You might not believe this, but there are a lot of people (me included) that were extremely excited about the Gemini 3 release and are pleased to see the SOTA benchmark results, and this is reflected in the comments.
I definitely believe it--I'm not a total AI hater. The jump on the screen usage benchmark is really exciting in that it might substantially help computer-use agentic workflows.
That said, I think there is too much a pattern with recent model releases around what appears to me to be astroturfing to get to HN front page. Of course that doesn't preclude many organic comments that are excited too!
A bit of both always happens. But given how important these model releases are to justify the capex and levels of investment, I think it is pretty clear the various "front pages" of our internet are manipulated. The incentive is just too strong not to.
There are approximately 300 comments on the half dozen or so posts on the front page about Gemini at the moment. 2 threads reference AGI, one of them this one.
Perhaps I shouldn't have implied an expectation of lots of explicit mentions of "AGI". It is more the general sentiments being expressed, and the extent to which critical takes seem to be quickly buried.
I'm totally open to being wrong though. Maybe the tech community is just that excited about Gemini 3's release.
Not sure if this is agreeing or disagreeing with there being astroturfing.
But I'd reckon that the negative sentiments at the top, combined with that there are over eight Gemini 3 posts on the front page recently, is good evidence of manipulation. This actually might be the most posted about model release this year, and if people were that excited we wouldn't have negative sentiment abound.
They're downboted into grey because it's complaining about the future of this thread before it has even happened. Also it's conspiratorial, without much evidence.
That used to be the case even before when Alphabet/Apple/Meta were negatively commented upon, I used to blame it in many of the users here (and who also happen to work for those companies) not wanting to see their total comps go down, but this right here I think that can squarely be blamed on AI-bots.
I think this is one of HNs biggest weaknesses. If you are a sufficiently large engineering organization with enough employees that pass the self-moderation karma thresholds, you can essentially strike down any significantly critical discussion.
Without a public moderation log (i.e. even user flags being part of the log) claims like this will always come up but to me it always seems more likely just the early commenting users tired of being told they are part of some astroturf campaign and if they don't flock to agree with the OPs views it must just be more proof.
I'm sure both reasons happen to some degree, just as a matter of how often is actual astroturfing vs "a small percentage of active people can't possibly just have different thoughts than me".
