alt Hacker Newsi 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.