TechTakes

The parallels are many.

1. hype - of course. This is the future of everything. not just money. I wasn't as involved in HN during peak BTC but I imagine it was also filled with unprompted musings about how crypto would change everything.
2. technical obscurantism. I struggled with this for a while. While crapto is easy to debunk if you know a bit about economics, the technical part isn’t too hard either. I was lost in the deluge of talk about “weights” and models before I figured it was just the same technobabble trying to make something more profound. I don’t understand how an LLM works like I understand how a blockchain works, but seeing the birds-eye view (i.e., how profoundly non-useful a lot of the applications are) has helped
3. massive energy over-expenditure, of course

As to what's different, AI hype is pushed by "real" people. Crapto for all its faults was thankfully hindered by the community's inherent aversion to public scrutiny to reach mainstream until arguably the danger had passed. AI has no such guardrails. People are betting the farm on hype and there's no GAAP nor SEC to pull the brakes.

It's also paradoxically less hopeful. Crapto at least promised a grass-roots upheaval of the global financial system[1]. AI just feels like the Big Tech companies are taking the velvet glove off and preparing to grind us all into algo-dust, with the benefits accruing to the already rich. You could start a shitcoin with some sweat, a GPU and a big-ass cooling fan, but the home-brew AI rig can never be as good as ChatGPT, even if it's pulling 3.5kWh of juice[2]

EDIT I do believe the dangers of AI are greater. While there was a very small risk of crypto derailing the entire financial industry (especially in the wake of the subprime crisis), I do see a large risk of AI basically destroying the open internet.

[1] albeit the populism was of the national socialist kind

[2] you just know the dude is gonna use it for deepnudes