78 comments

  • iammrpayments 7 hours ago ago

    Probably doing something similar here.

    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

    • claaams 6 hours ago ago

      I’ve noticed this too. I’ve seen a ton ai defenders and hype people here. It’s embarrassing.

      • bob1029 6 hours ago ago

        It was embarrassing a year+ ago when much of this technology barely worked at all.

        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.

        • UpsideDownRide 5 hours ago ago

          Sure it's better. 100x productivity is pure nonsense and there are other claims of this order.

          Rejecting exaggerated claims doesn't mean that someone is not seeing any value.

        • customguy 5 hours ago ago

          We have access to and use the same tech, the difference is elsewhere.

          > 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.

        • xeonax 5 hours ago ago

          Nov'25-Dec-25 something changed. I believe that was the time when Opus 4.5 was launched. (we went from function auto-complete to module auto-complete) People came from the vacations, and were like, make AI do your work. One could actually start offloading work to LLMs.

        • asdfsa32 6 hours ago ago

          Yeah, this is nonsense. No one is arguing that AI is useless, but that there is a coordinated marketing campaign hyping it up.

        • surgical_fire 4 hours ago ago

          A year+ ago, LLMs worked nearly as good as they work today.

          I say this as someone that uses LLMs on a daily basis. It is a moderately useful tool for software development, but it was already useful in January 2025 (to pick a random date). Check what models were available by then. There were improvements since them, but they were mostly marginal.

          The thing is, ever since ChatGPT 4 days there are people claiming on a daily basis exactly what you are claiming now, and it feels pretty silly. Sometimes it's hard to not imagine the accounts breathlessly claiming 100x productivity as bots.

          In other words, I presume that if you are 100x more productive now, you were a 1/100x developer before LLMs. I actually question the capabilities of anyone making claims like that.

      • matheusmoreira 6 hours ago ago

        Please don't imply every "AI defender" is a bot.

        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.

        • reilly3000 5 hours ago ago

          You can? It’s pretty remarkable what you can do with Qwen 3.6 on decent hardware, and Gemma 12b on nearly anything. If you can’t own it, take something for a spin on vast.ai where you can get all kinds of machines on tap for ~$0.20/hour+

          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.

        • emsign 5 hours ago ago

          It's the metrics though. I've noticed that AI topics get hundreds of votes, that means either someone is trying to beat the algorithm to stay in the top news, or suddenly this place is filled with thousands of AI enthusiasts who ignore all the rest, non-AI topics. (Thousands because not everyone will upvote, so if only a fraction upvotes hundreds of upvotes should translate to thousands.)

          The imbalance is what is off.

          • CrimsonRain 5 hours ago ago

            Or did it occur to you that there are a silent majority who just reads and upvotes and a great percentage of people actually support ai/finding it really useful? You anti ai luddites are like far left lunatics; scream at the top of your lungs and can't believe how "other side" keeps having support without much noise.

            • emsign 5 hours ago ago

              No need to insult me. Or make unbased assumptions about me.

          • simianwords 5 hours ago ago

            This kind of conspiratorial thinking is ridiculous.

            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.

            • emsign 5 hours ago ago

              I was talking about the metrics on HN you are talking about how AI improved you life (or didn't). Two different things in my opinion. I'm using AI myself btw. This isn't the point.

            • delis-thumbs-7e 5 hours ago ago

              Conspiratorial like OpenAI creating a tech news service just to spread misinformation and attack critics?

      • DaSHacka 6 hours ago ago

        I honestly think even the hypebros are less embarrassing than the full-on Luddites that think LLMs are an ontological evil.

        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.

        • watwut 5 hours ago ago

          Hypebros and full-on Luddites that think LLMs are an ontological evil believe exactly the same things about LLMs.

          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.

    • tokioyoyo 6 hours ago ago

      It would be cool to see HN internal stats over the last 5 years. New users, posts from different accounts and etc.

      • woozyolliew 6 hours ago ago

        Yeah. Could be astroturfing. Could just be a surge in enthusiasm after 10 years when all we had to be excited about was a new Javascript framework.

        Your analysis by account age might be telling

        • OccamsMirror 4 hours ago ago

          I want to push back on this. Hacker News was way more interesting before 75% of the submissions were about AI.

        • bossyTeacher 6 hours ago ago

          > Could just be a surge in enthusiasm after 10 years when all we had to be excited about was a new Javascript framework.

          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.

          • tokioyoyo 6 hours ago ago

            To be very fair, I was also very skeptical about LLMs in 2023. Not so much anymore.

            Edit: ok, i guess this account is from 2024, but been around a while. I guess can’t defend myself like this :)

            • loeg 6 hours ago ago

              I share the same sentiment, and my account is at least ten years old.

