Why the AI hype feels different: "ordinary people" use it

Blockchain on the other hand... 👎

I realized I can sum up why the AI hype (and there’s certainly a lot of hype) feels different for me: people want to, and like to, use it.

I was there during the blockchain hype train(s), as a developer and as a hodler, and it was always an uphill battle to onboard new users. The sheer complexity of it - both from the technical side to learn what blockchain and wallets are - and on the conceptual side - to learn WHY you have your wallet and it it’s a different thing from your bank - just drives people away. It took basically transforming the industry into a black market and a lottery (hyuuuuge gainz! to the moon!) to attract people into it - and most of them did it through exchanges and custodial wallets.

The LLM hype, OTOH, looks like a bittersweet combination of love and hate. People are anxious about what the whole “AI” thing will become and how it will affect their jobs, but at the same time, they seem to actually want to use it everywhere. They use it to calculate their bills instead of using a calculator. They use it to decorate their living rooms. People actually do spot occasional inaccuracies / hallucinations, but apparently don’t care.

There’s an old adage that if your hairdresser talks about investing in a product, you know it’s time to sell… but in this case the bust kind of… fails to happen (yet)? IDK. Definitely “interesting times.”