Comment by 1dom
5 hours ago
I did a lot of postgraduate research around crypto from 2011 - 2016. There are a lot of parallels, and your message adds to them.
"x is different because we can actually do useful stuff with it" is what every x enthusiast deep in an x bubble or pump n dump says about x.
When the next big tech bubble comes along in 10 - 15 years, there will be people saying exactly what you just said: "NextBigTech you can actually use to build useful things in the world, and NextBigTech thing actually does that building, not just what LastBigTech thing (AI) did, that obviously didn't deliver the utopia it promised".
I wonder what it'll be. AGI? Quantum computing? Brain computer interfaces?
I'd love to pickup this conversation again with you in 15 years.
No, AI is different because we're actively doing useful stuff with it. It's not "this will replace x soon", it's "I don't x anymore because it would be crazy not to use AI for this, which is what I do on a daily basis already."
"No, NewBigTech _is_ different, trust me, I'm an expert in all the things this tech does for us now."
Crypto was doing stuff in 2012, it contributed to a huge amount of global remittance payments even then, and probably still does now.
I was working with intelligence agencies, and crypto was being widely use in a variety of crimes too. Both of those are still probably true, and then there's now probably an entire industry shipping literally billions of $ around the world every day as settlement between exchanges in crypto.
As someone who was approached as an expert at the time, I was saying all the things you're saying to me now at the time about Crypto.
The point is I was right at the time: crypto was being used, and still is. You're right, AI is being used, and still is.
The problem, or the bubble or the pump/dump/parallel element is that the amount of attention and capital flowing around the area is vastly more than the current use cases and is therefore largely speculative.
This is true in AI too. Yes people are using it already daily, but if everyone is already using AI for everything, then why do we need a few hundered billion dollars more of datacentres, chips, RAM and powergen, what's that for...? "Future AI stuff..." soooo.... speculative...?
> if everyone is already using AI for everything, then why do we need a few hundered billion dollars more of datacentres, chips, RAM and powergen
Because everyone is already using AI for everything. That proves its value.
But of course the future isn't evenly distributed yet and only a tiny fraction of 1% of us are using AI all day so far. But once somebody gets converted they don't / can't go back to the old way. And converting them is pretty much instant.
Just like cryptobros will tell you they are doing useful stuff with their latest shitcoin. It's exactly the same thing.
A big difference between crypto and AI is around how crypto could paint a better future once we rebuilt most of our transactional infrastructure and persuaded a quorum to move onto it, and how I personally am benefiting from AI day by day to build myself tools and infrastructure for my life, work, businesses and finances only requires me to accept this change. Everyone else in the world could reject AI-augmented engineering, and I will still be tremendously better off.
You're right.
AI will offer us a utopia when we've finished rebuilding all of our electricity infrastructure and finally got enough AI datacenters, and stopped muggle humans buying memory and GPUs because AI needs them more.
I'm pretty certain I read the sentence above about crypto sometimes around 2015.
The difference is, for the claims of blockchain, it was trivially easy to look at and say, "This could have been a database".
Almost every single blockchain "product" (outside of the peer-to-peer trustless currency ) could have been a database.
This time the cost of entry of small software products has cratered.
For example, I was able to knock up a tool for a guide-maker for a niche game I play that gets about 500 peak daily players on steam.
The entire motivation for the tool is because I personally struggle to follow their well written guide. It takes a reasonable amount of focus and care to adjust a bunch of settings between "runs" based on the guide as written. Getting one of these wrong can set you back a bunch of time without even realising what went wrong.
These settings have an import/export feature in game, but that only allows for a few saved presets, and isn't easy to share.
So I've made a tool that lets people create, organise and share these presets.
Literally the only user is likely to be this single guide maker. Possibly a few others might use it to consume their guides.
Without claude-code, it would never have been reasonable for me to invest the time to make the tool. It would have been an idle dream sitting on my "I wish I had the discipline to make this" pile.
But I don't have the discipline to make that kind of project. I'm too easily distracted, and I'd have got bored of the idea before I'd finished establishing all the boilerplate, let alone before ironing out all the bugs. I also don't have the front-end talent to make things look pretty with CSS.
