Tell HN: Crypto/web3 grifters are Now AI/ML grifters
Me and some of my colleagues are fairly active on the MachineLearning subreddit and we've been getting a lot of unsolicited dms to collaborate in a breakthrough ML/AI project. The conversations start something like this: https://imgur.com/a/z6GUTGc Yup, you guessed it, they have the idea and we have to implement it. If you look into their profile history, you’ll see that they’ve been heavy on crypto/NFT/web3 stuff until a few months ago, some even made good money. They don't even have the dataset. One guy proposed my friend that he has a startup idea to use GPT-model to let people talk to their pets and that it should be 'fairly easy' to finetune from an existing model.
I am already fairly tired of seeing all the ChatGPT stuff on my socials, and I am not looking forward to another few years of more low effort/low quality stuff in peak of inflated expectations phase. I love GPT, I have many pipelines where I actively use it, but I also see the potential where people will abuse it, in every form from increased spam, personalized phishing, etc. Imagine scammers calling your grand parents not with an non-native accent anymore - heck maybe with your own voice (which in my head is fairly easy to do - get someone's family tree, call the grandkid using a model fine-tuned on some local accent, perhaps of the opposite gender and engage them in a conversation - use the voice clips to finetune another model and then call their parents/grandparents to get money, heck even the transcript for the scam interaction can be auto-generated). I am a first-generation college student, and getting my parents to use a smartphone has itself been a challenge - there's no way I can teach them to identify sophisticated scams. I bracing myself and not looking forward for all of this to come.
165 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadWe already have seen plenty of AI grifters on HN creating clones and copies of AI SaaS and bot offerings with almost no use case on top of ChatGPT with the AI bros selling their snake-oil as "the future" and AI totally replacing everyone's jobs almost just like the extreme crypto maximalists screaming about their utopia of replacing the banking system with crypto coins.
It is another grift for the AI bros, with OpenAI and Microsoft being the winners and can easily gate-keep and price out the majority of these grifter jumping on the bandwagon late, unless Stable Diffusion drives everything down to zero by releasing a better model for free.
But the truth is both crypto and AI are here to stay no matter the grifters and the opportunists. The inevitability on both of these technologies is that the laws will catch up with them eventually.
That said, I feel like that's true of people in general, at least in tech (I can't speak to other fields much), and it is extremely frustrating: history is important!
For me crypto is similar to the late 90's where everyone talked about how P2P i.e. decentralised communication was going to change the world. Remnants still live on today up and down the tech stack but that vision never became a reality.
I think crypto will similarly find its way into the traditional finance sector and live on but the utopia of decentralised finance will never eventuate.
To do that it would have to do something, anything, even one tiny little bit better than something in finance.
So far it's like quantum computing. Nothing is better solved with a quantum computer right now. Will that change in the future? Maybe. Until it does they simply won't be used. After all, why would they - except as an opportunity to build in-house expertise in a new space, and for the perception of being hip?
There is no preordained future where it's accepted, it has to earn its spot.
To be fair, DeFi offers better returns than are commercially available to the average consumer (granted, with increased risk, but still).
A conventional Ponzi scheme also offers very high returns, at a very high risk.
Put another way: if this clear yield actually existed, it would be arbitraged into the dirt by Cumberland/DRW and Jump - not left to the retail schlubs.
I’ve been assuming that one of the companies in that space will pivot to basically modern PKI infrastructure (signed transactions, etc. without 90s baggage like PGP, decentralized only in the sense of working offline on cheap hardware well enough to replace a paper check with a signature using their phone’s secure element) long enough to declare victory and get acquired, at which all of the cryptocurrency sales guys cosplaying as developers will start claiming that’s what they had in mind all along.
You needn't have been alive to be aware of the history, you could, you know, read about history.
Let's just say I much prefer the AI/ML community. The culture there was open to new ideas but wanted to see evidence things worked (leaving aside attention seeks like Gary Marcus). Blockchain is all hype and attacking people who ask questions (although the zero-knowledge community is pretty good).
And that it's far more difficult to bootstrap an AI model based business given the infrastructure costs versus a boring old SaaS one.
Imagine a brand new artist who has a distinct style, but yet the art style is used to print 20,000 successful NFT rug pulls. If there was a market, there is no longer one anymore.
I think that's the problem.
The Magus, by John Fowles
current scams are crypto-related. not web3, which doesn't have money written all over it. these scammers follow the money. still curious how they will use AI or ML for scams. the example given does not convince me. and doesn't need any of the current AI/ML advancement.
