Unraveling the Surge in AI Enthusiasm

Artificial Intelligence (AI) news seems omnipresent. Zach Perkel, a principal at Fractal, an enterprise AI company, has been tracking AI-related top stories on Hacker News, Y Combinator's platform. His analysis from January 2019 to August 2025 highlights a marked rise in AI-related posts making it to the top 10, indicating that we're currently experiencing a peak in AI enthusiasm.

Perkel reviewed 24,910 articles that appeared in Hacker News' top 10. From this data, he deduced that AI interest has multiplied tenfold since 2019's first quarter, where only 39 AI-focused articles were featured. In contrast, the third quarter of 2025—still in progress—has already seen 337 AI-related discussions.

This increase in AI chatter isn’t entirely unexpected, given our transition from a pre-ChatGPT world to one dominated by AI accessibility. However, the conversation around AI has accelerated significantly more than anticipated.

Perkel's findings reveal that the interest in AI surged notably between the end of 2022—coinciding with the launch of ChatGPT—and early 2023, where discussions about its impact heated up. A leap from 89 articles in the last quarter of 2022 to 174 in the first quarter of 2023 marked this dramatic shift. Though the leap illustrates AI's growing prevalence, the jump observed from the second to the third quarter of 2025 may surpass it as the largest yet.

It's essential to note that Hacker News is not generally a place for AI newcomers. Therefore, sentiment analysis shows a notable trend worth noting. Perkel discovered that critiques of AI are at an all-time high this quarter, with 42% of posts negative, compared to 27% in the first quarter of 2025 and 36% in the second quarter.

While there's speculation regarding an AI bubble, with companies like OpenAI nearing massive valuations, there's also an evident shift in sentiment towards AI.