Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderThe answer to this is: "we don't really know as its a very complex function automatically discovered by means of slow gradient descent, and we're still finding out" Here are some of the fun things we've found out so far: - GPT style language models try to build a model of the world: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382 - GPT style language models end up internally implementing a mini "neural network training algorithm" (gradient descent fine-tuning for given examples): https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10559
The better the models get, the harder it is for me to form a mental model of what goes on inside of them. An example of a prompt for which I don't have a good mental model why it works: What do you think about the following text? Joe drove Sue to university. Afterwards he drove home again and drank a tea with her in the kitchen. Older models behaved similar to Markov chains and completely missed that something is…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 1245
- Total comments
- 581
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-02-14 | What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work?First breakout · Best thread | washedup | 1090 | 496 |
| 2023-02-14 | What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? | dude01 | 3 | 0 |
| 2024-06-18 | What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)Latest 20+ point return | taubek | 149 | 85 |
| 2025-12-16 | What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023) | pella | 3 | 0 |