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The Download: why AI's latest breakthroughs and fears may be more hype than rea

49 points · 128 comments · joozio

hn_submit · 1790165836 · focus · HN ↗
I think the pumped-up hype nicely coincides with some A.I. companies' desire to go public in the coming weeks or months.
I see lots of fabricated news on the internet concerning LLMs. Like one that claims GPT-6 broke an Enigma enciphered message which has withstood decrypting for almost 80 years. And how this seasoned cryptographer stood in awe. Yeah, right.
1. 0xDEAFBEAD · 1790166517 · focus · HN ↗
  A good way to check whether it's substance vs hype is to check whether people are paying for it.
  "Anthropic is now pacing to generate more than $100 billion in annual revenue, up 50% from just two months ago, the New York Times reported Friday."
  <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/09/18/anthropic-100-billion-revenue" rel="nofollow">https://www.axios.com/2026/09/18/anthropic-100-billion-reven...
  That's already more revenue that Disney, Johnson & Johnson, Boeing, or FedEx. And they are growing extremely rapidly.
  1. hn_submit · 1790192862 · focus · HN ↗
    How much of that revenue is investment from other A.I. companies (NVIDIA, Microsoft) being tallied?
    Are companies really spending millions a year on A.I. when software engineers can be had for much less?
    0xDEAFBEAD · 1790221651 · focus · HN ↗
    Why would investment from other AI companies be tallied as revenue?
    hn_submit · 1790259471 · focus · HN ↗
    Because accountancy rules don't expressly forbid it?

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