4 ms·

My reaction is: that's an appropriate amount. AI is probably the biggest thing to happen (in tech) in the last two decades, so I think it's fair that it's takin

• mistyvales 2mo ago
  I'm sick of it, but you are 100% right. I'm sure a good number of active readers here want even more AI-related articles.
  • orphea 2mo ago
    Same. I hate that the TS is right.
• fcanesin 2mo ago
  Upvoted: I was going to write this exact reply. Everyone is a bit tired of hearing about AI, but it's advancing fast and it's the most important thing right now. As Demis says, if we get to ASI, we can solve all other issues with it.
  • netdevphoenix 2mo ago
    > it's advancing fast Actually, it (LLM models) has been advancing slower for a while. This is pretty much in the mainstream. And the current approach is facing all sorts of obstacles that are not exclusively technological. The compute needs are no longer sustainable. Financially, big labs are drowning in debt and backlash against data centres has grown so much that it has become an electoral topic in at least one major country.
  • jdjdjdjdjdi 2mo ago
    why exactly do we want ASI, and further, if we DID, why on Earth would we want it controlled by the likes of Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Larry Ellison? FUCK THAT
    • fcanesin 2mo ago
      Support DeepSeek and Ziphu than, I am not advocating the merits but it is the reality. ASI will be pursued regardless of wants.
  • lovich 2mo ago
    Shit we’re onto thinking ASI is happening soon? I guess people hyped up AGI so much that it’s no longer thrilling to talk about despite not getting to that point either.
  • sph 2mo ago
    > if we get to ASI, we can solve all other issues with it Jesus Christ this has to be bait. Added to the favourites to laugh about it when the lunacy and hype has died down in 5 years and the trough of disillusionment has truly settled in. Or to laugh about it when ASI actually has arrived and we're waiting in line to be turned into biofuel for the Greater Good. Everybody is literally pinning their hopes that God itself comes out of machine to save them from the exponentially accelerating pile of tech debt, and they're not even half joking about it. This is not engineering, this is utter madness.
    • DarmokTanagra 2mo ago
      Its just the next hype cycle that all of the crypto people have moved on to. Making hyperbolic claims about new tech makes people billions, until that changes you will always see this crap. This site is owned an operated by people building empires around that principle.
      • sph 2mo ago
        Say what you want about crypto, they didn’t expect Jesus to descend from the sky to shill Bitcoin.
        • DarmokTanagra 2mo ago
          I remember having conversations with crypto shills where they really thought blockchains were going to be used to replace nation states. They had whole manifestos prepared about how crypto was going to reshape society as we know it. Its the same exact people making the same exact claims, only difference is substitution of "blockchain" for "ai".
    • tim333 2mo ago
      I'd say it is engineering. There's a Moore's law like steady progress where the effective IQ goes up each year which will result in neither troughs nor biofuel but just smart AI. Given human nature I also think it'll be kind of undramatic. Like when jet aviation transformed things people moan about check-in queues and maybe with ASI people will probably moan their robot butler is only 200 IQ when their neighbours is 205.
  • grebc 2mo ago
    If intelligence solved everything, you’d have already solved everything already brother.
• pydry 2mo ago
  Feels more like another blockchain hype cycle to me. Especially the part where we're always on the cusp of the entire world changing while the biggest change is just that huge sums of money changed hands, inducing psychosis in a large group of investors.
  • sejje 2mo ago
    We're not on the cusp, we're in the process. World-changing doesn't happen overnight. The internet didn't, either. This is like 1991 internet.
    • jejsjsjsn 2mo ago
      it's more like the flight of the Concorde
  • tayo42 2mo ago
    Blockchain wasn't this overwhelming though. You could pretty much ignore it if you wanted.
  • jrflo 2mo ago
    I know what you're saying, there is a lot of speculation going on in AI right now. The difference is there is hard evidence of AI capabilities accelerating now: we've gone from toy chatbots to sort-of useful coding helpers to agents solving novel math problems in 3.5 years. We could plateau any day and a lot of investors would be stuck holding the bag, or we could continue on that trajectory and they'll make crazy profits. With crypto, the bet was always "how much money will people keep sticking in this market?" which seems a lot more flawed to me.
    • pydry 2mo ago
      The irony with blockchain is that it also had a bunch of real life use cases but the sheer extremity of the hype cycle managed to actually prevent them from being effectively brought to life. There was a lot of genuinely useful tech that blockchain could have facilitated and all we were left with in the end was a mountain of scams and bitcoin. I'm seeing something similar with AI where the genuinely useful stuff is getting washed out by the hype simply because it's a gradual improvement and not "disruptive". Meanwhile the stuff sold as disruptive like vibe coding is mostly bullshit.
