> There are good use cases for machine learning, AI, etc. But sadly, the best ones are masked by the hype-train AI junk that is either useless or incredibly expensive in comparison to the amount of money being charged for it.
so ive been in the industry ~8 years now, and this is the exact same discussion that was held during the NFT/blockchain hype. this cycle seems inevitable for any new disruptive tech.
The difference is that NFT always seemed to be just hype for hype’s sake, with zero functional/helpful use-case at all. No, “trading cards [more like hashes/serial numbers receipts of those tbh], but digital” is not a functional use-case.
And afaik, that was the only use of NFTs that actually worked. The whole “omg you can buy skin in this one game as an nft, and then have it across multiple games” (as well as other bs of a similar nature) was always a ridiculous thing, as it still requires gamedevs to collab and actually do all the required integration work (which is rather infeasible). And even if they decided to ever do that, they would almost certainly find it much easier to accomplish without relying on NFT tech.
AI also has a ton of hype and pipedreams that are vaporware, of course (just look at all the batches of chatgpt wrapper startups in thr past couple of years). However, what the AI hype has (that NFT never did) is a number of actual functional use-cases, and people utilize it heavily for actual work/productivity/daily help with great success.
Claud Code/Gemini CLI alone can be such a boon in the hands of a good software engineer, it is undeniable.
Transcription, translation, material/product defect detection, weather forecasting/early warning systems, OCR, spam filtering, protein folding, tumor segmentation, drug discovery/interaction prediction, etc. seem fairly promising to me, with machine learning approaches often blowing traditional approaches out of the water.
I feel the idea that there's only "one thing it's supposed to be good at (writing code)" is largely down to availability bias, in that we're in programming circles where LLM code completion gets talked about a lot. ChatGPT reportedly has 700 million weekly users - I'd assume many using it for tasks that I'm not even aware of (automating some tedious/repetitive part of their job).
> It sucks at the one thing it's supposed to be good at (writing code).
It sucks at replacing software engineers. So yes, if you expect it to design a complex scalable system and implement it for you from start to finish, then sure, you can call it bad at "writing code".
I don't care about that use-case. I think I am decently good at writing code, and I rather enjoy doing it. I find Claude Code/Gemini CLI extremely helpful at both saving me lots of time by freeing me from dealing with annoying boilerplate, so I can focus more on actual system design (which LLMs fail at terribly, if we are talking about real production apps that need to scale) and more difficult/fun parts of code (which LLMs cannot handle either).
That's the real power of it, multiplying the productive output of good SWEs + making the work feel more enjoyable for them, by letting those SWEs focus on actual tricky/difficult parts, instead of forcing them to spend a good half of the time just dealing with boilerplate.
And I am not even gonna bother getting into tons of other non-coding tasks it is already very useful of. I find it amazing that I can now not only get a transcript of my work meetings (which is already massively helpful for me to review later, as opposed to listening to a ~25min video recording of it), but also ask an LLM to summarize it for me or parse/extract info from it.
I think we’ll start to see a bunch of fintech companies use stablecoins for things, but as more of an implementation detail and not really a speculative market like it was before.
Well stablecoins by design cannot really fluctuate a lot in value (unless they collapse), so speculation on them is pretty much out.
It's still pretty unclear to me why you'd actually want a blockchain for managing it though, rather than a traditional database hosted by the central bank that is responsible for the currency that the stablecoin is following. You'd get vastly more throughput at much lower costs, and it's not like you really need decentralization for such a system anyway. The stablecoin is backed by something the central bank already has authority over.
Depends. Several central banks are working on exactly that, see for example the recent speech by the FED and the whole GENIUS act regulation framework.
But to be honest where I am (northwest Europe) we already have subsecond person-to-person transactions via the normal banking system, no matter which bank the sender and receiver use. So stablecoin-ifying the Euro wouldn't make a huge difference. There might be more to gain if the region doesn't have that kind of payment infrastructure yet.
I don't know about NFT, but blockains allows to me to send money to my Family in usdt/usdc for cents on the dollars, and for example in countries like Venezuela besides using it for receiving and sending money some people use it to save money because you cannot trust in the government and banks
That’s because organized crime provides the demand and liquidity needed for cryptocurrency. Without cartels and the like trying to bypass money laundering and capital control laws you would not easily transfer bitcoin to and from Venezuela.
I agree that this is an odd comparison— blockchain and especially NFTs really are a scam and a pyramid scheme, whereas modern generative AI has dozens of real applications where it's already been massively disruptive.
Maybe compare with something the development of motion pictures, with dozens of small studios trying different approaches to storytelling, different formats, etc, with live performances being the legacy thing getting disrupted. And then the market rapidly maturing and being consolidated down to a few winners that lasted for decades.
The valid use cases for blockchain are relatively few
The use cases where it gets applied are far more than the valid ones
As for NFTs ... there never was (and never will be) a valid use case - it does not matter if you "own" a digital asset (like an image): a screenshot of it is good enough for 99.99999...% of people, so why pay for the "real" thing?
so ive been in the industry ~8 years now, and this is the exact same discussion that was held during the NFT/blockchain hype. this cycle seems inevitable for any new disruptive tech.