It seems a bit self-reinforcing. AI makes almost zero (positive) impact on my day to day life and isn't actually something I interact with directly and the same holds true for most people I talk to.

There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction.

To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet. Some people are seeing massive improvements in how they work and it's understandable that they, like with blockchains or Kubernetes previously want to share their optimism. I just question if maybe these people are being to louder and have to much influence. There's a large silent majority for whom all the AI stuff is almost completely pointless.

It does need to take up more space on HN, compared to your normal media, because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances. The hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription, hence the ads. For now, it seems that AI is heavily pushed by industry and a group of fans, the amount of news and articles just doesn't line up with the actual daily use.

There's a part of me that agrees.

There's also a part of me that misses the earlier days of Hacker News when the subject matter was much more eclectic and seemingly every day I'd have a chance to learn about something completely different.

And that's maybe what I miss. Nowadays Hacker News feels increasingly like another social media platform: mostly a lot of opinions, war stories, and self promotion. That feeling of serendipity that so characterized earlier ages of the Web is fading here, too.

Yes, it's appropriate given the metric you have chosen ("big"ness), though maybe the word should then be "expected", since "appropriate" implies some kind of broader human-oriented concept of rightfulness/goodness.

Bigger than the Metaverse or monkey NFTs?

Upvoted: I was going to write this exact reply. Everyone is a bit tired of hearing about AI, but it's advancing fast and it's the most important thing right now. As Demis says, if we get to ASI, we can solve all other issues with it.

Problem is other cool hacky stuff gets drawned out. Nobody votes on those because I imagine it's no longer attractive to the type of visitor that HN attracts now. I reckon there's many more non-tech, "make me a millionaire" gold rush crowd here, as cynical as it sounds. I base that on pure logic, since it's kind of inevitable with AI having delivered a massive democratization of tech knowledge, but also on the amount of snarkier, shorter, less technical, less logical, one short sentence type of comments.

I know it's been said countless of times before, but I think this community has truly changed within last year.

> AI is probably the biggest thing to happen (in tech) in the last two decades, so I think it's fair that it's taking up a lot of the discourse.

Almost. the iphone was launched 19 years ago. It was (and still is) much more relevant than the current LLM-based AI.

I would say, AI is probably the biggest thing to happen in tech, full stop.

LLMs went from a toy to highly capable (along many dimensions) in just a few years.

Which makes it very likely that in a few years more, we will be seeing crazy capabilities that leave us humans increasingly behind.

I'm sick of it, but you are 100% right. I'm sure a good number of active readers here want even more AI-related articles.

Feels more like another blockchain hype cycle to me.

Especially the part where we're always on the cusp of the entire world changing while the biggest change is just that huge sums of money changed hands, inducing psychosis in a large group of investors.