Don't believe the hype
Crypto and NFT are dead, is AI the next big thing?
Recent years led to a huge hype around crypto. A new coin/token was released every other day, and crypto values were changing as quickly as the temperature in San Francisco. Solana, Ethereum, Shiba Inu, Tether, Cardano: we cannot count the number of tokens available to trade, and nobody can explain the difference between them.
The hype was so intense that projects that started as a joke (Dogecoin) became accepted by online merchants as a valid payment method. Initially skeptical about crypto, I experienced a massive FOMO, felt dumb, and believed I was missing something big. After all, the best investors were jumping into the crypto train. I thought I was the biggest idiot for not buying coins and started investing in crypto (spoiler alert: I lost a lot).
The top of the hype was in 2022 when multiple crypto companies (FTX, eToro, crypto.com, Coinbase) spent a combined $54M on ads during the Superbowl (reminder: a 30 seconds spot cost $6.5M).
2023 came around. Scandals about crypto started to emerge. The FTX/SBF debacle came to light, Terra-Luna collapsed (its value went from $119 to $0), and Three Arrows Capital got liquidated. In less than two years, Coinbase (the most reputable crypto exchange) stock went from ~$350 to ~$35.
In 2023, there was no single ad for a crypto company during the Superbowl.
With crypto going to zero, the hype is now shifting to AI. And investors are shiting millions from crypto/web3 to AI startups. The recent release of ChatGPT (along with other AI tools like GitHub Co-Pilot) make people believe that AI will replace workers. And investors believe ChatGPT and Large Language Model (LLM) are the technologies that will bring them millions.
This technology is unlikely to deliver what it promised. Crypto and web3 made us believe in a decentralized web. AI makes us believe in an automated world where machines are better than ourselves. The reality seems far from it, as AI specialists are warning us (see Yann LeCun tweet below or read the deeplearning.ai recent newsletter). As with web3, tech bros are telling us that it is different, and everybody is jumping into the “generative AI” train and starting new companies.
The reality? We are very far from real artificial intelligence. Products like ChatGPT will continue to make you think they are smart. But the core of the technology is not creative or intelligent: it reproduces what it has seen in the past. And it’s easy to trick the technology to make him do stupid things.
Is this all hype? Not totally. Some companies will produce innovative products. It is unlikely to be the breakthrough that is being sold to us. Instead of replacing humans in the workforce, this technology will likely be an incremental change that will make us more efficient and productive.