Comment by UniverseHacker
16 hours ago
I don't believe this was written by Gemini, at least with that prompt, because it is obvious (hilarious and creative) satire of HN and the tech industry based on inside HN jokes and tropes, and clearly isn't a literal interpretation of the prompt.
Moreover, a quick look at your profile suggests these jokes are pretty inline with your sense of humor and writing style.
Anyways, if I'm correct, it's especially hilarious and impressive.
Pretty much all of the history of HN front pages, posts, and comments are surely in the Gemini training corpus. Therefore it seems totally plausible that Gemini would understand HN inside jokes or sentiment outside of what's literally on the front page given in the prompt, especially given that the prompt specifically stated that this is the front page for HN.
I agree with your characterization (not a literal interpretation of the prompt), and think that's the most important thing I wish more people ITT would understand. But I nevertheless think Gemini did create that in response. Sometimes people think they want "prediction" when actually they want cheeky inside jokes and vibes. If anything Gemini is probably faithfully responding to the vibes of the prompt as well as following traditional signals of "success" per it's training.
The thing that got me is there are no duds. With just the short prompt in the header I would have expected a few articles that missed the mark, got the details wrong, or even make no sense at all but everything in this checks out. I think an editor may have had a hand in it this the very least.
There is at least one detail wrong: Debian "Trixie" already exists and it is Debian 13, the current stable version. Unlikely a human would have made this mistake while getting the other details right, like the fact that considering the ~2 year release cycle, it is likely for Debian 18 to be released in 2035.
Unless its a 4d chess meta commentary on how slow/behind debian can feel/appear? :P
O365 raising the price to $40 a month ten years from now didn't quite land. Microsoft 365 E5 is $57 a month right now! $100 or $1000 a month makes the joke clearer.
Try the prompt yourself!
I don't think this would be much of a challenge for Gemini.
Remixing humor from the past text so that it is in the same style is exactly what the model is good at.
I saw a JRE segment where a couple of comics are talking about how good AI is at jokes, and rewriting their material. From veteran stand-up comics. In their words: shockingly good. And some of the comics are using it.
I feel like your expectations have been swayed by the average sentiment of HN on the capabilities of LLMs. These things can be shockingly good at humour and satire.
As a very quick experiment, I would encourage you to have an AI roast you based on your HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42857604
Mine: "You write like you’re trying to hit a word count on a philosophy undergraduate essay, but you’re posting in a Y Combinator comment section... You sound like a Victorian ghost haunting a server room, lamenting the loss of the card catalog."
And
"Go compile your kernel, Matt. Maybe if you stare at the build logs long enough, you won't have to face the fact that you're just as much of a "Lego builder" as the rest of us—you just use more syllables to describe the bricks."
Both are pretty good!
Mine gave me a brutal double-roast:
"You were one of only two people in 2017 to post a story about Mastodon and gave it a single point. You essentially predicted the platform’s entire future relevance in one brutally honest data point."
The issue is none of his prompt asked the llm to be satiric, so sounds like he feeded some tone and ideas to it
OMG, no, thank you, I'm not sure I'm ready for this -- I once took several LLMs for a ride through my whole reddit posting history (it went into the interesting archives), and some of the insights were shockingly accurate and/or uncomfortable (could be accident).
Not sure if I'm ready for a roast but I'm sure by the end of the week someone will write a browser plugin / greasemonkey script to attach some snarky oneliners to the posters' nicks :)
Also, the recently discussed[0], HN Simulator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036908
It’s more that the prompt didn’t ask for humor or satire, not that I expect it to be unable to do this with a different prompt.
It didn't have to, not explicitly. The tone and the context already hint at that - if you saw someone creating a fake cover of an existing periodical but 10 years into the future, you'd likely assume it's part of some joke or a commentary related to said periodical, and not a serious attempt at predicting the future. And so would an LLM.
People keep forgetting (or worse, still disbelieving) that LLMs can "read between the lines" and infer intent with good accuracy - because that's exactly what they're trained to do[0].
Also there's prior art for time-displaced HN, and it's universally been satire.
--
[0] - The goal function for LLM output is basically "feels right, makes sense in context to humans" - in fully general meaning of that statement.
Amazing! 100% accurate roast for me.
haha, that's pretty hilarious :) score one for the LLMs.
Retiring Gemini AND IBM buying OpenAI is a hat on a hat
It is quite remarkable just how frequently people in tech forums underestimate reasoning models. Same story on several large technology subreddits. Wouldn't have been my guess for who will get caught off guard by AI progress.
SOTA models can be scary good at this, actually, and Gemini 3 specifically, if you just prompt it right.
And, given the 1M context window, I wouldn't even be surprised if it was fed a bunch of real comments as examples.
Maybe the poster IS Gemini 3?
yeah I thought the same. This is either a fake deep fake, or it is so good that I think it should be marked as the inflexion point that defines the singularity.