I've been reading this website for probably 15 years, its never been this bad. many threads are completely unreadable, all the actual educated takes are on X, its almost like there was a talent drain
What's the alternative here?
You say, "explaining away the increasing performance" as though that was a good faith representation of arguments made against LLMs, or even this specific article. Questionong the self-congragulatory nature of these businesses is perfectly reasonable.
Something really funky is going on with newer AI models and benchmarks, versus how they perform subjectively when I use them for my use-cases. I say this across the board[1], not just regarding IpenAI. I don't know if frontier labs have run into Goodheart's law viz benchmarks, or if my use-cases that are atypical.
1. I first noticed this with Claud 3.5 vs Claud 3.7
The Pro AI crowd, VC, tech CEOs etc have strong incentive to claim humans are obsolete. Many tech employees see threats to their jobs and want to poopoo any way AI could be useful or competitive.
Finding a critic perspective and try to understand why it can be wrong is more fun. You just say "I was wrong" when proved wrong.
The problem with the hype machine is that it provokes an opposite reaction and the noise from it buries any reasonable / technical discussion.
People here were pretty skeptical about AlexNet, when it won the ImageNet challenge 13 years ago.
And then, it's likewise easy to be a reactionary to the extremes of the other side.
The middle is a harder, more interesting place to be, and people who end up there aren't usually chasing money or power, but some approximation of the truth.
Usually my go-to example for LLMs doing more than mass memorization is Charton's and Lample's LLM trained on function expressions and their derivatives and which is able to go from the derivatives to the original functions and thus perform integration, but at the same time I know that LLMs are essentially completely crazy with no understanding of reality-- just ask them to write some fiction and you'll have the model outputting discussions where characters who have never met before are addressing each other by name, or getting other similarly basic things wrong, and when something genuinely is not in the model you will end up in hallucination land. So the people saying that the models are bad are not completely crazy.
With the wrong codebase I wouldn't be surprised if you need a finetune.
At this point, there are much better places to find technical discussion of AI, pros and cons. Even Reddit.
So, as much I get the frustration comments like these don't really add much. Its complaining about others complaining. Instead this should be taken as a signal that maybe HN is not the right forum to read about these topics.
It's healthy to be skeptical, and it's even healthier to be skeptical of openai, but there are commenters who clearly have no idea of what IMO problems are saying that this means nothing somehow?
AI is of course a direct attack on the average HNers identity. The response you see is like attacking a Christian on his religion.
The pattern of defense is typical. When someone’s identity gets attacked they need to defend their identity. But their defense also needs to seem rational to themselves. So they begin scaffolding a construct of arguments that in the end support their identity. They take the worst aspects of AI and form a thesis around it. And that becomes the basis of sort of building a moat around their old identity as an elite programmer genius.
Tell tale sign you or someone else is doing this is when you are talking about AI and someone just comments about how they aren’t afraid of AI taking over their own job when it wasn’t even directly the topic.
If you say like ai is going to lessen the demand for software engineering jobs the typical thing you here is “I’m not afraid of losing my job” and I’m like bro, I’m not talking about your job specifically, I’m not talking about you or your fear of losing a job I’m just talking about the economics of the job market. This is how you know it’s an identity thing more than a technical topic.
Also, please don't fulminate. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
General attacks are fine, but we draw the line at personal.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The other thing, though, is that views differ about how such comments should be classified. What seems like an outrageous "general attack" to one reader (especially if you feel passionately about a topic) may not at all land that way with the rest of the community. For this reason, it's hard to generalize; I'd need to see specific links.
The ML community is really big on Twitter. I'm honestly quite surprised that you're angry or surprised at this. That means either you're very disconnected from the actual ML community, which is fine of course but then maybe you should hold your opinions a bit less tightly. Alternatively you're ideologically against Twitter which brings me to:
> It's not about pride and identity, you dingus.
Maybe it is? There's a very-online-tech-person identity that I'm familiar with that hates Twitter because they think that Twitter's short post length and other cultural factors on the site contributed to bad discourse quality. I used to buy it, but I've stopped because HN and Reddit are equally filled with terrible comments that generate more heat than light.
FWIW a bunch of ML researchers tried to switch to Bluesky but got so much hate, including death threats, sent at them that they all noped back to Twitter. That's the other identity portion of it that, post Musk there's a set of folks who hate Twitter ideologically and have built an identity around it. Unfortunately this identity also is anti-AI enough that it's willing to act with toxicity toward ML researchers. Tech cynicism and anti-capitalism has some tie-ins with this also.
So IMO there is an identity aspect to this. It might not be the "true hacker" identity that the GP talks about but I do very much think that this pro vs anti AI fight has turned into another culture war axis on HN that has more to do with your identity or tribe than any reasoned arguments.
Also, the performance of LLMs on imo 2025 was not even bronze [3].
Finally, this article shows that LLMs were just mostly bluffing [4] on usamo 2025.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1i53ih7/fro...
My skepticism stems from the past frontier math announcement which turned out to be a bluff.
It's reasonable to be suspicious of self aggrandizing claims from giant companies hyping a product, and it's hard not to be cynical when every forced AI interaction (be it Google search or my corporate managers or whatever) makes my day worse.
X is higher signal, but very group thinky. It's great if you want to know the trends, but gotta be careful not to jump off the cliff with the lemmings.
Highest signal is obviously non digital. Going to meetups, coffee/beers with friends, working with your hands, etc.
