You might not believe this, but there are a lot of people (me included) that were extremely excited about the Gemini 3 release and are pleased to see the SOTA benchmark results, and this is reflected in the comments.
I definitely believe it--I'm not a total AI hater. The jump on the screen usage benchmark is really exciting in that it might substantially help computer-use agentic workflows.
That said, I think there is too much a pattern with recent model releases around what appears to me to be astroturfing to get to HN front page. Of course that doesn't preclude many organic comments that are excited too!
A bit of both always happens. But given how important these model releases are to justify the capex and levels of investment, I think it is pretty clear the various "front pages" of our internet are manipulated. The incentive is just too strong not to.
There are approximately 300 comments on the half dozen or so posts on the front page about Gemini at the moment. 2 threads reference AGI, one of them this one.
Perhaps I shouldn't have implied an expectation of lots of explicit mentions of "AGI". It is more the general sentiments being expressed, and the extent to which critical takes seem to be quickly buried.
I'm totally open to being wrong though. Maybe the tech community is just that excited about Gemini 3's release.
Not sure if this is agreeing or disagreeing with there being astroturfing.
But I'd reckon that the negative sentiments at the top, combined with that there are over eight Gemini 3 posts on the front page recently, is good evidence of manipulation. This actually might be the most posted about model release this year, and if people were that excited we wouldn't have negative sentiment abound.