Web3 sounds to me like antiquated nostalgia for something that happened at the turn of the century.
It didn't really go anywhere.
Web3 now is sort of a thing because one of the main Ethereum client libraries is called Web3: https://github.com/web3/web3.js
I specifically said 'It didn't really go anywhere" and pointed at the Ethereum (aka crypto) Web3 library!
I was expanding on @DonHopkin's comment "The original Web3 stuff that came less than a year after the Web2 stuff in the early 2000's".
In my view back then it was dumb (Web2.0 was still a new thing) and was just an attempt by the Semantic Web fans to get some hype. It didn't work.
(For better or worse I work at a Web3 company so I'm reasonably aware of how it is used within that community today)
Wikipedia has a disambiguation page in this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0
it's a matter of understanding here. web3 is a set of technologies (decentralization, blockchains, etc.). once you understand that you know that with or without crypto it can stand on its own. (oh i mean cryptocurrency just in case you didn't get it).
Most of the links in that arbitrary search page include crypto terms in the description, and I’m guessing that most (all?) of them include them after clicking through.
You have personal knowledge of many web3 use cases that don’t involve crypto. Do you have a single example?
no i won't. that page is enough for you. who are you?
Out of curiosity, why are you trying to convince me of something while simultaneously refusing to give a single actual example? You’ve already put in the effort to respond to me multiple times but you can’t type www dot (non crpto web3 project) dot com because it’s too uhh… demeaning? Literally impossible?
Are you saying that my being skeptical of crypto means I’m biased against web3?
How could that be the case if they’re unrelated concepts?
Also lol at digging through my post history instead of talking about the topic.
> Also lol at digging through my post history instead of talking about the topic.
Cool have a nice day.
And i would love for researchers to not have to code
I’ll give just one very small example: I have this huge photo library on my phone and sometimes I need to find a particular photo or receipt from a specific business that I clicked 3-4 years ago. Doing that manually means spending at least 10 mins to 30 mins if I don’t remember the exact month or year I clicked it in. And I used to mostly defer finding the photo as much as I could. Or do it when I was totally bored and nothing to do.
Cue AI: I type the business name or photo description in the search bar and it displays the photo right there. 3 seconds.
Another could be about the Camera app using CV to read live text or numbers. I guess CV and LLMs are specifically going to explode this year as they already have a strong base and proven use case.
Roughly 5 years ago it seemed amazing that you could search through Google Photos for "dog" and find all your dog pictures. That seems like such a minor milestone now, when you compare it to the way you can today generate amazing text & visual content matching a specific dog that you describe with a single sentence.
Anybody want to develop work in "hackathon" format to train AI to play PONG, in exchange for promises of equity and a cut of profits instead of cash for your time?
This Big Idea Guy assured me: "Biggest thing is i solved the hard ai/cognitive problem. Hence our secrecy".
Color me impressed! Who wouldn't want to work passionately for promises of peanuts in exchange for a piece of that pie?
And not only has he trademarked "Synthetic Cognitive Identities (TM)" but also he's applied to trademark "ARTIFICIAL PERSONALITY".
https://uspto.report/company/Luke-Du-Pont-S-Phoenix-Core-Ent...
All that groundbreaking top secret trademarked AI technology solving "the hard ai/cognitive problem" just to play PONG. But can it pass butter?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs
Also his now-shut-down Twitter account and his own words when I confronted him about it prove that he is a flaming homophobic transphobic bigot who retweets White Supremacist propoganda, so you better not apply if you're remotely "woke," or aren't qualified and willing to singlehandedly develop a cutting edge MVP on Unity and Unreal Engine at the same time.
Pick a lane, dude.
Oh and you'd also better know how to use Bayes' Theorem to cover your Posterior = Likelihood × Prior ÷ Evidence. He though he'd just throw that qualifying requirement in to filter out the charlatans.
JOB DESCRIPTION
Summary of the Position:
The Potential Engineer will develop work in “hackathon” format collaborating with a cross-disciplinary team to build amazing new technology and tools in the newly designed Artificial Intelligence space of Synthetic Cognitive Identities (TM). This space is specifically a MVP for a SCI to play Pong against a player under the rules of the leadership design. Nuget package and dll come in play in targeting unity and unreal as release platforms for ease of usability.
Main Responsibilities:
Be responsible for your feature's network, memory, GPU and CPU usage
Work on fixing issues in your feature's work.
