Comment by pavlov
6 months ago
Compare these positive introductory experiences with two technologies that were pushed extremely hard by commercial interests in the past decade: crypto/web3 and VR/metaverse.
Neither was ever able to offer this kind of instant usefulness. With crypto, it’s still the case that you create a wallet and then… there’s nothing to do on the platform. You’re expected to send real money to someone so they’ll give you some of the funny money that lets you play the game. (At this point, a lot of people reasonably start thinking of pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing which have the same kind of joining experience.)
With the “metaverse”, you clear out a space around you, strap a heavy thing on your head, and shut yourself into an artificial environment. After the first oohs and aahs, you enter a VR chat room… And realize the thing on your head adds absolutely nothing to the interaction.
The day I can put on a pair of AR glasses as lightweight as my current glasses and gain better vision, I'd pay a huge amount for that.
I hate my varifocals because of how constrained they make my vision feel...
And my vision is good enough that the only thing I struggle with without glasses is reading.
To me, that'd be a no-brainer killer app where all of the extra AR possibilities would be just icing.
Once you get something like enough and high resolution enough, you open up entirely different types of applications like that which will widen the appeal massively, and I think that is what will then sell other AR/VR capability. I'm not interested enough to buy AR glasses for the sake of AR alone, but if I could ditch my regular glasses (without looking like an idiot), then I'm pretty sure I'd gradually explore what other possibilities it'd add.
I just want the ability to put on a lightweight pair of glasses and have it remind me who people are.
Ideally by consulting a local database, made up of people I already know / have been introduced.
And yet while this capability would be life-changing, and has been technically possible for a decade or more, yet it was one of the first things banned/removed from APIs.
I understand privacy concerns of facial recognition looking up people against a global database, but I'm not asking for that. I'd be happy to have the burden of adding names/tags myself to the hashes.
I'd just like to be able to have what other people take for granted, the ability to know if you've met someone before (sometimes including people you've known for years).
This is why you can never trust any proprietary tech by a tech giant.
It's unfortunately a relatively hard optics thing to make reasonably working projectors into glasses, or the tiny OLED ones.
10 years ago I'd have settled for this if it only worked on Game Of Thrones characters.
Every single HN post on AI or crypto I see this argument and it’s exhausting.
When Eliza was first built it was seen a toy. It took many more decades for LLMs to appear.
My favourite example is prime numbers: a bunch of ancient nerds messing around with numbers that today, thousands of years later, allow us to securely buy anything and everything without leaving our homes or opening our mouths.
You can’t dismiss a technology or discovery just because it’s not useful on an arbitrary timescale. You can dismiss it for other reasons, just not this reason.
Blockchain and related technologies have advanced the state of the art in various areas of computer science and mathematics research (zero knowledge proofs, consensus, smart contracts, etc.). To allege this work will bear no fruit is quite a claim.
The problem with this kind of argument is what I'd call the "Bozo the Clown" rejoinder:
It's true that people spent a lot of time investigating something that decades (centuries, millennia) later came to be seen as useful. But it's also true that people spent a lot of time investigating things that didn't.
From the perspective of the present when people are doing the investigating, a strange discovery that has no use can't easily be told apart from a strange discovery that has a use. All we can do in that present is judge the technology on its current merits - or try to advance the frontier. And the burden of proof is on those who try to advance it to show that it would be useful, because the default position (which holds for most discoveries) is that they're not going to have the kind of outsize impact centuries hence that number theory did.
Or in other words: It's a bad idea to assume that everybody who get laughed at is a Galileo or Columbus, when they're more likely to be a Bozo the Clown.
> When Eliza was first built it was seen a toy.
It was a toy, and that approach - hardcoded attempts at holding a natural language conversation - never went anywhere, for reasons that have been obvious since Eliza was first created. Essentially, the approach doesn't scale to anything actually useful.
Winograd'd SHRDLU was a great example of the limitations - providing a promising-seeming natural language interface to a simple abstract world - but it notoriously ended up being pretty much above the peak of manageable complexity for the hardcoded approach to natural language.
LLMs didn't grow out of work on programs like Eliza or SHRDLU. If people had been prescient enough to never bother with hardcoded NLP, it wouldn't have affected development of LLMs at all.
Based on what do we know that Eliza won't scale? Have we tried building an Eliza with a few gigabytes of question/response patterns?
Prior to the rise of LLMs, such a thing would be a waste of time by any respectable AI researcher because it obviously isn't related to intelligence.
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Research is fine. But when corporations and venture capitalists are asking for your money today in exchange for vague promises of eventual breakthroughs, it's not wrong to question their motives.
> With the “metaverse”, you clear out a space around you, strap a heavy thing on your head, and shut yourself into an artificial environment. After the first oohs and aahs, you enter a VR chat room… And realize the thing on your head adds absolutely nothing to the interaction.
It doesn't if you use it as just a chat room. For some people it does add a lot, though.
The "metaverse" as in Active Worlds, Second Life, VR Chat, our own Overte, etc has been around for a long time and does have an user base that likes using it.
What I'm not too sure about is it having mass appeal, at least just yet. To me it's a bit of a specialized area, like chess. It's of great interest to some and very little to most of the population. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with places like chess.com existing.
I don’t have a problem with chess.com existing, but if someone starts shouting loudly about how chess.com is going to be the future of everything, and that I’ll need to buy a bunch of expensive-but-still-kinda-crappy hardware to participate in the inevitable chess.com-based society, and that we need to ground-up rearchitect computing to treat chess as fundamental component of UI… well, it just gets a little tiresome.
