aik

When did hacker news become laggard-adopter/consumer-news.

Cal is a consumer of AI - interesting article for this community, but not this community. I thought hacker news was for builders and innovators - people who see the potential of a technology for solving problems big and small and go and tinker and build and explore with it, and sometimes eventually change the world (hopefully for the better). Instead of sitting on the sidelines grumbling about that some particular tech that hasn’t yet changed the world / met some particular hype (yet).

Incredibly naive to think AI isn’t making real difference already (even without/before replacing labor en masse.)

Actually try to explore the impact a bit. It’s not AGI, but doesn’t have to be to transform. It’s everywhere and will do nothing but accelerate. Even better, be part of proving Cal wrong for 2026.

We’re a regular old SaaS company that has figured out how to add massive value using AI. I am making no statements about valuations and bubbles. I’m actually guessing there is some bubble / overhype. That doesn’t mean it isn’t still incredibly valuable.

I have no idea if OpenAI’s valuation is reasonable. All I’m saying is I’m convinced the demand is there, even without AGI around the corner. You do not need AGI to transform countless industries.

And we are profitable on our AI efforts while adding massive value to our clients.

I know less about OpenAI’s economics, I know there are questions on whether their model is sustainable/for how long. I am guessing they are thinking about it and have a plan?

Hard disagree. You don’t need AGI to transform countless workflows within companies, current LLMs can do it. A lot of the current investments are to help with the demand with current generation LLMs (and use cases we know will keep opening up with incremental improvements). Are you aware of how intensely all the main companies that host leading models (azure, aws, etc) are throttling usage due to not enough data center capacity? (Eg. At my company we have 100x more demand than we can get capacity for, and we’re barely getting started. We have a roadmap with 1000x+ the current demand and we’re a relatively small company.)

AGI would be more impactful of course, and some use cases aren’t possible until we have it, but that doesn’t diminish the value of current AI.

Agreed.

Confused here, is your argument here that OpenAI is not responsible for any innovation when it comes to LLM tech today? I’m curious about why you so strongly want to believe that?

Nobody knew that scaling transformer architecture would lead to the emergent intelligence we see today. Among other things, OpenAI did R&D for years on that. Also the only situation where this could true is if Google knew that LLMs could lead to this intelligence and decided to not make it happen, (along with every other tech company now that is furiously trying to catch up to OpenAI), which is absurd.

The money and compute is not the innovation. The LLM models and associated tools are, which is work by OpenAI employees and teams, not Microsoft employees/teams.

I think this perspective is probably only true for 0.001% of people that actually follow Sam closely and are not optimistic about AGI and like to throw their opinions around. The superficial stuff. The rest don’t care to even know who Sam is and don’t care to assume motive.

It’s very likely they’ll bounce back. I’d rather OpenAI continue to innovate and push the industry forward as they have been. Haven’t seen much of that from Microsoft, so heavily disagree with you there. Prefer to focus on the actual product of the company not the personalities of the people there or armchair assumptions on the vibes of the culture.

Why? It’s not firewalled.

1. “The heat death of the universe” is my favorite HN comment of the decade.

2. The heat death of the universe does not mean one gigantic black hole. I’m just a hobbyist but my understanding of the theory is that black holes will continue to form, but through Hawking radiation, they eventually radiate out all their energy until it is all dispersed, ultimately leading to uniformity across the entire universe, max entropy, where “work” can no longer take place.

(It is an interesting question then whether information is actually destroyed through Hawking radiation?)

Curious what model the dentist bot is running on? Tried it out, was surprisingly good, though eventually it contradicted itself (booked a slot it said previously was not available). (I get that’s the programming but am curious especially given the latency is really great).

Completely disagree. You’re not making a phone call in most cases for entertainment purposes. If the options are wait in line for 20 minutes or speak to an actually useful bot, I would take the latter in 100% of cases.

I think standard units are more common even if proportions. Not sure who speaks in bananas.

Have to consider cost for all of this. Big value of RAG already even given the size of GPT-4’a largest context size is it decreases cost very significantly.

Not entirely sure I believe everything here. Curious how it plays out. Lot of narrative-affirming content.

“In the Examiner article, O’Reilly made reference to a “scam bot [that] had a blue check mark, meaning that, unlike me, it pays money every month to Elon Musk’s vastly indebted and unprofitable platform, a situation which would greatly disincentive his company taking proactive measures to weed them out”.

Is the argument here that someone is creating an army of paid accounts and spamming with them? And this is a major source of bots? Is this actually happening? I think that is probably unlikely given how expensive it would be?