

They’re novelties for sure, but I see nothing but toy uses or things that be achieved by other, less wasteful, techniques.
I assume by crypto you mean cryptocurrencies rather than any cryptography, because there’s lots of valid uses for private communication.
So “as a compliment to web search” is a great example. We had really good we search based off deterministic algorithms. Now we have enshittified web search, so you boost it with AI that was significantly more expensive to train, significantly more expensive to run inference on, and can confidently return false “facts”.
We’re not using it because it’s better. We’re using it because the alternative got worse.