Make necessary updates to improve stability / performance of the SCI engine
Implement Unity Engine plugins
Work closely with Sr. Developers on project implementation
QUALIFICATIONS
Experience & Qualifications Required:
Passion for software development – we expect you to like to write and maintain code
Experience with the latest Unity Engine release
Experience with Unity profiling tools
Experience with Python
Experience with LISP
Experience with C #
Experience with Unreal Engine Blueprints
Experience with the latest Unreal Engine release
Experience with Unreal profiling tools
Experience with Unreal plugin implementation
Experience with C++
Cross-platform libraries
Experience with communication protocols (HTTP / Web Sockets)
Familiarity with build processes, compiler tool-chains
Experience writing multi-threaded code and reasoning about dependency graphs
Experience with Git
Optimization skills for both code and assets
Statistical and data analytics
Bayes' theorem
Debugging skills
Be ready to invest the effort to become an even better developer
LDAP/Active Directory
High performance computing
Network and software security
Cloud and virtualization technologies
Edge computing
We will appreciate:
Interest in the latest programming trends such as functional and reactive programming
High availability - hardware and software clustering
Tensor flow/Tensor board
AWS application load balancer and elastic load balancing (ec2 compute)
Are they getting this from somewhere? I had a guy show up in my office one day claiming to have invented something even better than machine learning, "machine personality". Similarly claimed to need total secrecy.
He'll end up with two college interns that he'll haggle with for the internship certificates / recommendations. That's what usually ends up happening.
As far as I can see, they're just typing a prompt into Stable Diffusion or DALL-E and picking a nice image.
It's lazy, talentless, and demeans the actual artists whose work was stolen to train these models.
Eventually the expectations changed. No longer was the village impressed with stick figures. A distinction had to be made between the average stick figure carvers and the good ones. They called them "artists".
Eventually someone figured out how to add color. The cycle repeats and expectations changed, the average distinguished from the talented. No longer was drawing a stick figure without color considered art. To be an artist, you had to use color.
Then someone showed up with a brush, then Photoshop, then Stable Diffusion. In the year 2023, expectations changed, yet again. And the average were separated from the talented, and the best prompt writers were considered artists.
In the year 2040...
I find this event similar than the photography. Oil painters did less portraits but you still have oil painters today. And many people did art using photography.
Crypto grifting was selling the dream to get rich. There was nothing in it to begin with. I think 'grifting' means dishonesty - selling snake oil. I don't think applies to AI, even if it's just a temporary hype cycle. I should mention that Bitcoin is obviously a real thing; "crypto" is the thousands of useless coins which claim to be the next Bitcoin.
In particular https://www.earthspecies.org/ is a pretty interesting project.
Are you kidding me? The movement of people like me who are deeply skeptical about the benefits of generative AI and place them in similar categories of "potentially hazardous to society" inventions like drugs, weapons, etc. is alive and well. We're genuinely fearful that there are folks out there who apparently aren't aware of the severe legal and cultural minefields that these sort of unregulated tools present. I haven't the slightest doubt that, now that we're seeing the collapse of "web3" nonsense/blockchain apps/cryptocurrencies/etc., there's a wealth of grifters looking for their next score and "AI" is the obvious successor.
for me it feels more inspiring and uplifting about the future of humanity than any technology I've experienced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGFEW2Hb2g
Copilot, I don't know.
VR is a thing, but still not the announced overwhelming revolution.
To me it looks like something very impressive, but not good enough to rely on it for any serious work..
A year or two ago, these exact same "people" were "genuinely excited" about blockchain and were finding ways to "build apps" around it despite having no idea what a blockchain even was. There is literally no difference.
Obviously, don't do the unethical stuff but if they were somewhat lucky in the crypto boom it would be nice to have that money redirected to ML.
I don't know if its possible to make people talk to their friends using GPT models but sounds like something that people can actually pay for.
If they don't have the dataset, building one or acquiring one can be added to the todo list.
You probably never received such am offer. It's always in the form of "I bring the idea, you do all the work and, instead of money, you'll receive a ${rand(5,20)}% share of the resulting company!". And if you offer to do the work for money instead, you'll never hear back.
People serious enough to put money behind their ideas won't randomly ping Reddit mods with them.
That's why I say do it if they are actually going to pay for your time. I don't know if anyone ever falls to the guy with idea but no resources and no expertise to do it themselves anyway?
