and tech bros will die in the trenches making sure we legitimaze this quasi-plagriasm. For all the talks of NFTs being scams and generative AI being substance, I see one technology that incentivized real humans to make real art and another technology that does the opposite, takes money out of artists pockets so people can use algorithms to lift their style.
I'm not trying to oversimplify these topics but it gets tiresome reading the exact same tired talking points about generative AI being substantive and web3 being all scams when there's strong arguments indicating otherwise. It's just impossible to read them when on sites like these they get faded out because you're not allowed to have divergent opinions without a bunch of defensive dorks downvoting you into oblivion.
There's one last important point I want to make. Sites like Reddit and Hacker News and especially mainstream media are unduly influenced by big corporations. True blockchain use cases give power back to the individual. Sure, there's plenty of VC pump and dump shitcoins in crypto such as Solana and NEAR but the long term real utility is about the individual. Meanwhile, LLMs are almost exclusively trained and served by massive corporations, the same massive corporations that can influence the media you read. If a journalist wants to write an article about crypto energy usage, they'll write it. If they want to write about LLM energy usage, you have some of the richest, most powerful people in the world with some of the premier PR firms in the world who can influence that journalist and that publication in all sorts of ways. So critical stories about AI are more likely to get buried than critical stories about crypto. Keep that in mind.
To me, the biggest difference between the AI hype and the crypto hype is that crypto had the skeptics and the critics in the room - as it should. But AI is badly, badly lacking those skeptics and critics.
Disclaimer: I think that we should not use blockchain (here we disagree), and I am not a big fan of generative AI (I think we kind of agree here).
> I really don't understand how the hacker news groupthink can [...] say "there's absolutely nothing there".
Blockchain doesn't solve anything other than cryptocurrencies that was not solved better before. But that leaves this one thing: cryptocurrencies; blockchains does enable cryptocurrencies in a way that was not possible before.
The problem I have with cryptocurrencies is that I don't want them. That's not a technical argument, that's more a preference of what I believe society should do.
So there is not nothing, but web3 is bullshit IMHO.
> You know what bubble I saw excited about them? Not the tech bros, but artists interested in a new way of monetizing their work.
Well, it's hard not to be excited by something that you don't really understand but that may bring you money. Doesn't mean NFTs are desirable. BTW you talk about them in the past, so somehow you do realize that apparently they were not desirable enough to survive, right?
> Meanwhile, LLMs are almost exclusively trained and served by massive corporations
I totally agree with that. I don't want Big Data to steal my data, use it to train models, and sell that back to me. I wish there would be a way to account for copyright and licensing in a decent manner, but I fear that the rich will win (that's capitalism, right?).
Just as much as I believe that Bitcoin made more harm than good, I believe that generative AIs have the potential to make more harm than good. The problem is that companies don't think about whether they should do something - only whether it is profitable. And people typically love to not think about it and just happily try and support all those cool techs.
Lacks an exclusion mechanism, so icons leak in
Includes STL files as photos and fails to display them
Sometimes misses photos for no obvious reason
It's difficult for auto-tagging to add value in the presence of unrelated dealbreakers. Laying off people working on unsexy features does not inspire confidence that they have these priorities in order.
You guys are reading way, way too much into this press release.
People here are acting they've abandoned their existing product and is betting the company on AI, when it could just as easily just be what every single major company has said recently ("we're exploring AI").
Also maybe it sounds better to say "we are restructuring to move to the next cool thing" than saying "we are laying off because... you know... things aren't going that great right now"?
This isn't about photos, it's about walking before you run and Dropbox failing to walk, firing their physical therapist, and talking up their big plans to hire a running coach.
However, I also totally see the point, as an example: the biggest reason I like Google Photos is the automagic tagging on the pictures, I can just write any random description and it usually finds them across 10+ years of photos I have stored (not perfect, but good enough), I can see AI replicating if not even augmenting such functionalities.