• happytoexplain 2mo ago
  Yes, it's appropriate given the metric you have chosen ("big"ness), though maybe the word should then be "expected", since "appropriate" implies some kind of broader human-oriented concept of rightfulness/goodness.
• cubefox 2mo ago
  I would say, AI is probably the biggest thing to happen in tech, full stop. LLMs went from a toy to highly capable (along many dimensions) in just a few years. Which makes it very likely that in a few years more, we will be seeing crazy capabilities that leave us humans increasingly behind.
  • altcognito 2mo ago
    You really have to expand the list to ridiculous levels before you get to something as big. We've already left humans behind in many ways (but in others we've failed to build LLMs that know how to find the gaps in implementation that humans are leaving out) Cynics really say stuff like "but it's been 3 years and all they can claim is that it's changed text to speech, speech to text, photos to text, text to photos, programming, cybersecurity, research, mathematics, war... "They lie about it being dangerous!" and simulataneously "They hacked a system with zero day exploits! Everyone involved should goto jail!" Tech leaders are awful, but it is just that we've built a society that enables the most awful among us to benefit the most. It has never been the case that tech leaders are particularly amazing, they are just amazing at exploitation.
    • qarl2 2mo ago
      > "They lie about it being dangerous!" and simulataneously "They hacked a system with zero day exploits! Everyone involved should goto jail!" FWIW: The simultaneous "it's stupidly weak" and "it's dangerously strong" is a well known propaganda technique.
    • skydhash 2mo ago
      > You really have to expand the list to ridiculous levels before you get to something as big Instead of expanding the list, it would be better to widen your vision. Email was more transformative than AI is right now. Unix, then Linux was more transformative. If you have a magic wand and remove AI, I think barely anyone would be impacted, but removing something like windows would be like erasing computers. And removing Linux would wipe most of the internet services.
• bunderbunder 2mo ago
  There's a part of me that agrees. There's also a part of me that misses the earlier days of Hacker News when the subject matter was much more eclectic and seemingly every day I'd have a chance to learn about something completely different. And that's maybe what I miss. Nowadays Hacker News feels increasingly like another social media platform: mostly a lot of opinions, war stories, and self promotion. That feeling of serendipity that so characterized earlier ages of the Web is fading here, too.
• mrweasel 2mo ago
  It seems a bit self-reinforcing. AI makes almost zero (positive) impact on my day to day life and isn't actually something I interact with directly and the same holds true for most people I talk to. There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction. To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet. Some people are seeing massive improvements in how they work and it's understandable that they, like with blockchains or Kubernetes previously want to share their optimism. I just question if maybe these people are being to louder and have to much influence. There's a large silent majority for whom all the AI stuff is almost completely pointless. It does need to take up more space on HN, compared to your normal media, because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances. The hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription, hence the ads. For now, it seems that AI is heavily pushed by industry and a group of fans, the amount of news and articles just doesn't line up with the actual daily use.
  • jrflo 2mo ago
    I don't think that AI has to influence every single person's daily life to make a huge impact. I think for probably 90% of people it's pretty useless out side of being a better search engine. But that doesn't mean it won't have a huge impact on science and technology at large. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen trying to stick it into everyone's face, but I don't think that should be conflated with the real progress that's being made.
    • mattmaroon 2mo ago
      I would say 90% of people do not yet realize how useful it is. It is not useless to them, they just don’t understand yet what it can do. And there were a few years there where a lot of BS AI hype turned them off to it. So a lot of people rightly dismissed it and don’t realize the inflection point it hit in the last few years. ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month
• cromka 2mo ago
  Problem is other cool hacky stuff gets drawned out. Nobody votes on those because I imagine it's no longer attractive to the type of visitor that HN attracts now. I reckon there's many more non-tech, "make me a millionaire" gold rush crowd here, as cynical as it sounds. I base that on pure logic, since it's kind of inevitable with AI having delivered a massive democratization of tech knowledge, but also on the amount of snarkier, shorter, less technical, less logical, one short sentence type of comments. I know it's been said countless of times before, but I think this community has truly changed within last year.
• pbkompasz 2mo ago
  Bigger than the Metaverse or monkey NFTs?
• brazukadev 2mo ago
  > AI is probably the biggest thing to happen (in tech) in the last two decades, so I think it's fair that it's taking up a lot of the discourse. Almost. the iphone was launched 19 years ago. It was (and still is) much more relevant than the current LLM-based AI.