People with money to put behind an idea will either open with "I'm looking to hire an ML engineer with experience for a startup idea" (keyword being "hire") or maybe "I'm planning to found a startup and am looking for a technical lead/cofounder". That is, in the unlikely case that they'll hire by pinging Reddit mods instead of going to a known job site.
There is maybe a minuscule chance that there's indeed someone in there who had a windfall, is willing to invest money and has a good idea but no clue on how to hire people, but this is a bit like responding to every spam email in the hopes that you indeed have a deceased Nigerian relative, which inherited you millions but was unable to afford a lawyer that actually speaks English.
"This is an excellent idea and I would be happy to get started on it. Please send me X BTC to this address as a downpayment."
Every bubble busts, but the end result has left us with rail lines, the United States, radio, television, digital cameras, and fiber optic lines.
The overall direction is upwards. EVs will probably be the long term outcome of the last bubble. AI still has a long way to go.
Crypto will probably go the way of the less useful bubbles (beanie babies and tulips)
Doesn’t need to be fraudulent to be a bubble.
People say that and yet it's been like what, 14 years? How long can a tulip market really last?
I figured that “old people getting on Facebook” must have been the final Eternal September, but apparently nope. Now, people that otherwise would never post (on social media, forums, etc) due to not having any knowledge or opinion on a given topic have the option of copying and pasting text back and forth to mindlessly farm engagement.
The era of the Ultimate Reply Guy is upon us, and it sucks. In the same way that rickrolling was a substitute for having a sense of humor, “Here’s what the robot says” is a substitute for insight or personality.
This is such an odd, hostile way to react to people posting things on the internet that I'm genuinely curious what part of this you have an actual problem with?
Framed another way, what you're describing here is that using ChatGPT is interesting enough to trigger engagement from social media users who are otherwise mostly inactive. If that is indeed the case, imo that is a pretty strong indicator of appeal to a wide audience.
I understood the comment to mean the posters are not posting about ChatGPT, but using ChatGPT to generate vapid (?, or inauthentic?) posts to farm engagement where there would otherwise be silence.
It’s not really a fun party trick if literally everyone can do it. If I want to know what GPT has to say about something, I can find out myself in seconds.
If you think there's no difference, why not just cease all contact with other humans and spend the rest of your life talking to ChatGPT since you love it so much?
There's no exchange of ideas or views, the entire point of discussion, because the person you're discussing the issue with doesn't know what they're talking about. So it's a complete waste of time. Yet this can be hard to see at first because, thanks to the internet, even a blind man could describe the art of the Sistine Chapel with absolute clarity.
ChatGPT will make this orders of magnitude worse. Because now that "proof my biases are right" will become more eloquent and more dynamic. And the lack of knowledge even more extreme, because now you need not even be able to paraphrase what you're reading. Just dump it straight from the bot.
And then there will be active abuse. Now spammers and governments alike can have a million bots spamming either for viagra or war. And it will be done using dynamically generated text that can be tied into any arbitrary topic. And populating those bots with "real" histories will be trivial by having them formulate random, but relevant, comments in topics outside their "real" purpose.
It feels hyperbolic, yet it seems very possible that text-generation software may kill off meaningful discourse on the internet, at least outside of small vetted communities. And while internet dialogue has always been a bit of a bubble, the inevitable "dynamic propaganda" now means you'll never be able to even get a remote sense of the views of the public at large.
Second, this was already going on for much longer than you think. If you read reddit now, or if you were 5 years ago, most of the posts are reposts from bots, and most of the top comments are reposts from top comments of the exact same posts. People, or bots, I don't know, literally find the previous posts of the exact same thing and copy/paste the top comments from there to have a higher chance at getting karma, and it's working.
Is it somebody that pops up to tell people that their opinions are wrong and insult them?
People with interesting ideas walked away because they could not create quality content at that rate. Or they had these "experts" shout them down. ChatGPT just seems to be more of the same.
As opposed to the usual high-quality, high-effort content on social media of one of the following: pictures of pets, pictures of kids, pictures of food, pictures of an insightful quote you copied somewhere, videos of you lip synching to something, videos of you dancing the exact same dance that a million other people have done on other videos, pictures of you in front of a landmark or at a beach or pool to show how "wordly and cultured" you are, your quiz results for some bullshit made-up quiz, some five-second hot take commentary on some current event topic (likely just parroting another hot take you read five minutes earlier), how much you loved or hated the newest blockbuster film or tv show, etc etc.
I'd rather see what a good A.I. has to say about various subjects compared to most of those, personally.