But also, there is insane amount of hype, smoke, and mirrors about such innovations right now, and it is coming from the very same capitalist propaganda engine that hyped up blockchain/crypto/NFT/metaverse.

I don’t doubt it, I mean, Google themselves put out a presentation about their new AI a few weeks back that was fully faked, but there is still quite a lot of progress in the open source camp with ever better models appearing. I helped a little with one of the open source projects some months back and although that one might not have been the best thing it still had some results that were built upon. Anyway, open source is stil not to the point to threaten OpenAI but there are already many people using it for helping with work, for example.

It’s very convenient that all those graphics processors that were pumped out for crypto just happen to be transferable to neural networks.

Not that transferable from what I’m seeing especially as the best ones are needed for training new models while you don’t need as much to run them locally. What I have seen is more about new chips made for AI/Transformers, and in this case the newest and most advanced ones are being sold to the big tech companies at really high prices. I doubt they would be paying that much if they didn’t think it was needed, although to be fair, as long as it makes a profit it doesn’t need to actually be an advancement or anything good.