About whether AI can understand books well enough to answer detailed questions.
Has this happened?
Yes 72 (57%)Not sure 29 (23%)No 25 (20%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether AI can understand books well enough to answer detailed questions.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
I can understand the appeal of getting an AI to generate movies or TV shows - if it were actually good, you'd be able to get a lot more of that stuff at relatively low cost.
I have zero interest in having a conversation with an AI, nor do I want my computers to have a personality in any way, but I think chatbots serve a similar purpose to this sort of thing - as a demonstration of the progress being made towards something with actual utility. I don't want to make smalltalk with a computer, but I'd love to be able to say, "How many books about dragons, written in Estonian, feature children under the age of 8?" and have it understand my question and understand the books well enough to give me an accurate answer.
Stuff like this is a good demonstration that we're nowhere near the level of sophistication for either of these things yet.