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Comment by globalnode | Hacker News Reader

i always thought there were two reasons for AI interest on HN.

1. since AI has captured the imagination of capitalists and they think this is the next industrial revolution, they gotta be in it to win it. combined with the fact that i believe most people here are wealthy or at least aspirationally so, that explained half of it.

2. the other half is that AI as a tech is interesting from a mathematical and compsci point of view, tho certainly not interesting enough to justify the proportion of topics about it here.

i guess i should add a 3rd reason.

3. ycomb has a financial stake in spreading the news about how wonderful this tech is!

lolol

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The only thing that should be surprising to anyone who knows about the early history of OpenAI is how little of it YC owns, given how much it leveraged YC’s credibility to get started (early employees joined an institution called “YC Research”, operating from YC’s office space). Once that stake is divided up among all the LPs and small unit holders, it’s not a huge outcome.

Also: nothing gets sustained attention on HN unless good hackers find it interesting. Our entire objective is to be the website that attracts the best hackers, serves them the most interesting content and facilitates the most interesting discussions. That can’t happen if we’re nefariously pushing a commercial agenda.

Rhymes with reddit.com at IPO:

- Sam Altman ~9%

- YCombinator had <5%

- Steve Huffman ~3% Although he had ~4% voting power via Class B shares.

- Alexis Ohanian: Minimal

- Advance Publications: ~30%

- Tencent: ~11%.

The original founders (Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian) massively diluted when they sold Reddit to Advance Publications in 2006 for $10 to $20 million.

Numbers above are vaguely accurate. See https://www.untaylored.com/post/who-owns-reddit

Even if ycombinator doesn’t have ownership in OpenAI, they do have ownership in a lot of AI startups and would still be incentivized to spread AI news

The interest in AI is global and spans nearly every corner of the Internet, it’s not something exclusive to HN. The root cause of this is #1 by a wide margin. Our society is governed by money, the investor class sees an opportunity to become trillionaires, the labor class is afraid of becoming the permanent underclass, all of these things are defined by money.

It also can give insights into natural intelligence.

One more (for me, and definitely for many others since I've seen similar posts):

It's letting me build stuff I probably wouldn't be able to build by myself without raising lots of money for way cheaper, at least until GitHub Copilot gets incredibly nerfed next month.

sorry everyone, sometimes i go down these rabbit holes

…or many people are using the products day to day in their work as IT professionals or developers?

I think it’s mostly the above, rather than a capitalist conspiracy, or in its relevance as a scientific curiosity.

I'll present an alternative set of reasons:

1. AI is tremendously useful at the current intelligence level and people here like to be more productive.

2. AI is exciting - both in the potential applications and new models getting smarter.

3. Many workers here have either transitioned to building agents or they're heavily using AI for their work.

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