Anything that gets posted to HN when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that gets posted to HN between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything posted to HN after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
The GP wasn’t complaining about there being an AI hype. They were complaining that the front page is oversaturated by said hype.
I’ve been on HN since near the beginning (under a different user name originally). And there have been quite a few trends rise and fall on here. But none of them were as intense as this AI hype currently is.
In fact it’s not even AI in the more general sense, it’s almost entirely just LLMs that get discussed. There’s so much more going on outside of LLMs but all anyone is talking about on HN is natural language tools.
> In fact it’s not even AI in the more general sense, it’s almost entirely just LLMs that get discussed.
"AGI is right around the corner" "No it's not" "Yes it is, LLMs are the future." "We don't even know if AGI is possible." "LLMs are the future." "No they aren't." "AGI is right around the corner..."
or
"LLMs are really useful." "No they're not" "Yes they are." "No they aren't." with a little bit of "They sucked the last time I used them." "Did you use them recently?" "That's what someone said last time." "But LLMs are really useful" ...
over and over and over.
It isn't even that it's mostly just LLMs being discussed, it's how they're begin discussed, they're effectively just a proxy for optimists and pessimists to argue over which worldview is better.
If we were talking about AI in general and not LLMs, the same conversation structures would still pop up.
No because those conversations are specific to off the shelf models used in generalised ways, which basically only applies to LLMs.
When you look at other applications of AI, such as models trained for medical usage or AI used in Hollywood (something I personally have professional experience in) then it’s a completely different story because they’re bespoke models trained and used for specialised edge cases. Rather than Joe Blogs using an off the shelf package to do the same thing as the previous person albeit slightly differently.
I imagine that's because LLMs are of most interest to the Hacker News crowd: they can help write code, and you can build systems on top of them that can "understand" and respond in human language.
Generative image / video / audio models can produce output in image, video and audio. Those have far less applications than models that can output text, structured data and code.
HN is by ICs who write code, the 90% of the folks that build all the stuff, largely neutral to negative. It has gained some excellent traction with 10% of the folks, but it is quite behind compared to ai coding subreddits. Months behind.
Anything that gets posted to HN between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything posted to HN after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.