Hacker News: chriskanan

New comment by chriskanan in "Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation"

chriskanan — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:54:49 +0000

Did you ever watch Star Trek: The Next Generation? The current trajectory is like the Ship's Computer. It know everything humanity has learned and can do a lot. But it can't explore and lacks desires and agency. That's why they made a big deal about the character Data being an entirely new kind of AI. Of course Star Trek has a very different economic system and there is a book called Trekenomics about that. So optimistically people live for themselves and don't persue labor they despise. Half of Americans hate their jobs and live for the dream of retirement when they get to actually do what they want.... But they don't have the same energy anymore.

New comment by chriskanan in "Teaching Claude Why"

chriskanan — Sat, 09 May 2026 00:58:17 +0000

Jobs are an invention of humanity. About 50% of people dislike their job. People spend much of their lives working. Poverty and inequality are a choice made by society if society chooses poorly.

New comment by chriskanan in "2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews"

chriskanan — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:10:14 +0000

Slightly more nuanced in that the reciprocal reviewer may have been essentially forced to sign despite having other commitments or may not have even been the lead contributor. Nowadays if a student submits a side project to a top-tier conference then it is required that if any authors have significant publication count in top-tier venues, then one must be a mandatory reviewer. Then one must sign that agreement. Students need to publish, much less so for me, where I really want to publish big innovations rather than increments, but now I get all these mandatory reviewer emails demanding I review for a conference because a student has my name on the paper and I'm the most senior, but I may have just seeded the idea or helped them in significant ways. However, many times those are not my passion projects and is just something a student did that I helped with, but now all AI conferences are demanding I review or hurt a student, where I'm the middle author.

But if anything, I think the whole anti-LLM review philosophy is wrong. If anything we need multiple deep background and research analyses of papers. So many papers are trash or are publishing what has already been done or are missing things. The volume of AI papers makes it impossible for a human alone to really critique work because hundreds of new papers come out a day.

New comment by chriskanan in "Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world"

chriskanan — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:50:02 +0000

I had lunch with Yann last August, about a week after Alex Wang became his "boss." I asked him how he felt about that, and at the time he told me he would give it a month or two and see how it goes, and then figure out if he should stay or find employment elsewhere. I told him he ought to just create his own company if he decides to leave Meta to chase his own dream, rather than work on the dream's of others.

That said, while I 100% agree with him that LLM's won't lead to human-like intelligence (I think AGI is now an overloaded term, but Yann uses it in its original definition), I'm not fully on board with his world model strategy as the path forward.

New comment by chriskanan in "Mercury 2: Fast reasoning LLM powered by diffusion"

chriskanan — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:14:02 +0000

I can see some promise with diffusion LLMs, but getting them comparable to the frontier is going to require a ton of work and these closed source solutions probably won't really invigorate the field to find breakthroughs. It is too bad that they are following the path of OpenAI with closed models without details as far as I can tell.

AI Doubling Time Horizon v1.1

chriskanan — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:52:00 +0000

Article URL: https://metr.org/blog/2026-1-29-time-horizon-1-1/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829716

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by chriskanan in "Alarm overload is undermining safety at sea as crews face thousands of alerts"

chriskanan — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 14:02:57 +0000

This has been a major problem in hospitals where there are many false alarms and often concurrent alarms for hospital beds: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3928208/

AI Is Not Just a Writing Tool, but Your University's AI Plan Is Probably a PDF

chriskanan — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:55:58 +0000

Article URL: https://syntheticminds.substack.com/p/what-universities-should-do-about

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46720950

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by chriskanan in "Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back"

chriskanan — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 01:09:16 +0000

Same here. I’m an AI professor, but every time I wanted to try out an idea in my very limited time, I’d spend it all setting things up rather than focusing on the research. It has enabled me to do my own research again rather than relying solely on PhD students. I’ve been able to unblock my students and pursue my own projects, whereas before there were not enough hours in the day.

New comment by chriskanan in "AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there"

chriskanan — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 17:46:52 +0000

I think we need to distinguish among kinds of AGI, as the term has become overloaded and redefined over time. I'd argue we need to retire the term and use more appropriate terminology to distinguish between economic automation and human-like synthetic minds. I wrote a post about this here: https://syntheticminds.substack.com/p/retiring-agi-two-paths...

