It's basically talking about the impact on the environment and which class of society will end up benefiting from AI. I thought the article was pretty clear, and a message we as a society should be discussing more, especially with the current state of things.
With that said, the article reads like it's been through an AI pass, and not as concise and direct as it could be.
"GPU compute powering crypto for the last decade..."
I keep hearing this lately. Also, that GPU compute has been re-purposed from crypto to AI.
I had the impression that crypto was powered by ASICs for the last... many years. And that was why GPU mining (let alone CPU mining) was not profitable
GPUs were used primarily for ethereum and to a lesser extent, other shitcoins. ETH switched to PoS in Sept 2022 and 18+ million GPUs were turned off almost over night. Nothing else has the liquidity to sustain a large operation any longer. ASIC's are used for bitcoin and a few smaller shitcoins, GPUs hadn't been used for bitcoin in many years.
GPUs used for mining don't translate well to AI at any large scale. It is all newly created (modern) hardware. Some miners who ran GPUs (and ASICs) have transitioned to running AI compute (CoreWeave, IREN, NScale, myself...), but that's not the same thing as taking the hardware and using it for AI. It is new hardware.
CPUs for mining crypto are a niche edgecase with very little liquidity and generally a bad idea, since it just incentivizes botnets.
I don't understand how you could compare crypto, which has no utility and no fair value, with AI which is used by hundreds of millions of people every day to achieve real outcomes.
Not OP, but I have, and I'm not impressed. Perhaps it would be good if you are doing things in the training data (like churning out yet another bland website). But if you are doing things that are not well represented in publicly available code, or in unusual languages, then LLMs are not great currently.
They are great for finding the right ffmpg command line arguments though, and not having to deal with that mess must count for something.
“You ingested the vast majority of available human knowledge to build your product, and intend to change the entire world with it, and in fact are doing so incredibly rapidly at a rate that dodges scrutiny. Could we know more?” Would be the expanded version I guess
The OPs framing is better. Where does anyone say there’s a requirement to share data as demanded because you used a publicly available resource. These companies have created something world changing that everyone uses now, that you can get for free or for a very small amount of money. They certainly don’t need to indulge anyone’s nosing or whatever this is, the argument is ridiculous.
No, AI tokens aren’t generic, they by definition cannot be used as a currency because they aren’t fungible. Generated tokens have completely different value depending on their meaning. You can spend 1M tokens doing nothing but wasting time and energy, then spend 100K tokens that bring a lot of value. It’s even weirder because we don’t have a way to know the ROI of tokens in advance
Quite a few of the usual suspects are involved in Crypto, NFT’s, “Metaverse”, and now AI. You’d think people would figure it out, but there’s the old Upton Sinclair quote I guess.
How much you spend on something does have an indication on what the utility is for you. Though people spent on all the other hype things so at the time those things also had some utility for that user.
the metaverse went from being about owning your identity and digital possessions to mostly being about buying jpegs. once collectibles and nft speculation became the headline, it was hard to explain why any of the underlying technology mattered. after that, most people just associated the whole thing with speculation rather than the original vision.
which is a shame, I still feel like VR is full of untapped potential
Yeah - they not just VRChat but many other VR projects are alive and very active, doing verz innovative and almost marvelous things most people don't know anything about.
It might not be a mainstream thing any time soon or ever, but that is not necessary as long as the people invovled woth VR are having fun. :)
With that said, the article reads like it's been through an AI pass, and not as concise and direct as it could be.
I keep hearing this lately. Also, that GPU compute has been re-purposed from crypto to AI.
I had the impression that crypto was powered by ASICs for the last... many years. And that was why GPU mining (let alone CPU mining) was not profitable
GPUs used for mining don't translate well to AI at any large scale. It is all newly created (modern) hardware. Some miners who ran GPUs (and ASICs) have transitioned to running AI compute (CoreWeave, IREN, NScale, myself...), but that's not the same thing as taking the hardware and using it for AI. It is new hardware.
CPUs for mining crypto are a niche edgecase with very little liquidity and generally a bad idea, since it just incentivizes botnets.
Major cryptocurrencies are based on Proof of Work or Proof of Stake. There are other consensus algorithms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt#Introduction
Scrypt has been introduced to stave off ASIC and FPGA solutions.
Ummm ... have you not tried using LLMs for coding work?
They are great for finding the right ffmpg command line arguments though, and not having to deal with that mess must count for something.
Have you tried since November 2025?
You guys have been saying that every few months.
"You read my blog so now show me your utility bill" is... an interesting argument.
Or hell, 2 years ago with "those fucking apes", aka NFTs.
Or, the Meta-Verse. Yeah, that really took.... Off.
I pay OpenAI $100/mo, twice what I pay for my mobile phone service.
It’s a useful service that I use every day.
I have never even heard of anyone in my social circle expressing even a mild interest in tulips, NFTs, or the metaverse.
This bubble has much more in common with the rail road boom and the 2000 fibre build out bubble.
which is a shame, I still feel like VR is full of untapped potential
It might not be a mainstream thing any time soon or ever, but that is not necessary as long as the people invovled woth VR are having fun. :)