About whether fast AI benchmark gains mean superintelligence is coming.
Has this happened?
Yes 18 (16%)Not sure 45 (41%)No 48 (43%)
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 fast AI benchmark gains mean superintelligence is coming.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
dramatically higher performance this year than last year, and were dramatically better last year than the year before
Yeah, but, better at _what_?
Cars are dramatically faster today than 100 years ago. But they still can't fly.
Similarly, LLMs performing better on synthetic benchmarks does not demonstrate that they will eventually become superintelligent beings that will replace humanity.
If you want to actually measure that, then these benchmarks need to start asking questions that demonstrate superintelligence: "Here is a corpus of all current research on nuclear physics, now engineer a hydrogen bomb." My guess is, we will not see much progress.