Unleash bots and sock puppets, generate mindless hype. Add a bit of circular accounting.
Watch the investments roll in and the share price soar up.
Profit...
This place average post went from “look at this new javascript framework” to “I just became 100x more productive with AI” in the last 3 years
If you did not perceive a step change in model capabilities in late 2025, it's possible you are working on problems that are just too hard or not well aligned (e.g., arts and crafts). If you are working on software and need to move the occasional mountain, it's really hard to argue with the capabilities of contemporary models and harnesses.
This space is evolving rapidly. Faster in some areas than others, but you should still keep an open mind and adapt to the new realities as they emerge. Wishing for a thing to fail can blind you to more opportunities than you would probably be willing to reject if they were presented directly.
LLMs are clearly world changing technology. I'm no fan of the big corporations but I'm very excited to see the models themselves develop. I'm looking forward to the day I can self host these things.
It should really not surprise you that Hacker News, a community with an extremely technical audience, is interested in a bleeding edge technical tool that is literally completely reshaping the industry.
Your analysis by account age might be telling
People are easily divided and suddenly in a binary position.
You're either totally pro AI and can't stop talking about it all the time, it's like your new god.
Or you're a hater. And old-school person, who deceived themselves and got a good portion of their self-worth from typing strange invocations in an even stranger electronic device.
Both are bullshit, but if you're not in either camp you get flack from both.
My (!) reality is that it's useful technology, but far from the claims that were made by the people trying to sell (!) it.
I've seen quite some improvements over the years, but I haven't seen the claims materialized in any release in the last 18+ months.
Yes, it's impressive, yes, it's probably here to stay in some form or another.
But it's not Skynet, GLaDOS or even HAL ...
Sure. Based on cursory analysis, California (B&P § 17200 + § 17941), New York (§ 63(12)) and New Hampshire (RSA 664:14 / 664:16 + RSA 358-A) seem to be good places to start. Worst case, we get a public record of who paid for what under what pretences.
A country like France has shown that they're willing to take no an oligarch[0], and they have the nuclear means to protect themselves from American oligarchs leveraging the American military to punish France for doing so.
This kind of stuff will continue until a country like France forces a jet carrying someone like Musk, Altman, Thiel, or Zuckerberg to land so that they can be arrested, tried, convicted, and forced to spend a few years to decades in a drab little room.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
but did it?
The trajectory is clear and the hyperscalers are in an disadvantage: they need to become bigger and bigger while models, frameworks and harnesses that are "good enough" for 95% of all people become smaller and specialized hardware becomes cheaper and less energy hungry. In the end the only viable customers that are left for the big ones is the military and... the military. But even the Pentagon realizes that a decentralized less fragile approach is actually safer instead of having big data centers that could be Wildberried by an adversary, that is if the alcoholic in charge isn't firing some generals who act too smart again. Machine vision which isn't even real AI is capable of destroying targets in Ukraine for instance. Dirt cheap. And Palantir's Maven Smart System was incapable of predicting the most obvious flaws in the Iran war, like how easy it is to to strike US bases or close the Strait of Hormuz. I'm not saying condensing the killchain is useless, I'm saying that it's not everything.
People aren't dumb. So they must be strong-manned and cheated into submission.
Uh huh.. AI content detectors don't work.
This article plays right into my biases but I don't think it's actually very credible? They're just guessing that some unknown blog is funded by OpenAI because it has maybe-AI-generated articles that use similar talking points
"These are the talking points of Leading The Future, the $125 million super PAC funded primarily by OpenAI president Greg Brockman"
I'm sure OpenAI is doing a tonne of astroturfing but my god this is weak
But the analysis of the internal admin pages for generating articles, the API and the interview structure are pretty damming evidence that this is largely driven by AI.
How credible is this credible claim?
But indeed, if Pangram is marketing itself as "near-zero false-positives" now, that entails that the are aggressively biasing it towards being conservative, likely leading to lots of false-negatives and low match scores on AI content.
Is it Acutus Medical, a “cardiac arrhythmia management company”, or Acutus Partners, “Expert healthcare consulting for transformative growth strategies that empower healthcare organizations to thrive and succeed”?
Neither seem obviously correct, and there are no other good candidates, not to mention that the lack of a link from “The Wire” to its supposed parent is suspicious.
Well that’s about the nicest possible way to phrase that…
Why do people insist on giving shady characters the benefit of the doubt? It’s pretty clear what’s happening here and yet the level of effort put into avoiding judgement seems excessive.
The primary difference is that hypebros brag about incoming promised apocalypse, 40% unemployment, economy ruled by unaccountable monopolies and permanent underclass. Luddites think that such development would be a bad thing.
I dont think apocalypse will happen, but I do think AI companies are massive assholes who deserves all the pushback they can get for the way they doom hype themselves up.
Rejecting exaggerated claims doesn't mean that someone is not seeing any value.
> It was embarrassing a year+ ago when much of this technology barely worked at all.
The things some people say, how they talk about "outraged AI critics" what they would prefer those to be, would be fucking stupid even in first grade.
These, and things like "AI-generated news sites to attack critics" really speak for themselves. There is something worth really calling out here, and it fell out naturally.
What's the actual fraud angle? Non disclosure?
llama.cpp has gotten so good that you can really get optimized performance with a few flags or none at all, and serve any model on-demand. Spend $45 to have your own GLM 5.2 machine for an hour. If you can’t manage full utilization you’d get 33.2M tokens, retailing for $128.
It takes some smarts to use dumb models, but renting time for frontier tokens is easy math. Vast also lets you run on spot which is great for training or agents with harnesses that can accommodate uncertain model availability.
The imbalance is what is off.
My life is affected for better or worse because of AI - I’m forced to use it at my day job as an R&D. It is perfectly rational and expected and preferable for AI to be the front news in a technology forum.
You probably don’t like AI but that is completely different from being affected by it.
No. I distinctly remember HN being fairly skeptical of LLMs the way they were sold back in 2023. Then, the astroturfing began happening gradually. First in the comments and then in the posts.
Edit: ok, i guess this account is from 2024, but been around a while. I guess can’t defend myself like this :)
Obviously, in my opinion, based on reporting of truthfulness someone like Sam Altman would not be entirely opposed to astroturfing here.
But people should probably appreciate at the least running free local software that has a few tricks up its sleeve.
LLMs in 2023, from what I remember, were slightly better auto complete. It's pretty different now.
Sure, it's obvious to all how the GP comment reads, just as it's obvious to all how this rapid defensiveness appears. <shrug>
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151732
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151719
Multiple comments made by this account in a timeframe I at least would personally have a hard time reading the comment I’m responding to and then and replying to this quickly, and from an account made in 2025.
Kind of making the point for the people you disagree with, assuming you are an actual human and not a bot tasked with pushing a narrative.
Either I’m commenting because my life and others lives are affected by AI, it is actually a big deal. It will change our lives. It will never go away. And that’s why I comment on it.
Or I’m shilling for AI companies because and the above points aren’t true.
Which one do you think is true?
Had a recent commenter insistent on calling out another HN user as a tool of the Chinese state boosting propaganda points.
Either of them may well have been a paid commentator, but both also could hold a sincere belief in the points they were making.
False dichotomy.
Who can tell until we remove anonymous posting from the internet?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