Some of us are implementing things in relation to AI so we know it's not about "increasing performance of models" but actual about the right solution for the right problem.
If you think Twitter has "educated takes" then maybe go there and stop being pretentious schmuck over here.
Talent drain, lol. I'd much rather have skeptics and good tips than usernames, follows and social media engagement.
i.e. it is a culture of meritocracy; where no matter your social connections, political or financial capital if you are smart and driven you can make it.
AI flips that around. It devalues human intelligence and moves the moats to the ol' school things of money, influence and power. The big winners are no longer the most hard working, or above average intelligence. Intelligence is devalued; as a wealthy person I now have intelligence at my fingertips making it a commodity rather than a virtue - but money, power and connections - that's now the moat.
If all you have is your talent the future could look quite scary in an AI world long term. Money buys the best models, connections, wealth and power become the remaining moats. This doesn't gel typically in a "indie hacker" like culture in most tech forums.
As a partially separate issue, there are people trying to punish comments quoting AI by downvotes. You don't need to have a non-informative reply, just sourcing it to AI is enough. A random internet dude telling the same thing with less justification or detail is fine to them.
As hackers we have more responsibility than the general public because we understand the tech and its side effects, we are the first line of defense so it is important to speak out not only to be on the right side of history but also to protect society.
I do not see that at all in this comment section.
There is a lot of denial and cynicism like the parent comment suggested. The comments trying to dismiss this as just “some high school math problem” are the funniest example.
I don’t think developers will be obsolete in five years. I don’t think AGI is around the corner. But I do think this is the biggest breakthrough in computer science history.
I worked on accelerating DNNs a little less than a decade ago and had you shown me what we’re seeing now with LLMs I’d say it was closer to 50 years out than 20 years out.
You mean the one that paves the way for ancient Egyptian slave worker economies?
Or totalitarian rule that 1984 couldn't imagine?
Or...... Worse?
The intermediate classes of society always relied on intelligence and competence to extract money from the powerful.
AI means those classes no longer have power.
I think what it feels like I see a lot, are people who - because of their fear of a future with super intelligent AI - try to like... Deny the significance of the event, if only because they don't _want_ to wrestle with the implications.
I think it's very important we don't do that. Let's take this future seriously, so we can align ourselves on a better path forward... I fear a future where we have years of bickering in the public forums on the veracity or significance of claims, if only because this subset of the public who are incapable of mentally wrestling with the wild fucking shit we are walking into.
If not this, what is your personal line in the sand? I'm not specifically talking to any person when I say this. I just can't help but to feel like I'm going crazy, seeing people deny what is right in front of their eyes.
The pro-AI astroturfers are building the popular consensus of acceptance for what those in power will use AI for: disenfranchisement and oppression. And they are correct because the capabilities of AI right now will enable that, as stated above.
The AI denialists are correct as well: current AI isn't what it is popularly billed. The CEOs are falling over themselves claiming they can cut headcount to zero because of their visionary implementation of AI. It's the old prototype/demo but not the real system snowjob in software sales, alllll over again.
Any actual benefit of AI to the common man comes with the current state of how tech companies "benefit" a consumer: with absurd degrees of privacy invasion, weaponized psychological algorithms, attention destruction, etc.
Here's a fun startup that in invariably in the works: the omnipresent employee monitoring AI. Every click you make, every shit you take, every coffee you sip, and every meeting you tune out. Your facial expressions analyzed, your actual "passion" measured, etc. Amazon is already doing 80% of this without AI in the warehouses.
The only saving grace to that is Covid and WFH, where they don't have the right to intrude on your workspace. So next time you hear about the return to office, remember what is coming....
The "It will just get better" is bubble baiting the investors. The tech companies learned from the past and they are riding and managing the bubble to extract maximum ROI before it pops.
The reality is a lot of work done by humans can be replaced by an LLM with lower quality and nuance. The loss in sales/satisfaction/ect is more than offset by the reduced cost.
The current model of LLMs are enshitification accelerators and that will have real effects.
Almost every technical comment on HN is wrong (see for example essentially all the discussion of Rust async, in which people keep making up silly claims that Rust maintainers then attempt to patiently explain are wrong).
The idea that the "educated" takes are on X though... that's crazy talk.
There are a bunch of great accounts to follow that are only really posting content to x.
Karpathy, nearcyan, kalomaze, all of the OpenAI researchers including the link this discussion is on, many anthropic researchers. It's such a meme that you see people discuss reading Twitter thread + paper because the thread gives useful additional context.
Hn still has great comment sections on maker style posts, on network stuff, but I no longer enjoy the discussions wrt AI here. It's too hyperbolic.
I think hn probably has a disproportionate number of haters while Twitter has a disproportionate number of blind believers / hype types.
But both have both.
Not sure how this compares to YouTube (although my guess is the thumbnails + titles are most egregious there for algorithm reasons)
Most of HN was very wrong about LLMs.
But in most other sites the statistic is 99%, so HN is still doing much better than average.
And like said, the researchers themselves are on X, even Gary Marcus is there. ;)
How is it rational to 10x the budget over and over again when it mangles data every time?
The mind blowing thing is not being skeptical of that approach, it's defending it. It has become an article of faith.
It would be great to have AI chatbots. But chatbots that mangle data getting their budgets increased by orders of magnitude over and over again is just doubling down on the same mistake over and over again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...