Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 1,227 posts.

AI & Machine Learning
932

Stone Soup AI (2024)

For some time, I’ve argued that a common conception of AI is misguided. This is the idea that AI systems like large language and vision models are individual intelligent agents, analogous to human agents. Instead, I’ve argued that these models are “cultural technologies” like writing, print, pictures, libraries…

951

The Math Behind GANs (2020)

Generative Adversarial Networks refer to a family of generative models that seek to discover the underlying distribution behind a certain data generating process. This distribution is discovered through an adversarial competition between a generator and a discriminator. As we saw in an earlier introductory post on…

954

Grok 4.1

Grok 4.1 is now available to all users on grok.com, 𝕏, and the iOS and Android apps. It is rolling out immediately in Auto mode and can be selected explicitly as “Grok 4.1” in the model picker.

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Bitter Lesson is about AI agents

The Race for AI Progress In 2019, Richard Sutton, wrote his groundbreaking essay titled ‘The Bitter Lesson’. Simply put, the essay concludes that systems which get better with higher compute beat the systems that do not. Or specifically in AI: raw computing power consistently wins over intricate human-designed…