Quantifying AI Coverage on Hacker News (beuke.org)

A new analysis quantifies how often Hacker News front‑page stories mention AI-related keywords month-by-month from early 2008 through July 2025. Using the ClickHouse public Hacker News dataset and a reproducible SQL query, the chart computes the share of submissions whose titles match a list of AI terms (e.g., “artificial intelligence”, “ChatGPT”, “LLM”, “transformer”, “machine learning”). Early years show AI as a niche topic—fractions of a percent in the late 2000s, rising to ~0.5–1% by 2014–15 and roughly 2–3% through 2017–2021 as deep learning milestones (AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero, transformer papers, GPT‑2) gradually pushed AI into broader tech discourse. The dataset highlights a dramatic inflection around ChatGPT’s public launch on Nov 30, 2022: monthly AI coverage jumped from ~3.6% in November 2022 to ~8.2% in December 2022, then settled into a higher band throughout 2023–2025 (peaks of ~13–14% in early 2023 and ~18% by 2025). That sustained increase links spikes to product/model releases (GPT‑4, Llama 2) and policy debates, showing generative AI transformed from a specialist interest to a dominant Hacker News theme. The keyword-based, title-only method provides a clear, reproducible signal of relative attention over time—useful for tracking community focus, news cycles, and how model launches shape technical and societal conversations.