August 2, 2026
Tulips, tokens, tantrums
AI Mania: From Tulips to Tokens
Commenters say AI smells like Beanie Babies with a better sales pitch
TLDR: The article says the AI boom may be another hype cycle dressed up as destiny, with real costs hidden behind flashy promises. Commenters immediately split into camps: some mocked it as Beanie Babies 2.0, while others argued AI is obviously useful and the comparison is absurd.
The article swings big: today’s artificial intelligence gold rush is framed as the latest chapter in a long history of hype, from tulips to crypto coins to digital tokens sold one tiny unit at a time. It argues that while companies shout about genius machines and even blame AI for layoffs, ordinary people are left worrying about jobs, power bills, water use, and whether they’re being manipulated by a trend that now seems to market itself. But in the comments, the real show begins: some readers basically yelled, “Here we go again.” One compared it to Beanie Babies, then twisted the knife with “those fucking apes,” dragging NFTs and the failed metaverse into the group chat like the ghosts of hype cycles past.
Others were not buying the doom at all. One commenter flatly said comparing crypto to AI is nonsense because AI is already helping hundreds of millions of people do real things every day. Another dismissed the whole piece as a confused grab bag of facts trying too hard to make AI look evil. And then came the snark: one reader mocked the article’s demand for transparency on energy and water use with the deliciously petty line, “You read my blog so now show me your utility bill.” Even the more thoughtful replies got weird in a fun way, with one person suggesting human skills are the real tulips and tokens are just the generic money layer. In other words: part panic, part eye-roll, part meme war — and everyone thinks they’re the only adult in the room.
Key Points
- •The article compares the AI boom with earlier speculative waves and says GPU compute previously used for crypto has shifted into language models.
- •The article argues that there is no consensus on whether current AI agents are truly intelligent or conscious and states that AI has not solved the hard problem of consciousness.
- •It cites Yann LeCun, Donald Hoffman, and Sam Altman to illustrate differing views on machine intelligence, consciousness, and singularity claims.
- •The article places current AI hype alongside past overstatements about automation, including forecasts about autonomous driving and historical claims that programming would disappear.
- •It argues that the AI industry lacks transparency about resource use and infrastructure impacts, including energy, water, land control, grid constraints, and local opposition to data-center development.