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Comment by robinhouston | Hacker News Reader

In a way the most remarkable thing about this is that it isn't even at the top of the HN homepage. Even if this is a step up from what we've seen before, we're no longer astonished by the idea that AI can make significant advances in mathematics and computer science.

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I don't think that's it. Multiple or my friends from the target audience (academic mathematicians) admitted to scrolling past because the title made it sound like a review of last month's contributions, instead of 10 new ones.

There are articles with far fewer upvotes and comments ranking higher on the front page right now, despite being the same age or older than this one. HNs opaque ranking system at it again.

This is not at the top as it is actively flagged by people that can't psychologically cope with the advances of AI. Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite.

Interesting. I had no idea that a person could see what is flagged?

If you page through the /newest listings you can see [flagged] and [flagged][dead] submissions.

eg. this: [flagged] A migrant surge tests Spain's open policies (economist.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131860

is clearly marked as flagged.

Unlike the current submission: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science (openai.com) which isn't [flagged].

* https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

That's true, but submissions are only killed in that way if they receive a ‘fatal’ number of flags. However, flags lower the rank of a story even at non-fatal levels. What antirez is suggesting here is that the rank of this story has been lowered by flags – and that seems plausible, if you compare its rank to that of other stories with a similar age and number of points.

[flagged] submissions aren't [dead] (killed), they are still active and can be upvoted and commented upon.

> if you compare its rank to that of other stories with a similar age and number of points.

Ranking is complicated enough here even before weighting, speed of initial upvotes can play against ranking, number of comments and the shape of the comment tree also affect ranking. And yes, various subjects and submission sources do get weightings that impact ranking.

What's funny, to myself at least, is that any attention at all is paid to "HN front page ranking" - I've been on again off again active here since 2008 .. and can't recall ever really looking at a default HN "front page" ever.

( There's /newest /newcomments /active etc to browse and sites such as https://hckrnews.com/ )

Didn't know I was part of an elite.

You're were for 4 months. That's what we're talking about. It used to be.

I've been on this site for much longer than that.

When's the cutoff date?

Forums change with the times, and this one never existed solely to burnish your ego.

Moreover, mister elite, you don't know why this press release was flagged.

I'm not sure why we should privilege your bitter speculation over more mundane possibilities.

> people that can't psychologically cope with the advances of AI

Yes. And there are many of them. I wonder what would help them come to terms with it. Seriously, people are going to be grieving over this. Loss of identity, loss of social standing, ideas of entire future lives that will now never happen. The greatest crime people may hold AI guilty of is taking away their dreams.

People have had to deal with getting their jobs automated away for centuries. None of this is new, and perhaps reminding ourselves of this is the best way to cope.

I understand your sentiment, but I think this really is something different. This isn’t a craft going away, or even an industry being replaced, it’s potentially everything we do. It’s the ground being pulled away beneath people’s feet, everyone, everywhere all at once. I think the vacuum it leaves in people’s lives needs to be filled with something, and I haven’t heard any good ideas about this or how the transition should be managed at all.

There is a glaring fallacy in your “AI will change everything as it is super intelligent” hypothesis. If it is so great thinker which can do everything why not just solve this social impact thingie? Or maybe it is not so capable?

I don’t think it’s magic. Things need to actually be made to happen regardless of intelligence, and that’s a social issue. Also if AI were powerful enough to fix everything by itself effortlessly it would already be far too powerful for us to control, and we probably shouldn’t allow that to happen on general principle.

That assumes the particular problem actually has a solution (that you will like).

This is the sentiment of people who haven't accepted that this is in fact something very different from what people have seen in the past.

It's given many more an opportunity to fulfill their dreams.

> Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite

hah, sorry, we are plebs out here.

Jokes on him. I'm a peasant and I've been here for years

We cannot psychologically stand that Redis is hyped by OpenAI:

https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/examples/vector_datab...

How are the sales going?

If you're actively throwing away brand new greenfield research because it was generated by a computer at a company that stans industry-spanning software so that you can stay mad at your pet celebrity project, you might be the problem.

You have to give AI one thing: It is vastly better at understanding text than AI boosters.

Which is a low bar, but still.

> Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite.

Never was.

> Hacker News is no longer a web site of an elite.

It was always mainly a website for employees of an elite.

This comment is about the tier of a Reddit atheist going to a funeral and telling a grieving family that "haha grandma is dead and there is no heaven".

It’s never been clear to me why the HN algorithm isn’t public. It’s obviously nowhere near as complex as something like Twitter, and of course isn’t a trade secret. The fact it’s private only furthers speculation like this.

Probably to avoid manipulation, there is tons of stuff on HN that hopes to make it to the limelight through this forum channel

So condescending. “Can’t psychologically cope”? Can you hear yourself? There’s some advances, but we’re losing a lot too. Don’t get dazzled by the hype.

I like your comments and agree with a lot of your points, including parts of this one. That said, please don't go to this route. A lot of the doomerism comes from financial insecurity fears. Try to remember that a lot of people are subconsciously afraid of losing their homes. I know that it is pretty hard to ignore them, but try to engage with people that do not dismiss 100% of AI accomplishments.

> A lot of the doomerism comes from financial insecurity fears. Try to remember that a lot of people are subconsciously afraid of losing their homes. I

I think recognizing and accounting for your own personal biases is one of the requirements of the being an intellectually honest and rigorous online discourse participant.

Things could be genuinely impressive and fascinating even when directly challenge your ego and material well being.

Or maybe, just maybe, other people have different opinions than you?

Is that possible or is everyone else too common to have those?

It wasn't heavily flagged. It was pulled down by the flamewar detector due to the large number of comments, and it slid under the radar due to only hitting the front page during overnight hours on Friday night/Saturday morning. It still spent 10 hours on the front page, but all during off peak hours. I've now created a new copy of the post so it can have prime time exposure.

What about AI research itself? Is OpenAI close to automating its human staff out of a job?

Yes, but they wouldn't publish that bit lest other companies steal the ideas.

They and Anthropic have indicated that the models are substantially augmenting the research and doing large amounts of work autonomously at this point. Here is one of the many blog posts on it [1]. Many people would dismiss this as "marketing" so take it for what you will.

My guess from following this stuff quite closely is that these companies are still a couple years away from fully autonomous research staff.

[1]. https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...

> What about AI research itself? Is OpenAI close to automating its human staff out of a job?

It's more like they've already automated the parts of the jobs that the humans most closely thought of as the "their job"

It’s also very very divided (x companies, oss vs not and other interests)

This is one of the most impactful mathematical publications in history by all accounts

I think we've now hit a point where 99.9% of the population gloss over these types of AI advancements because of human competence being insufficient

No human could have published this because it requires paradigm shifts (e. g. Section 5) in multiple mathematical domains. Mastering one of them to this degree is rare, mastering 3+ pretty much non existent for humans.

Honestly just a bit burnt out on posts like this

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