              • asdfsa32 6 hours ago ago

                Suites are still in trend, but Suites are not "in". That is the point here. AI is being marketed beyond what it is honestly capable.

                • tokioyoyo 5 hours ago ago

                  Our jobs are basically sifting through PR garbage and making use of what it’s actually capable of. Obviously there’s a lot of fluff, but there is real use cases for myself as well.

          • Barbing 6 hours ago ago

            Check Ars. Commenters hated it. Commenters are still 15-20 y/o accounts, but less blind hate.

            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.

          • doix 6 hours ago ago

            Yeah, I was very skeptical and now I've drank the kool-aid. Got multiple parallel cloud agents with independent loops making PRs and me reviewing them. AI is also reviewing PRs and sometimes even catches useful things.

            LLMs in 2023, from what I remember, were slightly better auto complete. It's pretty different now.

            • leptons 6 hours ago ago

              I'm using AI in many ways but I'm not ignoring that it has some real costs. The code AI writes is too voluminous to fully review. I'm quite disconnected from it, and probably won't be able to maintain it myself. The more we use AI to code, the more our real skills atrophy (already feeling that). And when AI pricing finally catches up with the astronomical spending going into it, people are going to have a rude awakening. Nothing good is coming from any of this, unless you're able to cash in before the economy collapses when this bubble finally bursts.

              • doix 3 hours ago ago

                I guess it depends, but what are you doing with all your time if you aren't reviewing the code and trying to make it maintainable?

                The time I previously spent writing code is now spent reviewing code and giving feedback so that it gets written differently if don't like it.

                The skills required have changed completely imo. You need to be able to context switch efficiently and review "better". Also identify which tasks require lots of supervision of what the AI generates and which don't.

                I think AI is here to stay. Open models keep the costs at a certain level. If hosted solutions get too expensive, people will selfhost. Even if models never improve beyond today, the open ones are good enough at this point to provide immense value.

                Just my opinion of course.

              • simianwords 5 hours ago ago

                AI pricing finally catching up? What do you mean? Every few months prices are going down by 5x. Your price correction will not happen and it’s time to accept it.

                • gerhardi 5 hours ago ago

                  I'm interested in which model prices have went down 5x on multiple occasions? Are you talking about subscription or API/Token pricing?

                  • tokioyoyo 5 hours ago ago

                    If you think of what you could do for $200 last year vs today, I could argue the prices went down.

                    • gerhardi 5 hours ago ago

                      Yes I agree with this - models today are better than they were a year ago. But not sure if I can "do for $1 what used to cost $25" across the board (meaning two times occurred 5x price reduction). But it's maybe not that simple to compare as there are some simple things also that just were not feasibly possible at all some time ago.

          • simianwords 5 hours ago ago

            You know how this reads right? Most people updated beliefs. While you couldn’t do it, so you think people are conspiring against you behind your back.

    • broodbucket 5 hours ago ago

      I'm not gonna say where we're at now is better, but as someone who has never had any interest in webdev, the perpetual JavaScript frameworks baffled me. How could they still be interesting and how was there not one that was good enough yet?

    • weird-eye-issue 6 hours ago ago

      Yeah but that's just how things have gone. My enthusiasm about a new JavaScript framework is practically zero these days compared to several years ago, and I do genuinely use AI for all of my coding especially since I developed a health issue that prevents me from typing

    • raincole 6 hours ago ago

      Or, you know, many people genuinely find it exciting to see AI pumping their long overdue side-projects, just like many people once found bikeshedding their frontend frameworks exciting?

    • dzhiurgis 4 hours ago ago

      Neither was true. It is most skeptical community ever, including AI. To the point I'm convinced astroturfing is done by malicious parties.

    • antonvs 5 hours ago ago

      I don’t suppose that could have anything to do with the fact that AI has become a huge part of day to day business in the tech industry and elsewhere? Totally mystifying that anyone would say anything about that!

    • OtomotO 5 hours ago ago

      What's missing is a balanced view.

      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 ...

  • Alien1Being 5 hours ago ago

    Perfectly rational.

    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...

  • Alien1Being 5 hours ago ago

    Fraud, but a presidential pardon has already been paid for in advance.

    • Alifatisk 5 hours ago ago

      You know whats crazy? We’re in bizarre times were this can actually be true. Things we joked about before which was obviously too nonsensical to be true is no longer the case in my world.

  • JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago ago

    Is there a state in which this constitutes fraud?

    • ranyume 6 hours ago ago

      There are only two industries left in america.

      • OtomotO 5 hours ago ago

        One of them is the fraud industry?

    • zombot 6 hours ago ago

      It would have to be state law so the president can't pardon them.

      • JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago ago

        > would have to be state law so the president can't pardon them

        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.

        • defrost 6 hours ago ago

          How's this kind of thing play in the US with free speech, Citizen's United, companies with money can make political statements, etc.