That's just silly, everyone knows the future is lichess.
AI has the same vague hand-wavey problems of the metaverse. LLMs are not AI. Roblox is not the metaverse. Both are approaching parts of the promise of each of their potential, but only a small part of what they could be or are promised to be.
Hype cycles will hype. Builders will build.
I think AI is inevitable in the way that bitcoin is now inevitable: it's not going to go away, it consumes a huge amount of energy, has various negative externalities, but a massive fanbase.
It doesn't really matter whether crypto is "useful", it has billions of dollars worth of fans. Similarly the LLM fans are not going to go away. However, there will probably be curated little oases for human-made works. We're also going to see a technique adapted from self-crashing cars: the liability human. A giant codebase is launched and a single human "takes responsibility" (whatever that ends up meaning) for the failures.
It does matter whether something is useful and I really wish people would stop making comparisons to crypto because it's an absolutely terrible comparison.
AI is certainly in a bubble right now, as with dotcoms in 1999. But AI is also delivering a lot of value right now and advancing at an incredible pace. It will become ubiquitous and at a faster pace than the Internet ultimately did.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin has been around for 17 years and there still are no non-criminal use cases apart from buying it and hoping it will be worth more in the future.
> Meanwhile, Bitcoin has been around for 17 years and there still are no non-criminal use cases apart from buying it and hoping it will be worth more in the future.
That is plain and simply false. It works just fine as a currency, and some legitimate businesses even accept it. I think it's true that Bitcoin is not particularly useful, but that's not the same as there being no non-criminal use cases.
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> With crypto, it’s still the case that you create a wallet and then… there’s nothing to do on the platform. You’re expected to send real money to someone so they’ll give you some of the funny money that lets you play the game.
This became a problem later due to governments cracking down on cryptos and some terrible technical choices made transactions expensive just as adoption was ramping. (Pat yourselves on the back, small blockers.)
My first experience with crypto was buying $5 in bitcoin from a friend. If I didn't do it that way I could go on a number of websites and buy crypto without opening an account, via credit card, or via SMS. Today, most of the $5 would be eaten by fees, and buying for cash from an institution requires slow and intrusive KYC.
> buying for cash from an institution requires slow and intrusive KYC.
Hello my friend, grab a seat so we can contemplate the wickedness of man. KYC is not some authoritarian or entrenched industry response to fintech upstarts, it's a necessary thing that protects billions of people from crime and corruption.
That's an unreasonably charitable reading of the purpose of KYC. It's primarily about government control of the primary medium of economic exchange. As always, this benefits the privileged at the expense of the less privileged.
Its use to limit competition from cryptocurrency is a perfect example of that. A major market which crypto was supposed to be able to serve - the "unbanked" - are largely locked out of it. Turns out giving poor people access to money is not a feature that the system wants to allow.
The benefit you claim for KYC is a marketing bullet point side effect at best.
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So was the telescreen.
There are Ethereum, Algorand, many alternatives with low fees.
> And realize the thing on your head adds absolutely nothing to the interaction.
There are some nice effects - simulating sword fighting, shooting, etc.
It's just benefits still outweigh the cost. Getting to "good enough" for most people is just not possible in short and midterm.
Bitcoin seems to be working as a kind of digital gold if you look at price development. It's not that much about technology though.
Except that you can't clone gold or fork gold.
Gold isn't lost because you forgot the password to open it.
Or arbitrarily decide tomorrow that the old gold is not valid and a specific chain of gold is the real one.
Also, you can smelt gold, create electronics, jewellery, cosmetics, drugs with gold, you can't with Bitcoin.
Seriously comparing Bitcoin to gold is beyond silly.
I'm not invested in Bitcoin in any way, so I consider myself neutral. But I see some similarities here. Yes, unlike Bitcoin, gold has some real uses - but it's not what defines gold price, so I don't think it's relevant here. Yes, humanity could theoretically collectively decide that from now on gold is not valuable any more and chose some other scarce material as a way to store wealth, so I think it's not unlike bitcoin really. The difference is in mindshare - gold obviously has more of that, including governments investing in gold. Bitcoin is more likely to drop out of fashion with investors than gold, but so far it didn't happen, and there is also a chance it will not happen or that it will get even more mindshare, e.g. with other states following Trump's US in creating bitcoin reserves.
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Give it some time - just like LLMs the first VR headsets were created in the 90s (for example by Nintendo). But it took another 30 years for the hardware to achieve levels of functionality and comfortableness that make it a viable consumer product. Apple Vision is starting to get there. And crypto is even younger - it started in early 2009. For people living in countries without a proper banking infrastructure the stablecoins are already very helpful. Billions of people live in countries that don't have a well audited financial sector, that respects the rule of law or an independent central bank that makes sound monetary decisions irrespective of the government. For them stablecoins and their cheap transactions are huge.
I feel like my personal experience of the metaverse is a really good comparator for LLM’s. Really cool, I can see the possibilities, I want it! It seems like it’s there, But I can also see that the gap between what exists and what would make it truly useful is too great.
The question I have for your observation (which I think is correct btw) is:
Do you think it's inherent to the technology that the use cases are not useful or is it our lack of imagination so far that we haven't come up with something useful yet?
Solutions in search for a problem just don’t tend to be very good solutions after all.
Maybe the answer isn’t that we’re too dumb/shallow/unimaginative to put it to use, but that the metaverse and web3 are just things that turned out to not work in the end?