My experience is that when crypto was in the news, my non-technical friends, family, and colleagues would ask me what is bitcoin and were generally confused.
My experience with the AI boom couldn't be more different - everyone from my colleagues to my mum are using chatgpt as a daily tool.
I really don't think that AI and crypto are comparable in terms of their current practical usage.
Comparing crypto and AI is really tired and you make the best point - real people are using these GPUs to actually do things of value and improve their daily lives.
At the peak of the crypto boom/hype cycle I took on a little project to look at the top 10 blockchain networks/coins/whatever.
From what I could tell a very, very, very generous estimate is that crypto at best has MAUs in the low tens of millions.
ChatGPT alone got to 100 million MAUs within a year of release and has only grown since.
ChatGPT 10x'd actual real world usage of GPUs (and resulting power and other resources) in a year vs ~15 years for crypto.
> I really don't think that AI and crypto are comparable in terms of their current practical usage.
GPUs stopped being used for crypto because Ethereum switched from PoW to PoS and that decimated the whole gpu mining industry. Ethereum was the only profitable thing to mine, that also had a usecase. The rest of the chains dumped in price and became unprofitable to mine at scale. Not enough market depth to unload the tokens at scale.
> GPUs in AI provide far more value and utility than crypto ever has regardless of how/if it’s mined with them or not.
Two points:
1. GPUs for AI != GPUs for crypto. They are not the same systems. There is a tiny bit of overlap, but most people bought underpowered gpus that were focused on ROI. For example, you didn't need more than 8GB ram. You also didn't need ultrafast networking.
Wow, what a different in perspective. I've met maybe a few people period that have at least mentioned that they've ever used AI tools (ever) in their personal lives, frequency be damned. Maybe you're just a lot more insistent in weaving in questions about using AI tools in daily conversation.
At work setting in a tech company, there seems to be a handful that are very in love with AI, a bunch that use it here or there, and a large majority that (at least publically) don't even use it. It's be interesting to see what company enforced spyware would say about ai uptake though for real.
My experience with the AI boom couldn't be more different - everyone from my colleagues to my mum are using chatgpt as a daily tool.
I really don't think that AI and crypto are comparable in terms of their current practical usage.