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
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.
If you genuinely wanted to create an environment that attracted hackers, you would need to filter content that appeals to the lowest common denominator. Script kiddies outnumber hackers by 1000:1, so if you freely allow content that appeals to script kiddies on your site, it's inevitable that your site will be completely taken over by script kiddies due to simple demographics.
I still visit HN out of habit but that is what has happened here. Most of the articles on the front page aren't even written by humans anymore, they are meaningless AI-generated fluff pieces, and yet despite being devoid of intellectually interesting content still get upvoted because that's the audience this site has now. Most of the ShowHN submissions are also completely useless and intellectually uninteresting AI-generated nonsense by people who have no idea how to program.
(For the record, I'd note I'm not even strictly anti-LLM; I work for an LLM startup and think they are great tools for some use cases. But I am anti-AI-psychosis, and HN has completely succumbed to psychosis.)
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
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.