Anyone else find LLM related posts causing them to lose interest in HN
Loved this site for a long time, always felt like I could come to learn something interesting and find niche topics and experts.
Feels like posts have overwhelmingly been on LLMs for the past few years and I've just lost interest.
Makes me sad, this was really my favorite site.
It's the current hotness in tech. HN has always included trending tech topics. Ever since HN started, I've seen -
* Explosion of social media
* JavaScript libraries and the frontend revolution to modernizing the web and browsers
* Mobile apps
* Crypto
* Machine Learning
and now, AI & LLMs.
The only difference LLMs have with the others is the learning curve. The others, one could easily hop on the trend. With LLMs, before being able to understand what everyone's talking about, there's a lot to know. There can be a sense of being left out. I think that can be demotivating.
edit: formatting
It's not just here, it's everywhere. I'm excited for the day the hype bubble collapses.
Very meta post. ;) I need a filter on all web browsing so that I never hear about LLMs ever again. They're a scourge on critical thinking, on workers, on the environment, on the internet. If they are the future, leave me behind.
Lol tell me about it. My problem isn't only that it's LLM, but the same 3-5 topics over and over and over and over again:
> This is how I use ChatGPT to write my program.
> Here is a cool SaaS that will generate a CV for you with state of the art AI
> AGI is happening in 5 minutes! (If it wouldn't happen, read the previous statement again)
> LLMs are going to kill/save humanity
> Show HN: we worked on this revolutionary next step in AI in the past 12 years. It's 100% open source, come! (Narrator: it's a 200 lines python wrapper over OpenAI api)
If this is a poll, my answer is no. I enjoy the discussions around a lot of the HN LLM/AI especially. Most other places are to surface level.
It's becoming a major issue when getting hired.
I have no good answers to AI bullshit, none they want to hear at least.
Can't remember the last time I saw a company that wasn't hyping AI to hell and back.
Are you boycotting LLMs or something? They're one of the best hacker tools around lately. Tasks I would have frustratedly scoured stack overflow to solve in three hours I'm solving in 30 seconds using cursor in agent mode and just letting it run whatever it wants as root on my MacBook. Maybe your sadness is rooted in the fact that we interacted with computers one way for a few decades and some of that's becoming quite obsolete as the months whizz by on this tech freight train.
OpenAI is valued at ~150 billion.
Anthropic is valued at ~60 billion.
nvidia was valued at $15/share in 2023 and is now valued at $150/share.
It might seem that LLMs have sucked all the air out of the room, this is why. If you find LLMs boring, you are in for a very boring couple of decades - because it's not going away.
I have been on HN for 16.5 years and I don’t plan to stop now. It’s been worse.
Trends come and go. The stories and comments come and go. HN is constantly changing. You can’t attach yourself to how something was before. It will change again.
Thats just life.
I've lost interest in HN because it's seemingly only 50% posts about tech on any given day, and most of those are just one of the Thunderbongs of HN reposting some GitHub URL, or a half baked article from 2017. It wouldn't be so bad if the comments remained reasonable, but even those have tended towards the kind of fodder you get on Reddit, over the last year. I browse Lobsters instead if i'm thinking, but the HN habit is strong.
In the 1990s there was another big AI push, rules, the RETE algorithm, etc., and, in the middle of it, gave talks at Wharton, Stanford, etc. First cut, could think of it as a generalization of Select-When. The code had a problem, and one afternoon had an idea, got a pizza, and in the morning had some running, innovative code that saved much of the project. Gee, I got $1000. Soon that AI flopped, no surprise.
Current AI? Even if it were, really is, 99% hype and the rest nonsense, and can't tell for sure, still it's the loudest sound, involves really big server farms, electric power sources, data collections, attention from media, investors, and even the POTUS, and can't give a solid argument that it will never amount to much, sooooo, can't just ignore it and have to pay attention, e.g., see if the balloon will keep rising or spring a leak and fall.
Here at HN, when see AI, LLM, GANs, AGI, easy enough mostly just to skip them, but can't just ignore all of it. Besides, if want to pay some attention, HN is one of the best places to do that.