New comment by chriskanan in "Megafauna was the meat of choice for South American hunters"

chriskanan — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 22:14:28 +0000

See this study, which is consistent with your thesis: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/814485

Essentially, it claims that modern humans and our ancestors starting with Homo habilis were primarily carnivores for 2 million years. We moved back to an omnivorous diet starting around 85,000 years ago after killing off the megafauna, is the hypothesis.

Retiring "AGI": Two Paths for Intelligence

chriskanan — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 11:48:04 +0000

Article URL: https://syntheticminds.substack.com/p/retiring-agi-two-paths-for-intelligence

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45472629

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by chriskanan in "The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years"

chriskanan — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 13:03:47 +0000

That's the practical reason for why one might care. Keep in mind that the solar system is rotating around the galaxy, so over time different stars become closer or farther away.

As the Kurzesagt video points out, a supernova within 100 light-years would make space travel very difficult for humans and machines due to the immense amount of radiation for many years.

Still, I think the primary value is in expanding our understanding of science and the nature of the universe and our location within it.

New comment by chriskanan in "The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years"

chriskanan — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 13:00:15 +0000

A Type II supernova within 26 light-years of Earth is estimated to destroy more than half of the Earth's ozone layer. Some have argued that supernovas within 250-100 light-years can have a significant impact on Earth's environment, increase cancer rates, and kill a lot of plankton. They can potentially cause ice ages and extinctions. Within 25 light-years, we are within a supernova's "kill range." Fortunately, nothing should go supernova close to us for a long time.

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_supernova

Kurzgesagt video on the impact on Earth of supernovas at varying distances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4DF3j4saCE

New comment by chriskanan in "The AI vibe shift is upon us"

chriskanan — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 11:53:23 +0000

Read the paper. The media is not providing a lot of missing context. The paper points out problems like leadership failures for those efforts, lack of employee buy-in (potentially because they use their personal LLM), etc.

A huge fraction of people at my work use LLMs, but only a small fraction use the LLM they provided. Almost everyone is using a personal license

New comment by chriskanan in "The US Department of Agriculture Bans Support for Renewables"

chriskanan — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 19:17:56 +0000

This is so shortsighted. The US needs a huge increase in its electricity generation capabilities, and nowadays, rewnewables, especially solar, are the cheapest option.

This video from a few days ago analyzes the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tNp2vsxEzk

Regardless of climate change issues, the anti-renewable policy doesn't seem to make any sense from an economic, growth, or national security standpoint. It even is contrary to the anti-regulation and pro-capitalism _stated_ stance of the administration.

New comment by chriskanan in "95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend"

chriskanan — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 22:20:48 +0000

That's my assessment of the report as well.... really, some news truly is "fake" where they are pushing a narrative that they think will drive clicks and eyeballs, and the media is severely misrepresenting what is in this report.

The failure is not AI, but that a lot of existing employees are not adopting the tools or at least not adopting the tools provided by their company. The "Shadow AI economy" they discuss is a real issue: People are just using their personal subscriptions to LLMs rather than internal company offerings. My university made an enterprise version of ChatGPT available to all students, faculty, and staff so that it can be used with data that should not be used with cloud-based LLMs, but it lacks a lot of features and has many limitations compared to, for example, GPT-5. So, adoption and retention of users of that system is relatively low, which is almost surely due to its limitations compared to cloud-based options. Most use-cases don't necessarily involve data that would be illegal to use with a cloud-based system.

New comment by chriskanan in "95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend"

chriskanan — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:31:40 +0000

Where is the actual paper that makes these claims? I'm seeing this story repeated all over today, but the link doesn't actually seem to go to the study.

I am not going to trust it without actually going over the paper.

Even then, if it isn't peer-reviewed and properly vetted, I still wouldn't necessarily trust it. The MIT study on AI's impact on scientific discovery that made a big splash a year ago was fraudulent even though it was peer reviewed (so I'd really like to know about the veracity of the data): https://www.ndtv.com/science/mit-retracts-popular-study-clai...

New comment by chriskanan in "95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend"

chriskanan — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:26:23 +0000

Sam Altman way oversold GPT-5's capabilities, in that it doesn't feel like a big leap in capability from a user's perspective; however, the a idea of a trainable dynamic router enabling them to run inference using a lot less compute (in aggregate) to me seems like a major win. Just not necessarily a win for the user (a win for the electric grid and making OpenAI's models more cost competitive).

The reasons Americans aren't having babies, according to data

chriskanan — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 19:56:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2025/trump-baby-boom-birth-rate-declining/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44904901

Points: 5

# Comments: 1