this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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A lot of companies investigated cryptocurrency obliquely; "blockchain" was the hype word for several years in tech. And several of those companies had a serious sunk-cost fallacy going when they perpetuated their blockchain projects, despite blockchain only at best being a case of Worse Is Better, where a solution that sucks, but exists can be better than a perfect option that doesn't.
I agree with you that blockchain and cryptocurrency is a scam and has no uses, and I know that several tech companies sprung up to try to make a profit/scam people with "blockchain" tech. But Google/Microsoft/etc never went for those, whereas they are using AI tech. I don't think LLM's/AI's are a fad or a scam, I think there's genuine use cases for them.
Microsoft definitely did: https://www.zdnet.com/finance/blockchain/microsoft-is-shutting-down-its-azure-blockchain-service/
I wouldn't be surprised if there were also serious internal discussions from some cryptocurrency booster within the ranks at Google as well.
And this is an example of the "AI as a continuation of the same grift as blockchain" pipeline, with exactly the same vague business wank with no substance behind it: https://www.aiunleashedglobalsummit.com/summit