          What's the actual fraud angle? Non disclosure?

          • JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago ago

            > What's the actual fraud angle?

            …I literally quoted statute.

            • defrost 2 hours ago ago

              Sure, and I literally asked you as you seemed familiar .. point taken, I'll f-off and read US law then.

              Cheers.

              BTW - I circled back and answered that question you asked of me. You're welcome. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48917128

    • Teever 6 hours ago ago

      Unfortunately you're not going to see any sort of legal redress against American oligarchs in any sort of American legal venue.

      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...

      • JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago ago

        The only reason I’d rather be an oligarch in America than France is because of the lazy nihilism.

        Pointing to Durov while Bolloré runs free is silly.

  • zombot 4 minutes ago ago

    Of course they do. Using their own slop generators to propagate their marketing lies is probably cheaper than paying shills.

  • protocolture 6 hours ago ago

    >But there don’t seem to be any contributors, or at least not human ones. I ran every article on the site through Pangram (the AI detector that credibly claims a near-zero false-positive rate). Of the 94 articles, 69% came back flagged as fully AI-generated, with another 28% flagged as partially AI-generated. Only three articles were classified as human-authored.

    How credible is this credible claim?

    • NitpickLawyer 5 hours ago ago

      If anything this shows how pangram is unreliable. Chances are, if someone is running an article generation thing, it'll be 100% generated. Writing 3 / 100 articles "by hand" doesn't make any sense.

      • oersted 5 hours ago ago

        They do seem to have an internal review process, some articles might have been heavily edited, particularly early in the development process.

        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.

    • tripleee 5 hours ago ago

      I'm now suspicious this author (had AI) built the blog they're referencing just so they could make claims against OpenAI.

    • antonvs 5 hours ago ago

      Regardless of that claim, here’s a good test for how real this site is - it’s called “The Wire by Acutus”, but try to find a site for “Acutus”.

      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.

  • 0xDEAFBEAD 6 hours ago ago

    Funny, I was told by HN commenters that worries about AI risk are just a clever marketing strategy on the part of OpenAI and friends. I wonder why they would be working so hard to push back?

    • oersted 5 hours ago ago

      Recent events have shown that it's a double-edged sword. Sure the Mythos hype probably drove a lot of sales and investment, but it also led to a crackdown from the government.

      • OtomotO 5 hours ago ago

        > but it also led to a crackdown from the government

        but did it?

    • emsign 5 hours ago ago

      Regulatory capture. They are the hyperscalers who invested and still invest heavily in hard tech, like data centers. They need regulation of "uncontrolled" AI models, so that Joe Smoe doesn't ditch his ChatGPT subscription and uses his local LLMs and agent harness setup in his home lab. Or some open weights model, or the condensed Chinese ones... it's "regulate everything else to death that is better than our enshittified OG models behind a paywall".

      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.

      • 0xDEAFBEAD 5 hours ago ago

        If AI industry critics are valuable as a means of OpenAI achieving regulatory capture, why is OpenAI attacking critics using underhanded means, as in the OP?

  • jms703 7 hours ago ago

    This is normal tech company marketing strategy, right?

  • tripleee 5 hours ago ago

    > When I ran the message through Pangram, an AI content detector that credibly claims a near-zero false-positive rate, the email came back as “fully AI-generated.”

    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

    • oersted 5 hours ago ago

      I agree that the connection to OpenAI is very speculative here. It's true that Pangram is also very unreliable, and the match is pretty weak anyways: "69% came back flagged as fully AI-generated, with another 28% flagged as partially AI-generated".

      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.

      • tripleee 5 hours ago ago

        Oh with that I wasn't arguing the blog wasn't AI. I'm sure it is. My point there is that stating that any Pangram settles anything is a huge mark against the author's credibility

  • ProAm 6 hours ago ago

    The only reason OpenAI wants to give 5% of the company to the US government is so they become 'to big to fail'. They dont give a s** about the US, its just a way to get funding when the bubble bursts

  • OkGoDoIt 6 hours ago ago

    “Using your own firm’s president as a supposedly independent expert, without acknowledging the relationship, is a striking departure from basic journalistic norms”

    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.

  • dzhiurgis 5 hours ago ago

    Grok's unhinged mode is amazing for trolling anti-ai cooks. I've been having a blast.

    • userbinator 5 hours ago ago

      Had to look this up to see they really named it that, but then again, probably not surprising considering Musk's cars have a "ludicrous mode".

      • dzhiurgis 4 hours ago ago

        Yes, and others brains still runs in "pedestrian mode." Some of us prefer acceleration.

        • anonreplier 2 hours ago ago

          Not hard to accelerate something going that slowly

    • jpnc 5 hours ago ago

      Certainly money well spent and technology properly utilized. Could have learned an actual skill instead.