The LLM doesn't get demotivated. It doesn't get bored, and compressed the building of the prototype down to a day or two. Enough to keep my interest until feedback arrived. A week later, and it's shipped with 50+ issues raised and fixed.
> The difference is, for the claims of blockchain, it was trivially easy to look at and say, "This could have been a database".
Yes, and it's trivial now to look at so many LLM startups and say "that could be a complex if/else statement" or "that could be an Alexa skill" or "I can do that already with my mobile phone".
Everything you've just described about the impact of the friction of you doing your work, and how AI has solved that, is essentially what crypto promised and delivered for a certain subsect of finance, which is why crypto still has market caps in the trillions.
AI will do the same, make a notable change on a certain sub sector of work.
My point isn't that AI is useless, it isn't that it won't add value. It's hugely valuable and will change the world in way people don't even realise, just like dotcom and crypto did and do. Right now though, the disruption and investment is disproportionate and speculative, which is why it has parallels to crypto and dotcom.
Crypto only looked like it solved friction in places with messed up banking.
To people in the EU/UK who had free faster payments before Bitcoin was a thing, it never looked like an improvement at all.
The solution expensive and slow banking was always political, not technical.
Crypto was purely speculative, because it was never solving real problems.
I'm not speculating about problems being solved, I'm out there solving real problems. No-one in "blockchain" ever got to say the same. It was always a promise of things being better. And for many people, things already were better than what was being promised.
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Exactly this. Before crypto it was Big Data, before that it was Low-code platforms
There was also a mini bubble around social media aggregators and RSS feeds culminating in sites like gada.be
I see the dynamic as follows (be warned, cynical take)
1) there are the youth who are seeking approval from the community - look I have arrived - like the person building the steaming pile of browser code recently.
2) there are the veterans of a previous era who want to stay relevant in the new tech and show they still got mojo (gastown etc)
In both cases, the attitude is not one of careful deep engineering, craftsmanship or attention to the art, instead it reflects attention mongering.
Was low code platforms ever hyped to a tiny fraction of crypto and ai?
They were when we called them 4GLs.
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You're telling me big data went away?
Right in the bin next to your DevOps.
This said I remember when the internet was a fad that wasn't going to stick around according to some people, so there is that.
I agree! AI, crypto and dotcom were all hugely valuable and world changing. It's a shame they were all afflicted with hypes and bubbles along the way.
Internet -> Obvious value, more efficient communication, knowledge sharing, transactions etc.
AI -> Value is very obvious to me as a developer.
Blockchain -> ? What is the actual value? Something about decentralized finance and not having to trust anyone? And the tradeoff is every transaction costs $10 or more. It was always a dubious proposition with its "value" driven by speculative investment which fueled the hype machine.
Yeah there are parallels in that in all cases people got really excited about something tech and poured a bunch of money in, but the outcomes and actual amount of value derived can be wildly different.
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Since you're very active with the commenting, what would you say is your definition of "bubble"?
In those years of crypto, did you actually build anything relevant to the world? It sounds like you were in the wrong bubble and now have sour grapes.
Meanwhile im using AI coding agents to build a B2B Saas.
I don't know how relevant to the world another b2b sass platform is. You could easily grab one from github which is where AI is got the data to build one in the first place.
Meanwhile cryto offers an alt banking platform used by many who have been debanked.
I could be building a game, a home blog, any sort of OSS.
The point im making is that crypto exists purely as this alt investment, trading tokens to get rich. Im skeptical its actually being used as a currency in any real currency-fashion. But now seems to be stuck in pump and dump schemes.
Meanwhile, AI is enabling people right now, today, to help build and learn things they normally wouldnt do.
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I was a crypto researcher - I watched all the people like you run to the bubble telling themselves they're building the next b2b crypto SaaS:)
Am I running to the bubble? What I’m saying is I’m using AI as a tool today in a normal industry app, and has greatly improved my performance.
This generalizes to any investment bubble "this time it's different".