If the latest AI swarm from OAI decided to astroturf HN, we probably would struggle to know. It seems easy relative to coordinating a massive hack of Hugging Face.
replySo I half stopped paying attention to enthusiastic posts and comments about AI.
It's the cutting edge and it's a bit wild west. There is a lot of room for innovative use cases that, whether actually practical or not, can be marketed and sold as practical.
replyAI discussions attract people who love it, who hate it and who are tired of hearing about it. All three groups end up opening the thread and commenting.
replyBecause it is the hot new thing and HN is a hype machine. Before AI there were crypto and blockchain, after AI there will be something else.
replyThere won't be an after AI
replyBecause if the idea is interesting, it's interesting.
replyDont know about that.
replyA significant portion of the posts are of the type "new version of model X was just released" or "I just built something by prompting an LLM a few times".
Latest papers from DeepSeek and DeepMind on the other hand are rarely discussed and if ever posted the comment section quickly turns into political discussions or my bigcorp is better than your bigcorp wars.
That of HN is a largely non-random public, not a fully selected public. Of course Paretian distributions are also valid here.
reply(Edit: and it is evident in this very page.)
Just like AI-related projects on GitHub always get an entirely different order of magnitude of stars. This is what people are focused on, outshines anything else.
replyI have no doubt there is lot of boosting going on. Essentially entire industry is build on boosting in many ways. So manipulating any available discussion platform is almost certain.
replyIts all about AI these days.
replyPoints aren't that meaningful but that's the part that is a "popularity contest."
replyFor what it's worth.
The submitter reduced the complexity of the situation to a whim, and misrepresented it.
replyReality is what it is, some heavier some lighter: we discuss reality, its details ranked by weight.