I feel like LLMs are inextricably tied to topics like politics which fuels the exhaustion and fatigue. There is also the general pessimism around technology and overvaluation. I see billboards advertising out in the world mentioning some AI service with a bland catchphrase and I'm already thinking, "no more." It's like someone having to consume an entire buffet by themselves. I have never thought about any other type of technology this way before, not even crypto. The word that comes to mind is "Ouroboros".
Maybe it is a coincidence with recent global events also causing an influx of globally broadcast textual information, but this may not bode well for any future advancements in technology that only make certain activities more efficient than they already are. How will this sentiment about technology change in a year? In five?
I’d rather have this for the rest of my life than have any more of the cryptocoin/NFT flood we had prior to this. Even better if we get a C/Zig/Odin bone thrown our way every once in a while.
There's only 6 ai posts on the front page right now, out of 30 and 2 or 3 are becasue the deepseek model is a hot topic right now. Tbh that doesn't seem very overwhelming?
No, even these first-gen LLM are transforming how I do science. Today DeepSeek tests. Great interactions. Without HN I would have been a few weeks late to the party.
No, on the contrary, I like it. It’s a huge emerging technology that is changing the world. I suppose if it wasn’t wanted it wouldn’t be upvoted to the front page.
My big annoyance with all the LLM talk on HN is that the majority of things discussed simply amount to being glorified HttpClient wrappers yet advertised or talked about as it is this big advancement that everyone should be excited about.
Then you have people that drank the LLM kool-aid and their hyper-inflated expectations and how they will all be met within the year.
I am starting to simply ignore such threads altogether.
I'm kinda tired of seeing the first comment to a totally unrelated topic be, "you know, LLMs these days can actually..."
Where is the creativity? Are we doomed to solve every problem, technological, social, and political with an LLM now? Is this the slow descent into Idiocracy?
I've stopped listening to Data Science podcasts because they only talk about LLMs as AI and those items. There are so many DS problems and topics that I would love to learn and read about but if it isn't about LLM or how an LLM might solve the problem it seems there is zero discussion about them.
I have not jumped on to the AI / LLM bandwagon yet. I love writing code and I don't want to outsource that to an AI agent. I guess I also love the process of going through the docs or Googling for answers, when I am stuck or have questions about something. That process has lead to some other learning / discoveries.
We gotta put AI Blockchain in the Metaverse!
Absolutely. Truly innovative research and projects are always fascinating to me. But even generalized to AI/ML, I can’t think of anything more recent than GANs (2015), Transformers (2017), and maybe AlphaFold 2 (2021)…
Just my personal taste though; I don’t mean to knock LLMs.
Yes! thank you, a big yes. This is not just HN for me, it's every online platform youtube, LinkedIn, twitter(yeah not x elon shitface). I've just lost interest in tech talks all together because of overwhelming LLM and AI takes and topics.
Actually I'm mostly demotivated by the amount of politics and "agenda pushing" posts. They seem somewhat alien to the spirit of hacking, and prefabricated to shift HN's audience's values and preferences.
This post included (or a consequence of).
I'm in my 40s, and not working in any AI tech. Seeing it absorb everything and being hyped over the moon makes me understand the folks 20 years my senior around the .com bubble. We are the dinosaurs now.
I actually do like the LLM posts occasionally, and very much like the “good old content” you talk about and that content I can’t find anywhere else, so what can you do?
It's mostly "ai" and politics, which mirrors my real life experience that no one is actually interested in doing actual software dev anymore
Let's be the change we want to see.
It will pass.
For me it's that it's all so obviously a grift. With crypto there was at least some legitimate value to blockchains. ML is a valid science and has led to major breakthroughs in other sciences.
But AGI/genAI LLMs come across like just another scam from the Worst Guys You Know who were all cryptobros in the 2010s. The output integrity problems get dismissed. The traceability/repeatability problems get dismissed. The data ownership problems get dismissed. There's the endless problems with aggressive feeder bots causing real (financial/operational) harm to others. All of the people selling it have the smell of timeshare salesmen.
