How come AI-related posts get so many points on HN?

AI discussions attract people who love it, who hate it and who are tired of hearing about it. All three groups end up opening the thread and commenting.

If the latest AI swarm from OAI decided to astroturf HN, we probably would struggle to know. It seems easy relative to coordinating a massive hack of Hugging Face.

So I half stopped paying attention to enthusiastic posts and comments about AI.

I have no doubt there is lot of boosting going on. Essentially entire industry is build on boosting in many ways. So manipulating any available discussion platform is almost certain.

It's self explanatory. People are very interested in it. Every new computing Wave comes with months or years of non-stop articles here. I remember when Twitter was released, people wouldn't talk about anything else for a while.

It's the cutting edge and it's a bit wild west. There is a lot of room for innovative use cases that, whether actually practical or not, can be marketed and sold as practical.

Just like AI-related projects on GitHub always get an entirely different order of magnitude of stars. This is what people are focused on, outshines anything else.

Dont know about that.

A significant portion of the posts are of the type "new version of model X was just released" or "I just built something by prompting an LLM a few times".

Latest papers from DeepSeek and DeepMind on the other hand are rarely discussed and if ever posted the comment section quickly turns into political discussions or my bigcorp is better than your bigcorp wars.

Most people here aren't experts in the underlying technology. But they do work with it regularly and are interested in the latest developments in the tooling.

That of HN is a largely non-random public, not a fully selected public. Of course Paretian distributions are also valid here.

(Edit: and it is evident in this very page.)

Because it is the hot new thing and HN is a hype machine. Before AI there were crypto and blockchain, after AI there will be something else.

There will be on HN. Artisinal Intelligence, Biological Inference, Living Local Models, whatever. If the AI hype turns out to be real there will be a counter-revolution where the usual suspects start pushing their abacus-enhanced lifestyles, guaranteed AI-free.

The submitter reduced the complexity of the situation to a whim, and misrepresented it.

Reality is what it is, some heavier some lighter: we discuss reality, its details ranked by weight.