Goalposts

Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?

2026 SeptemberCulonavirus

About whether frontier AI's math results are real and how close self-improvement is.

Lol no one cares. Most of that is smoke and mirrors anyways. Stokes was plagiarized. Most of these "breakthrough" solutions are actually present in the training data and in the prompts researchers and mathematicians input into ChatGPT themselves, prompts OpenAI then steals even when you don't agree to improve the model.

PS: I use LLMs every day, basically let Codex write most of my code (after 15+ years of professional programming), these are amazing tools, smart in some ways, but completely demented in others. People just need to fucking stop being AI doomers and AI coomers. Is this technology great? Yes. Is it worth 10 trillion? Hell fucking no. If we get to a point where RSI is a thing, then maybe. So far it's not a thing and its not even close.

AI reaches recursive self-improvement (RSI).

Has this happened?

Yes 15 (12%)Not sure 34 (27%)No 76 (61%)

Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.