AI Mania: From Tulips to Tokens(seanhelvey.com)
48 pointsby Lambda116 hours ago11 comments
  • smokel6 hours ago
    This is a pretty confusing article. It seems to string together some loosely related facts to make the current AI boom look bad.
    • 5 minutes ago
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    • simonjgreen6 hours ago
      It is confusing. But I enjoyed the read, it’s refreshing to read a string of rants from a human rather than something perfectly polished by Opus.
      • andy996 hours ago
        I didn’t read it, primarily because of the tulip thing in the title which seems anything but a refreshing take.
        • jayd165 hours ago
          One sentence in, it mentions that the tulip reference is from a book on botany and perhaps not just a reference to Wallstreet and bubbles.
        • jrflowers5 hours ago
          Nice. What other stuff haven’t you read?
      • cadamsdotcom3 hours ago
        Can you point me to where to read things perfectly polished by Opus?

        I'll give them to Opus to show it how not to suck at writing.

      • c-fe5 hours ago
        I also enjoyed it. Something about the writing really made me enjoy it, it was so different from the llm text i read all day long
    • pydry5 hours ago
      Unless you subscribe to the view that This Time It's Different(tm), they seem pretty pertinent.
      • babelfish5 hours ago
        tulips do not have intelligence, tokens do
        • lioeters5 hours ago
          That's an unintelligent thing to say about tulips.
          • babelfish4 hours ago
            you are welcome to invest in tulips!
            • lioeters2 hours ago
              Intelligent tulip on the phone: "Put down 10K tokens on OpenHumans, Inc! It's Monkey Mania out there."
    • bjourne5 hours ago
      Agreed. It has nothing to do with either tulips nor mania. Just some random musings.
    • bezier-curve5 hours ago
      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.

  • botencat5 hours ago
    Does this article being unreadable prove that it was at least written by a human? Frustrating tradeoff.
    • nadermx5 hours ago
      Not the solution you where hoping AI to solve?
  • cyfex5 hours ago
    "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

    • decimalenough5 hours ago
      Bitcoin mining is powered by ASICs. Random shitcoins are not.
      • reverius425 hours ago
        Random shitcoin mining surely isn't a large fraction of industrial GPU usage?
        • decimalenough5 hours ago
          Not anymore, but around 10 years ago it absolutely was, because for a short period you could literally print money with them.
          • reverius425 hours ago
            Ah, but any 10 year old GPU now is e-waste, not useful LLM hardware. So it might as well have been mining ASICs.
    • latchkey5 hours ago
      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.

    • ButlerianJihad5 hours ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cryptocurrencies

      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.

  • blfr6 hours ago
    We created the content their systems are built on, yet they won’t even share how much energy each query uses, how much water goes to cooling

    "You read my blog so now show me your utility bill" is... an interesting argument.

    • simonjgreen6 hours ago
      “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
    • jayd166 hours ago
      Take advantage of open information, provide little yourself. Seems like a consistent enough line of questioning.
      • andy995 hours ago
        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.
  • dools5 hours ago
    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.
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    • bigstrat20035 hours ago
      Crypto bros claim that crypto is super useful, revolutionary tech too. The proof is in the pudding, and AI has yet to show any real utility.
      • dools5 hours ago
        > and AI has yet to show any real utility

        Ummm ... have you not tried using LLMs for coding work?

        • VorpalWay5 hours ago
          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.

          • dools2 hours ago
            I've built 4 pretty novel features where the LLM didn't know how to solve the problem, but with design/decision input from me was able to implement it. Between the two of us it was done, I would estimate, 10 - 20 times faster in terms of man hours than the same implementation would have taken without the use of LLMs. Like it's team level productivity from a single developer. In my case it was done infinity times faster because I just wouldn't have done these things, it would have been cost-prohibitive.
          • simonw5 hours ago
            > 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.

            Have you tried since November 2025?

            • ofjcihen4 hours ago
              They did get better around that time but there are some things that they are legitimately bad at for now.
            • what4 hours ago
              >have you tried since $date

              You guys have been saying that every few months.

              • simonw4 hours ago
                And you guys have been consistently replying with that exact same comment.
                • dools2 hours ago
                  Have you been consistently replying with the same answer to that comment? Or have you genuinely tried using coding agents?
                • what11 minutes ago
                  Maybe because not everyone works on trivial shit and it still doesn’t work for them?
          • empty_set352044 hours ago
            For what it's worth, engineers at proprietary trading firms are finding that they can get substantial productivity boosts by using LLMs and it'd be hard to find a domain that's less represented in the training data.

            Does definitely require more steering than if you're churning out slop apps/websites though.

  • turtleyacht6 hours ago
    Aren't human skills the tulips? That's why we're recording all kinds of movements; tokens become generic execution currency.
    • dgellow6 hours ago
      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
  • gyanchawdhary5 hours ago
    this article reminds me of Greta for some reason .. wonder what she's upto these days ?
  • arisAlexis5 hours ago
    In the meantime tulips prove math theorems that humans couldn't solve. Ridiculous article title (I wouldn't read it)
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  • nekusar6 hours ago
    Or the 1990s Beanie Babies.

    Or hell, 2 years ago with "those fucking apes", aka NFTs.

    Or, the Meta-Verse. Yeah, that really took.... Off.

    • EA-31676 hours ago
      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.
    • jiggawatts6 hours ago
      Tulips, NFTs, and the Metaverse all revolved around exclusivity and collectibles. Art with no real utilitarian value.

      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.

      • gcgbarbosa6 hours ago
        How did metaverse revolved around exclusivity or collectibles?
        • simonjgreen6 hours ago
          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

          • m4rtink5 hours ago
            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. :)

        • jiggawatts3 hours ago
          A big part of the metaverse was "buying land" in exclusive locations, a similar concept to NFTs or crypto in general.
      • GolfPopper5 hours ago
        You start with "real utilitarian value" and your example is... how much you pay for it. That sounds more like a drug habit.
        • chung81235 hours ago
          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.
        • quietbritishjim5 hours ago
          I think their point is that is pretty cheap for such a useful service. The opposite of a bubble price.