why don't I ever hear anything about NEAR, the "AI blockchain"? Am I in a bubble or is no one serious working on it?

Decentralized open source consciousness | Values-aligned communities | citizen of Black Rock City

Chasing Curiosity. Pluralist. Empathetic Accelerationist. Founding Engineer @icebreaker. YC S16, KB7, fid:66
icbk.me/tayyab.fc

I used to feel good about however I’ve curated my information flow, but then I missed all of Virtuals, so I started 2nd guessing (on top of the periodic healthy 2nd guessing) 

But maybe Virtuals isn’t real either, just a good meme token (and those I don’t catch early generally)

I feel this way about many chains, projects

There were some guys from NEAR at the CB AI Hackathon in SF last month. Seems like there’s a lot of cool things going on, but you’re right, I don’t hear a ton of talk about it, anywhere.

Other than that gimmicky fake hack I've not heard much

I suspect it's the latter. The NEAR folks have never really delivered on any of their promises.