And now with China releasing open source models that seemingly embarass their U.S. counterparts, it makes the whole thing feel even more like a ponzi scheme.
LLMs as a whole have a severe credibility problem.
That's why you load the feed into an rss reader and just scroll past fast....
I ignore and focus in post more interesting, and every week I find posts which I like
The blockchain-people needed to go somewhere once people realized that thekr solution in search of a problem isn't gonna stick.
Not saying that there is interesting bits in LLM research, it is just completely drowned out by the hype chasers whl smell the next gold rush.
I hate to say it, but this is likely just the beginning. Those dismissing this as mere hype might not fully grasp the magnitude of what’s unfolding. The implications of LLMs extend far beyond trends—they’re reshaping how we interact with information, build tools, and solve problems. It’s hard to ignore their transformative potential, even if it feels like they’re dominating the conversation right now, LLM-backed apps and agents are creating new millionaires every other day.
I would say no, but I am certainly skipping a lot of content
That is sad that you come for the posts and not the comments.
Yes. But this too shall pass when the bubble bursts.
Silicon Valley is full of techno-religious, socially awkward people trying to find God in technology. AGI promises to understand them in a way normies never could. A dream that will never happen, just like proof in God is impossible... but people believe anyways. Hope in finding an answer to the unanswerable. The human brain processes information in narrative form, lovers of a good story are the ones most enamored with AI, with hype and trends, because it's a vision of the future where the unanswerable questions about existence are answered, finally. Well, let's speculate and burn our sacred planet down one computing plant at a time. And yet, we'll find ourselves still questioning, still trying to answer the unknowable.
no, i find this subject very interesting. the discussion could be a little more competent and practical.
Yeah, it's really really boring. LLMs are not quite nothing, I believe they have some decent uses and will probably come to have more, but I find the breathless hype very depressing. Engineering (as that is what many software developers want to be called these days) should consist of sober judgements on the merits of the components you're evaluating, and this mostly isn't that. I've used LLMs enough to see for myself that they're impressive for certain jobs and more generally up to a point, but worse than useless after that.
Yes. The hype, lies and more lies.
Honestly, LLM-related posts are usually a topic I’m more likely to click on, depending on the article. I find some of the discussions pretty interesting and useful, though I get why the saturation might feel like too much for others.
Why do you feel compelled to omit the subject from each sentence?
> Loved this site for a long time
>> I loved this site for a long time
Given that HN is fundamentally a venture capital organization, I think it's typical that it emphasizes the latest hype cycle. That's were VC is active (for better or worse).
But HN has also evolved into a more general tech news aggregator. In this use case, the over emphasis of the latest "hotness" is annoying.
For myself, I'm not an LLM fanboy, and just skip those posts.
What I find most annoying at HN lately is the flagging of an increasing number of articles that someone somewhere doesn't agree with.
I would ask them to simply skip those post, like I do for LLM articles, and let people who are interested in discussing those topics have their discussion.
Shutting down other peoples conversations is a disturbing trend that I feel it is giving HN more of a one sided echo chamber feel.
Not really, I think it’s interesting coverage and reading people opinions and comments about emerging technology ai or not ai is fantastic.
I posted about genocide and nobody gave a fuck. Your website was never there, sorry. It's just old school reddit
^5 ^5 ^5
Posts like this are precisely why I took interest in HN
I'm so old Stanley Kubric '2001, Space Odyessy' made an indelible imprint:
"DAVE, I CAN'T D0..."
Chilling, indeed. Decades later movies like 'Blade Runner' & 'Bi-Centenial Man' casting sympathetic light on Artificial LIFE.
Now we've this BUZZWORD (oops, SEO 'Keyword'?) of these 2 uppercase letters... LLM (Tip of what iceber, begs the question?) choking bandwidth.
Call Pizza-Hut for pickup & this elegantly crafted BOT takes the order
Is this really (total cost) less expensive than employing a human?
Yet I've not found any projects using this tool to aid dementia, blind, deaf or etcetera.